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.

Drawing on thirty months of extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Peermade and Munnar tea belts of the South Indian state of Kerala, Plantation Crisis explores the collapse of the plantation system and the abandonment of its workforce during the recent crisis in the Indian tea economy. The colonial era plantation system in India – and its two million strong workforce – has, since the mid-1990s, faced a series of ruptures due to neoliberal economic globalisation. In the South Indian state of Kerala, otherwise known for its labour-centric development initiatives, the Tamil speaking Dalit workforce, whose ancestors were brought to the plantations in the 19th century, were at the forefront of this crisis, which has profound impacts on their social identity and economic wellbeing. Out of the colonial history of racial capitalism and indentured migration, Plantation Crisis offers a complex understanding of how processes of social and political alienation unfold in moments of economic rupture. A major argument of Plantation Crisis is that the economic crisis connected with global developments has intensified what may be described as non-economic cultural processes in the continuing abjection of plantation Tamils.

This event is co-organized with the Agrarian Change Seminar Series, convened by the Journal of Agrarian Change

Jayaseelan Raj is Senior Lecturer of Anthropology and Development at King's College London, and a Fellow in the GRNPP at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of Plantation Crisis: Ruptures of Dalit Life in the Indian Tea Belt (UCL Press, 2022), and co-author of Ground Down by Growth: Tribe, Caste, Class and Inequality in Twenty-First Century India (Pluto Press, 2017). His research and writings focuses on plantation system and labour, caste, class, gender and ethnicity, agrarian capitalism and migration, and state and Dalit question in India. 

Internationalist strategy and praxis remain crucial in our times of perma-crisis across the heartlands and peripheral spaces of global capital. Key barriers to an internationalist politics that takes sovereignty and self-determination for all peoples seriously are those centres of overwhelming resistance to progressive transformation within the imperial core: agricultural producers and communities. For self-determination to be possible in the capitalist peripheries, the agricultural systems of the core will require transformation. First, we examine the ways in which developed capitalist agricultural sectors’ emerging ‘green transition’ strategies attempt to draw on state powers and resources to support re-invigoration of their conditions of production. Second, we can look to how these strategies meet the existing socio-ecological care labour frameworks and state forms that have emerged in response to earlier regimes of accumulation. The paper concludes with some reflections on what these dynamics may imply for programmatic political agendas, looking beyond capitalist agricultural sectors toward organising coalitions across formal and informal movements, and into the state.

Anna Sturman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. Her research centres on the political economy of climate change, particularly focusing on the intersections of theories of the state, non-human nature and value.