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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.