Paper short abstract:

Colonial enterprises, oil industries and digital platforms are key moment of logistic developments. They share structural characteristics. Through different examples we trace a genealogy of logistics from the colonial past to the present days.

Paper long abstract:

Logistics is no longer just a system of connection between people, practices, places, and objects, but these may be said to be ontologically constituted by the system of logistics itself. Thus, logistic is a veritable paradigm of the global circulation and due to its paradigmatic form, it can be understood as a power. This accounts to consider logistic as historical process whose development has enlightened some capitalist rationalities which in the past were less clear. The aim is to decenter the traditional historical account on capitalism and root it within logistic itself. Logistic as a power also aims to consider its impacts upon sovereignty and governance regimes.

Through concrete examples grounded within colonial enterprises, energy industry and digital platforms - which in our opinion represent the three highest moment that define the concretization process of logistic as a power - we cast a skeptical glance on the suppose geographical and chronological distinction of capitalism. In fact, tracing the genealogies of these three logistical concretizations shows an historical continuity of capitalist rationality. Explores these genealogies aims also to rethinks the bases of those institutionalist claim of a dualism between the territorial political authority (national-state) and economical actor. Extractivism, plantation economy, trade network, enclave economy, shipment, and data collection - just to quote few rationalities that characterize logistical development - are comprise by a repertoire of rival and overlapping political and constitutional forms in both alliance and tension with the national-state and its pretense of centralized and coherent power.