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- Convenors:
-
Plarier Antonin
(Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3)
Armel Campagne (EUI)
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan (Florida State University)
Rebecca Gruskin (Hamilton College)
Sandro Dutra e Silva (Universidade Estadual de Goiás, Universidade Evangélica de Goiás)
Send message to Convenors
- Chair:
-
Plarier Antonin
(Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3)
- Discussant:
-
Iva Pesa
(Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Nature for Harvest: Commodities and Resources
- Location:
- Room 17
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 20 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This industrial development of mineral extraction in colonial period engendered multiple historical transformations of the environment. This panel explores these socio-environmental aspects of modern extractivism through different imperial or colonial case studies.
Long Abstract:
Capitalism and, notably modern colonial empires have developed mining operations at a scale hitherto unknown in history. This industrial development of mineral extraction engendered multiple historical transformations of the environment. In particular, new “workscapes” (Thomas Andrews, 2009), characterized by heaps, tailings, sludges, industrial machinery, and boomtowns, have appeared as landscapes transformed by modern extractivism. This led to growing conflicts about resource and land uses which took specific forms in colonial situations (Balandier, 1951). In this specific context, how were subterranean resources appropriated? What kind of conflicts emerged from these processes of mineral extraction and accumulation through dispossession? What types of pollution and environmental hazards were induced by imperial mining operations and how colonial administrations and local populations dealt with it? Finally, who work in modern colonial mines and What were the environmental and health conditions in these enterprises?
This panel explores these socio-environmental aspects of modern extractivism through different imperial or colonial case studies.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 20 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
In age of environmental crisis and struggle to claim customary rights, Jani Shikār, presents a perfect example of asserting forest rights through a cultural practice. This paper seeks political consciousness behind larger environmental movements by studying indigenous practices likes Jani Shikār.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how the introduction of forest protection laws in late 19th century in
Chotanagpur gave birth to a practice called Jani Shikār(hunt by women). Jani Shikār in the
current historiography has been studied in several writings as a symbolic past of tribal
women’s valour and resistance. But this paper situates Jani Shikār as a conscious assertion
attempted by marginal community to claim their customary rights over forest access which
were curtailed heavily on the name of forest protection.
The increased hunger deaths due to encouragement of mono culture of rice and crop
failures which was even more impactful with the unavailability of alternative food items
because of the forest restrictions, created unrest among the indigenous group.
Revolts which were an outcome of unjust of landlords, moneylenders and British officials,
also highlighted issues related to the environmental injustice and demanded to claim rights
over forest, land and water.
This paper shows how the reference of Jani Shikār was completely absent in earlier
ethnographic and missionary writings but with the increasing forest restrictions it became
more prominent in later narratives. This paper will deal with the question of marginal
assertion through both writing and practice and how it provided strength to the political
consciousness and ecological movement in late 19th and early 20th century. This paper sees
Jani Shikār as a different form of marginal resistance which needs to be studied, especially to
trace various method and language of resistance, where women’s lives remain at the centre of
forest-centric conflicts.
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyses the art of managing tailings by the community of mining enterprises in negotiation with the colonial authorities in the post-flood era. The mitigation measures were designed to relocate pollution and protect the polluting companies.
Paper long abstract:
At the height of colonial mining in Malaysia, the Great Flood of 1926 prompted mining companies to engage with the colonial authorities to manage the risks of flooding and tailings. This paper is divided into three parts.
The first part examines how the mining companies’ community positioned, navigated and negotiated the politics of river governance. To what extent were collective strategies designed to mitigate and manage the environmental crisis in the post-flood era? How did they reconfigure a new pattern of practices, norms and regulations in colonial extractive industries?
The second part analyses the outcome of the negotiations between the mining companies and the colonial authorities. There were two mitigation measures: relocating tailings and protecting polluting companies. To what extent were these measures modelled and implemented? How did they forge or reinforce social and environmental ramifications?
The final part draws an exception case study to general governance policy: a Japanese iron company developed its own strategy to reduce environmental impacts. How did the Japanese company deal with the tailings and menaces to rivers with autonomy? To what extent did its resources and motivations shape its decisions and tactics to reduce risk? The research shows that the Japanese company was more willing to adapt to relatively less destructive measures than the general mitigation policy.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the production of industrial and natural spaces in Tunisia’s phosphate mines, showing how capitalism relied both on cheapening labour and distributing environmental harm. To trace capitalism's ecology, it collapses the boundary between environmental and social history as fields.
