A Vast Bed of Combustible Fuel

Bibliographic Data

ID4053549
AuthorsMatthew Shutzer (0000-0003-3392-849X), Arpitha Kodiveri (0000-0003-0666-1339)
Year2023
Volume2023
Issue145
Pages13-36
Publication date2023-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueRadical History Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-6545 • E-ISSN: 1534-1453
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/01636545-10063567
OpenAlexW4322727662
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited39

Does climate change pose a crisis for the concept of nation-state sovereignty? This article explores how contemporary debates about climate and sovereignty are connected to deeper histories of empire and capitalism in the global South. Arguing against recent critical appraisals of sovereignty that emphasize the elision of nature from formal political and legal theory, the article reconstructs a genealogy of sovereign power in the major fossil fuel-producing territories of India spanning the nineteenth century to the present day. It brings to light three historical articulations of sovereignty that undergird contemporary modes of extractive dispossession enforced by the Indian state: the discovery of fossil fuels as subjects of sovereign power during an early colonial project to build prison complexes in Indian coal mines; the juridical remaking of "land" under Benthamite-inspired laws of "real property;" and the politicization of fossil fuels as an underground commons belonging to the abstract entity of the postcolonial nation

Anthropocene · Capitalism · Colonialism · Commons · Economics · Economy · Empire · Environmental ethics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Water Governance and Infrastructure

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