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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the gendered and racial dynamics of extractive capitalism in Trinidad and Tobago, focusing on conflicts between oil, agriculture, and fisheries. It finds colonial-era power structures (re)produce peripheralised 'edge populations' who are excluded from the terms of development.

Paper long abstract:

This article studies the gendered and racialised dynamics of extractive capitalism through an examination of ongoing contestations between the oil, agrarian and fisheries sectors in the energy-rich Caribbean state of Trinidad and Tobago. Expansion of commodity frontiers – first sugar, then oil and gas – have dramatically reconfigured agrarian, coastal and marine environments, and produced a range of negative social and ecological effects. These processes of extractive capitalism, have, from their inception depended upon the activities and actors of those at the margins of the economy – so called ‘edge populations’ – who are central to understanding such processes of capital accumulation and the nature of post-colonial capitalist development. Deploying a ‘racial capitalism’ framework, this paper unpicks how power dynamics emanating from a distinct form of extractive capitalism simultaneously generates conflictual processes of dispossession and (re)produces countervailing resistance, which are both gendered and racialised. Using the case study of the Caribbean, a key site of colonial extraction built upon gendered and racialised divisions of labour, this article traces the reproduction of ‘edge’ populations through contemporary capitalist relations whilst also demonstrating the agency of these communities to negotiate and resist the profound environmental impacts of extractive capitalism and the expansion of commodity frontiers