This is an excerpt from Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy, now available from Verso Books.
Fly over ocean anchorages near the world’s largest oil ports, and you’ll see a tangle of cargo ships waiting to refuel and tankers of all sizes radiating out from the loading buoys, queuing to unload or load their cargo.
Oil ports often boast proximity to both tank farms and refineries. These oil facilities are usually visible in their totality only from the air or from the sea, with loading buoys sometimes a mile or more away from the shore itself and the ships anchoring still farther out to sea.
Tank farms tend to be hidden behind layers of barbed wire, and strips of wasteland often separate them from nearby roads, villages, and towns. These interconnected coastal infrastructures reveal the extent to which the extraction, storage, pricing, and sale of petroleum and petrochemical products is not just dependent on how these products are transported across oceans but is fundamentally defined by it.
The politics of maritime circulation are bound up with the asymmetries of power typical in extractive industries: the unbalanced relationship between producing nations and the consumers; between producers of crude and those who refine the oil; between those who work on the ships, tank farms, and infrastructures and those who profit from them; among hegemonic leviathans, rising global powers, and those struggling against imperial economic arrangements.
These asymmetries are hidden behind the security fences and complex jargon of energy and logistics, deliberately made invisible. But a series of recent events have made the internal mechanics of this clockwork apparatus much…
Auteur: Laleh Khalili