Paper long abstract:
In the early twentieth century under French colonialism, phosphates from Tunisia’s Gafsa region fed Europe’s appetite for chemical fertilizers. This paper explores how French capitalists, doctors, and scientists imagined discretely bounded “industrial” and “natural” spaces in 1920s-1930s Gafsa, revealing how capitalism has relied both on cheapening labour and distributing environmental harm. These processes depended on raced and gendered French claims about what was “natural” to places and peoples. For the French-owned mining company, industrial sites were zones of regulation, where degradation could be managed. But degradation could pass without accountability in spaces imagined as natural. Gafsa’s North African residents developed strategies for resistance and survival that co-opted and challenged the industrial-natural binary. They developed aetiologies of disease for tracing “manufactured germs” that flowed through wind and water. To narrate the protracted, multi-decade conflict over how far the industrial workplace extended, this paper draws on doctors’ reports, biomedical papers, company documents, and oral histories.
Tracing capitalism’s ecology requires merging environmental and social history, honouring both fields while collapsing the boundary between them. By centring labour and resistance, this paper provides a methodological way to embrace both social history’s commitment to non-elite humans and environmental history’s commitment to a more-than-human world. At stake is an expanded conception of capitalism that accounts for the multiple ways it is ecologically embedded: not only at the systemic level, as scholars in world ecology have shown, but also in lived experience, in the variegated and contested environmental sacrifice zones that developed in specific, colonial contexts.
Paper short abstract:
From 1912 to 1932, the second largest coal producing company of the French colonial empire was at the heart of two major environmental controversies with colonial administrative bodies, which accused it of deforestation and water pollution. I explore the making and unfolding of these controversies.
Paper long abstract:
From 1912 to 1932, the second largest coal producing company of the French colonial empire in terms of production, employees and profit, the Société des Charbonnages du Dong-Trieu (SCDT), was at the heart of two major environmental controversies. The Municipal Council of Haiphong (MCH), in charge of administrating the second most important town of Tonkin (northern Vietnam), accused the SCDT of polluting its supplying waters despite their legal sanctuarization. Meanwhile, the colonial forest administration in Tonkin blamed the SCDT for being the main responsible of the deforestation of a forest reserve.
On mostly hygienist and techno-solutionist grounds, and marginally environmental ones, the MCH requested from the SCDT the respect of the existing regulations, the implementation of preventive sanitary measures, and its financial participation to the creation of a sewage treatment plant. Meanwhile, on conservationist grounds, the forest administration in Tonkin required the respect of the existing forest regulations and the financial and material assistance of the SCDT in its struggle against illegal logging in the reserve.
The acceptation by the SCDT of these demands implied significant financial expenses without economic benefits in the short and medium term. There was thus an insurmountable contradiction between the interests of the SCDT and those of the other parties.
My contribution thus aims to explore the making and unfolding of two major environmental controversies in colonial Tonkin by looking at the conflicting interests, strategies, representations and discourses of the involved parties, as well as the arbitration of the controversies by the upper colonial administration.
Paper short abstract:
Commercial mining activities in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) date back to the late 1920s, and led to the emergence of the Zambian Copperbelt. This paper examines mining practices and regulation under colonial rule, highlighting how they contributed to the environmental decline of the region.
Paper long abstract:
Decades on mining commercial mining on the Zambian Copperbelt have resulted in what is now referred to as ‘historical’ environmental challenges. Indeed, the physical evidence of enormous slag dumps (locally referred to as ‘black mountains’) and barren spaces void of natural vegetation bears testimony to this. Detrimental mining practices date back to the colonial era, during which time little regard was given to the impact of mining on the environment. Instead, the demand for increased production and need to maintain a strong and healthy workforce intensified efforts to maintain a strong and healthy workforce at the expense of environmental safety.
This paper will examine mining practices and regulation in the Northern Rhodesia mines during British colonial rule. It will highlight mining methods introduced during that time, which marked the beginning of environmental challenges on the Copperbelt. Furthermore, it will briefly explore health and safety measures introduced on the mines, particularly those focussing on pollution-related diseases such as silicosis. In so doing, the paper will demonstrate the passive attitude of mining and colonial government officials towards environmental safety.
