Between capital and subject? Negotiating environmental policy under Dutch colonialism in Curaçao, 1915 – 1938

Archana Ramanujam, Brown University

How do capital and state relate to one another under colonialism? Despite renewed sociological interest in colonialism and empire, this question - which is at the core of how colonial power operates - has been tackled incompletely. Scholars have investigated colonial states’ power and their governance strategies in depth, as well as the broader dynamics of dependency between core and periphery during and after colonialism, but rarely how capital negotiates the colonial state. Environmental policy forms a critical site to negotiate capital-state relations because the stakes of environmental problems are often quite large for both parties. Additionally, the orientation of the state and capital towards environmental problems can vary heavily, meaning the outcome of negotiations around environmental policy is not a foregone conclusion. This paper fills the capital-state relations gap in the study of empire by examining the negotiations between one of the world’s largest multinationals – oil and gas corporation Shell - and the Dutch colonial government in Curaçao, a (former) island colony in the Caribbean. I focus on environmental policy negotiations around the Shell refinery there, which would become the largest in western hemisphere. I examine the period between 1915 and 1938, which were the refinery's first decades on the island. I argue that in these two decades the Dutch colonial state compensates for Shell’s environmentally harmful actions, in part to serve its subjects’ interests, and that this is surprising. I show that it was not only economic interests, but also structural conditions like the property regime, that help explain why the state did so. Thus, I contribute an understanding of capital-state relations under colonialism that pushes back against common state-first theories of colonial power.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 24. Racial Capitalism and Modernity