In this presentation of work in progress, Archie will explore the interconnections between the emergence of the global meat industry, and the political ecology of metabolism. Tracing the history of metabolic thinking to Justus von Liebig and his meat extract company, the talk will explore how British imperialist private land-ownership and an emerging international division of labour defined the internationalisation of meat in the early 20th century. 

Archie Davies is a cultural and historical geographer working across the fields of political ecology and the history and philosophy of geography. His research addresses food, hunger, nature, race, and embodiment. He has written about the coloniality of infrastructure, the racial division of nature, the history of landscape thinking, and the idea of socio-ecological metabolism. He also works on the history of Brazilian geographical ideas, and his book Josué de Castro and the History of Geography was published by Liverpool University Press in 2022. He is a translator of Brazilian radical ideas, and his collaborative translation with Christen Smith and Bethania Gomes of the Black feminist Beatriz Nascimento's collected works has just been published by Princeton University Press as The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento. He is currently working on a global history of meat extract.