The paper will argue that mining developments during the colonial era contributed to challenges in mining-related environmental management beyond independence; and that that the need to meet increased copper demand had a detrimental impact on the environment.
Paper short abstract:
Around 1850, iron ore extraction began in Aïn Mokra, Algeria. A gigantic production mobilizing a huge workforce transformed territories disciplining workers to do so. This paper propose a socio-environmental history of Aïn Mokra seen as an observatory of industrial and colonial capitalism.
Paper long abstract:
In the mid-19th century, the Aïn Mokra iron mine in Algeria began operations. Within a few years, more than 300,000 tons of iron ore were extracted annually from the site, feeding a French steel industry in constant search of raw materials. Extraction mobilized a workforce of nearly 2,000.
This paper will first look at the land history of mining. As in mainland France, but according to singular procedures specific to the colonial situation, the mining concession gave rise to numerous conflicts. The concessionaire found himself at odds with the rural Algerian population, forest concessionaires and the state itself.
The transformations brought about by mining are those that characterize the transition from a rural to a mining territory, including urbanization, industrialization and connection to the "world system". While this history is related to that of metropolitan mining, the colonial situation produces specific features that this paper aims to examine.
One of these is the presence of forced laborers on the site. These categories of workers, both colonial and colonized, are exposed to excess mortality, as documented by the archives of the Bône military hospital and by the printed sources of colonial medical doctors. The aim of this paper is to link environmental and social history to understand the historical transformations proceeding from this mining activities.
Paper short abstract:
The study of "coal zone" in Province of Concepción, has was make from economic, social and political perspectives, but no since environmental history, nevertheless the evidents socio-environmental effects (1850-1900). What's was the consecuences in the lives of the inhabitants and local environment?
Paper long abstract:
The economy of coal extraction in the XIX century, too arrived at South America, especially at Chile coast, where cities how Coronel, Lota and Lebu created a enclave to respond at the world demand of fossil resource. But this not only generated the enrichment of families such as the Cousiño, the Rojas or the Schwagers, but also led to a series of socio-environmental consequences. What were those effects? What level of impact did in local society have as a result of this mining activity, for example, on their health? What effects did it have on the natural environment, such as rivers, beaches or forests? These questions, which we intend to answer in this preview, show us a proto-zone of sacrifice, which maintained and increase its imprint in the 1960-2010 years thanks to the installation of thermoelectric, fishing and oil storage projects, although, fortunately, this has changed thanks to social pressure and greater environmental awareness. However, this study can constitute a good background for an unwritten history, which has a varied literature ranging from the novel to academic historiography, although with an absence of studies from environmental history.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores 18th-century charcoal production at Keban-Ergani Mines in the Ottoman Empire. Charcoal dependence harmed ecology and communities, illustrating mining's impact on Kurdistan's lives, economies, and ecosystems, showcasing Ottoman colonial mineral exploitation.
Paper long abstract:
This paper delves into the socio-economic and environmental ramifications of eighteenth-century charcoal production in the Keban-Ergani Mines within the Ottoman Empire. Situated in the eastern frontier primarily inhabited by Kurds and Armenians, these mines held immense significance for the empire, abundant with copper, gold, and silver reserves that fueled the Imperial Mint and Ottoman military industry. Despite diminishing silver from the Americas, the economy's commercialization and prolonged conflicts with Iran, the Habsburgs, and Russia heightened the need for money and mints. Technological advancements enabled faster and smoother coin minting, leading to the establishment of provincial mints across the empire.
Sustained production in these pivotal mines relied on a constant charcoal supply from nearby forests, unlike Europe where coal became abundant in the late eighteenth century. However, this dependence on charcoal negatively impacted the social ecology of the region. Loggers had to travel as far as 150 miles beyond the mining area to acquire wood, resulting in increased safety risks and costs. The local population became less cooperative due to these challenges, causing intermittent mine halts due to fuel shortages. By the 1830s, areas surrounding the mines either lacked wood entirely or had forests depleted without regeneration efforts.
This paper scrutinizes how pre-capitalist mineral extraction practices, specifically in the Keban-Ergani mines of Kurdistan, transformed the lives of the local population, regional economies, and ecology. It posits that mining significantly contributed to advancing Ottoman colonization in Kurdistan through economic exploitation, environmental degradation, heightened state control, and suppression of local autonomy.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the changing relationship between value creation, supply chains and the social and environmental costs of extracting tin in a colonial and post-colonial context (1850-1980).
