Extractive investibility in historical colonial perspective: the emerging market and its antecedents in Indonesia

Abstract

The term 'emerging market' is widely used in popular and scholarly fields to simply indicate an empirical condition of economic improvement. For Indonesia, this affirmative investor label covers economic activities including cheap commodity extraction via the plantation and the mine for the world market, despite the expropriation and ecological ruin such extraction generates. This article connects this emerging market present with the colonial past by tracing how extractive spaces and relations have been produced over time with the help of investment capital. Developing the concept of 'extractive investibility' in historical colonial perspective, the analysis begins by tracing Dutch East India Company (VOC) era interventions and the establishment of the Cultivation System and plantation economies on Java and Sumatra by the Dutch colonial state. The article then documents how the brief 'Third Worldism' interlude meaningfully challenged these colonial extractive relations. The analysis ends by detailing how the emerging market label was explicitly conceived to replace the term 'Third World' and continues to function as a discursive idealisation which directs capital back toward extractive spaces.

Sejarah dan Perkembangan Hukum Agraria di Indonesia Dalam Memberikan Keadilan Bagi Masyarakat

“…Meskipun hal ini diperkirakan akan terjadi pada tahun 2020, perkebunan telah menjadi sumber utama perselisihan pertanian bahkan dalam lima tahun terakhir. Pada tahun 2020, perkebunan dan kehutanan terus memiliki tingkat konflik terbesar, dengan tingkat konflik gabungan sebesar 69% (Tilley, 2021).…”

The three phases of financial power: Leverage, infrastructure, and enforcement

“…Here, the Marxist tradition has clearly been unduly neglected, especially finance-driven theories of imperialism (Patnaik and Patnaik, 2021;Lenin, 1999Lenin, [1907; Hobson, 2011Hobson, [1902; Luxemburg, 2015Luxemburg, [1913) and dependency and world systems scholarship (Amin, 1974;Arrighi, 1994). Recently, however, IPE scholars have increasingly drawn on this tradition to theorize the power of finance in the Global South (Alami, 2019;Bernards, 2019;Dafe 2019;Kvangraven, 2021;de Goede, 2020;Koddenbrock et al, 2020;Tilley, 2020;Alami et al, 2022). 3 Finance was eventually brought back into the political economy literature via the concept of financialization (Krippner, 2005;Perry and Nölke, 2006;van der Zwan, 2014).…”

The new ‘bond-age’, climate crisis and the case for climate reparations: Unpicking old/new colonialities of finance for development within the SDGs

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