The Licit Life of Capitalism

I n the last pages of her brilliant account of oil extraction in Equatorial Guinea, Hannah Appel reminds us that "many of capitalism's most egregious excesses are lawful" (280).This quote defines the core premise of The Licit Life of Capitalism, the result of 14 months of fieldwork between 2007 and 2008.In the purest tradition of contemporary economic anthropology, Appel investigates the excesses of capitalism, exploring the introduction of a neo-liberal postcolony, with all its structures and constitutive patterns of racism, patriarchy, and dispossession, and the violence of the licit capitalist system of oil extraction.The book demonstrates the process of disentanglement between the Equatoguinean reality and an offshore industry reliant on global inequalities.Appel describes her work as a "political history of the conditions of possibility" (5) of the current form of oil extraction in the small, insular state.The book begins with the same colonial conflation of public office with private gains, found later in post-colonial Equatorial Guinea.From Spanish colonial authorities to Macías and Nguema, Malabo's rulers established parts of the possibilities for transnational oil companies in their daily practices in the country.Appel traces the belief that Equatorial Guinea is disconnected from some of the world's largest corporations to the use of technological, legal, and discursive strategies.While this disentanglement appears successful at first glance, she demonstrates how these processes failed to account for the industry's deep entanglement with the historical phenomena of colonial domination.This book is inscribed in feminist approaches to capitalism and the Black radical tradition of scholarship.It forcefully embraces critical theory to provide a globally applicable argument about capitalist extraction and its constitutive excesses against emancipation

Natural Resources and Economic Development