It is Philip Marsden's “total absorption” with rocks when he was a child in the geological playground of Cornwall who unlocked a new kingdom. “Another world was hidden inside it,” he wrote. So starts Under a metal skya lyric meditation on the wealth Under our feet, ocher and gold and lithium mercury.
The starting point of Marsden is wonderful. But for Laleh Khalili, it is a question of mapping the power through the brutal machinery of the global economy. His new book Extractive capitalism Also takes up the challenge of understanding how humans relate to the world in us, but from a different advantage. It is urgent, controversial and shows how everything, from data centers to transport, depends on extraction.
Trump administration Resource offer with Ukraine is an example. For the American president, negotiations are a model for the way Washington seeks to function to guarantee assets and financial returns of foreign investments. Readers of these books Will recall the constant and raptor need for states and corporate powers to acquire, often by force, access to natural resources.
Marsden takes us to the east through Europe where its adventures cover Dutch peat bogs, Czech radium spas and Slovenian mercury mines. He considers geology as a metaphor of civilization, the layers of the earth echoing those of human memory. Like his previous works – The passage,, Spirits-duals And Survey – This trace of trips through Armenia, Russia and Cornwall respectively, the writer and historian explores the links between the landscape and who we are. The story mixes the writing of travel with a philosophical survey, starting and finishing in its region of origin. His concern for a lifetime, as he says, was “how to put the spiritual kingdom with the physical”.
Each era inaugurated technological advances – tin and copper brought the Bronze Age; Silver propelled world trade – but above all, they meant what was possible if humans extended their imagination. The sense of fear of Marden is palpable: “The metals made us heroes, giving us the wings of the birds, the speed of the wind, the voices of the gods.”
If Marsden's gaze is back, Khalili is flawless today. The commodification and the trade of resources such as oil and sand “maintain mirrors with global inequalities and ecological looting”.
His is a study of individuals and institutions that take advantage of these transactions – oil merchants and government representatives to management consultants who wrote the professor and author, were “voluntary soldiers in the world battle for capitalism”.
Each chapter pursues a different angle on those who have engaged in secret trade but influence natural resources. Khalili's latest works could be better understood as a test compilation – some of which have already been published elsewhere. Its message: commercial enterprises that mines and commercial goods ultimately channel large profits generated from around the world to a small pool of investors and shareholders.
Companies that dominate its story are often heirs of colonial conquest, refining the old domination systems for modern times. Often, the objective is to remove the “embarrassing interference” of workers, unions and regulations. Among the losers of these professions are the sailors who are abandoned at sea by shipping companies, “made invisible while we use their cargo”.
Together, the two books offer different approaches but complementary perspectives. One persists, the other breeds. However, the two are clear that the suppression of the wealth of the earth has consequences. Marsden cries out what was lost while Khalili dissects which continues to be looted to feed an implacable capitalist world.
Marsden does not offer an explicit criticism of mining, but rather launches it as a transgression against nature which “kept its materials on purpose. Cut into the flesh of the planet and you hurt it. Use its resources and undergo the consequences. ” Metals, despite all their magic, have returned people against each other, “favored inequality, rewarded greed. They have let out the disagreement ”.
His book is difficult to categorize, to weave geology, archeology, ecology and economic history, even alchemy, in an elegy for a world on the run. It is indulgent in parts – who knew that the mud left by the tin was known as “loobs” in the Cornwall dialect? This will delight some and exhaust others. But its depth of feeling is undoubtedly.
It shows humility in the face of time and nature. The layers of earth and rock are generally measured in hundreds and thousands of years, “the recent era of man”. For Marsden, this neglects the “millions of years geological”.
Khalili, on the other hand, is analytical and not sentimental. Marsden evokes the spiritual consequences of mining, but Khalili's work concerns the political impact of extraction. The parameters it describes are wrestling sites. Where Marsden sees a sacred ground, Khalili sees a battlefield.
The control tools of the colonial era, including accounting systems, labor management, the chronometer have been reused for the industrial era and beyond. They provide the basis of the infrastructure of modern capital and the trade in raw materials, oil pipelines and ports with commercial contracts.
Oil and sand, in its story, are not only resources but instruments of domination. The oil supplies cars and planes made of petrochemicals and skin emollients. Sand is used to make concrete, asphalt, glass and semiconductors. The two have become essential for industrialization and urbanization, explains Khalili, and now we are forced to wonder how we reconcile our large -scale needs for these resources with their deep cost.
“Any real transformation – in the way we produce and circulate and consume energy, in which benefits and which suffers from the effects of the production and circulation of oil and its products – has come and will only do by concerted political action: that which links the fight against the unequal planetary distribution of wealth and power to movements to save the environment,” writes Khalili.
Khalili, who was born in Iran and educated in the United States before moving to the United Kingdom where she teaches at the University of Exeter, wrote a lot about political violence, infrastructure, logistics and globalization. His previous books include War and commerce tendons And Body life of the seaAnd her writing on the maritime industry is where she is the strongest in her last work.
It moves quickly, and the rhythm can be dizzying, bringing backwards to the magnate of the Greek expedition Aristotle Onassis to the oil trader Marc Rich and Arif Naqvi, the founder of the Abraaj Giant Abraaj group. It extends over centuries, continents and a multitude of industries in less than 200 pages. The urgency is clear, but occasionally disorienting. However, its clarity of the message is flawless: extraction is the empire by other means. His argument does not only concern the economy and those who earn money from these professions, but on injustice often suffers by those whose hands work for the extraction of these same resources.
Each book, in its own way, requires a calculation with what is below. Marsden encourages contemplation because Khalili is a criticism. Together, they reveal the gifts of the earth as sources of unimaginable wealth that have continued human capacity, but also operating sites. Marsden reminds us that digging old forces. Khalili shows us how these forces were monetized and mobilized on an industrial scale, resulting in “the decimation of our cities, the pollution of our waters, the degradation of our land, our air rendered compensable”.
The two authors reflect on the destruction of the earth and share a feeling of loss. They offer other ways to understand the world under our feet. The question that hangs unresolved between them is how to exactly balance our material dependencies with their human and ecological consequences. Neither of them offers a solution, but both require a reassessment. The land below us is not a passive terrain but rich in history, business, memory and power. In their own way, the two books encourage us to look below and locate again.
Under a metal sky: a journey through minerals, greed and wonder by Philip Marsden GRANTA £ 20, 352 pages
Extractive capitalism: how products and cronyism stimulate the global economy By laleh khali Profile £ 11.99, 208 pages
Anjli Raval is the editor -in -chief of the FT and former main energy correspondent
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