Paper long abstract:
The environmental history of mining is dynamic and varies depending on specific minerals, regulatory frameworks, technological, regional and temporal contexts. Today, there's a growing awareness of the environmental and social impacts of mining, especially in ecologically sensitive areas and in communities where mining takes place. This paper explores the changing relationships in value accumulation, the shifts in composition of global supply chains, and the impact of social, political and environmental conflicts that emerged during these processes in both the colonial and post-colonial context. The paper takes the Dutch Billiton Maatschappij as a case. This company that was founded in 1852 played an important role in tin mining in the 19th and 20th centuries in Indonesia. While the economic benefits of mining were significant, particularly for the colonial powers and the mining company, there were also long-term environmental and social costs and sovereignty issues associated with the extraction of tin in this part of the world. The paper shed light on how some of these issues changed, while others remained after decolonization. If focusses on changing roles of markets and the responsibility for social and environmental issues. The case of Billiton is emblematic of the broader story of resource extraction in colonial and post-colonial contexts. It highlights the intricate relationship between economic development, environmental impact, and social consequences. It also serves as a case study for understanding the challenges of balancing economic interests with environmental sustainability.
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the seemingly "abandoned" company town of Serra do Navio, located in the Brazilian Amazon, exploring its process of creation, abandonment, and its afterlife as heritage, spanning from the 1950s to the present.
Paper long abstract:
This research aims to investigate Serra do Navio, a mining company town located in the Brazilian Amazon (Amapá State). This once-model village acts as a case study of the heritagization processes that abandoned industrial places are submitted worldwide. After being established in the 1950s to accommodate workers employed in the mineral extraction activities in the Amazon, Serra do Navio was progressively abandoned by its residents in the 1990s. In 2010, despite the severe environmental damage caused by mining in the region's landscape and environment, the city was declared heritage by the National Heritage Institute (IPHAN). To interrogate this polemic recognition, overly focused on the modernist architectural legacy, this research plays with the ambiguity of utopia and dystopia. It applies those concepts to discuss the past and present life of the Company Town Serra do Navio, once deemed a utopian modernist city and nowadays struggling to maintain its formerly praised socio-economic legacy. To investigate this, the work combines both archival and ethnographic research to analyse the former mining enterprise of Indústria de Comércio de Minério (ICOMI). This industrial settlement went from being the first mining company town to settle in the Brazilian Amazon region to an afterlife as a national heritage. Through these investigations, this paper illuminates the failure of Brazilian developmentalist projects while it sheds light on the possibilities and challenges brought by deindustrialization beyond the abandonment status.
Paper short abstract:
As symptom and driver of rapid planetary transformations, mining makes visible the otherwise invisible and subterranean grounds of modern substance dependencies. USSR’s uranium mining in GDR landscapes exemplifies the 'Socialist Anthropocene', the colonial extractivism of a communist empire.
Paper long abstract:
This paper engages with one of the world’s three largest uranium extraction projects, run from World War II until the fall of the USSR in regions of the former GDR. While above ground the socialist project was promising people new, bright futures, the highly secret mission of the company ‘Wismut’ was mining the radiant resource underneath the Earth to provide the Soviet empire with material for nuclear weapons and energy, in a cealed-off microcosm of extraction, labour and pollution. With the fall of communism in 1989/90, the new federal government ended the production and put large-scale restoration plans into place, transforming many of these exhausted, contaminated socio-ecological landscapes into restoration areas.
Yet, the toxic heritage to the present is affecting the human and non-human inhabitants of these minescapes, their water bodies and soils, as well as the collective and cultural identity of their inhabitants, while new projects of ‘green mining’ of Lithium, Copper and other metals are underway.
Transsecting these areas through theory and transdisciplinary modes of situated engaged practice, this paper asks how, in light of the ‘metabolic rifts’ that rural mining regions exemplify and embody, different futures for these extracted landscapes of the Anthropocene can be envisioned. This multi-scalar study is a call for experimentally exploring and exercising forms of commoning place-based, yet planetarily networked knowledge practices, for perceiving, inhabiting and collectively acting upon the local/global, rural/urban, social, energetic and ecological flows, relations and injustices, by crossing arts, activism, social, Earth and life sciences, epistemologies and societies.