Laleh Khalili, "Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy" (Profile Books, 2025)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very, very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Laleh Khalili about her book titled Extractive Capitalism, How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy, published by Profile in 2025. This book takes us

to a whole bunch of different places, often hidden behind the more obvious facets of late capitalism, looking at container ships, but looking at, for example, what happens when they're debt ridden and the seafarers on them, thinking about consultancy firms and the ways in which they're embedded, perhaps in more places than we might realise. I don't want to give too much away at this point, but there's a lot for us to talk through. So Laleh, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

Thank you so much, Miranda. I'm very happy to be talking to you and to your audience. And I'm extremely grateful for you getting my name and my name exactly right, including the sound in my surname, which usually only the Scots and the Dutch can do.

Well, we'll see if we can continue on such a positive note. But before we dive too far into the book, would you mind please introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you even decided to write this book? What's the backstory here? Wonderful. So I am an academic.

at the University of Exeter. My area of interest and research and official academic training is political science. I got my political science degree, although I don't believe in politics being a science, but that's for another discussion another day, in the US. And my area of interest, geographic area of interest is

is the Middle East. I'm currently focusing primarily on the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, but I have had longstanding interest in particular in Palestine and the Mashraq or the Levant. So my broader area is pretty much east of the Mediterranean and the Arab-speaking countries therein. Now, the reason that I came about to writing this book is that I have written a number of

academic books, about three of them. And then I've edited academic volumes. And I have begun to think that as I'm getting older and closer to my retirement, I actually want to speak to a larger audience. And I want that larger audience to engage with some incredibly complex political, social, economic issues.

areas that I research in ways that actually allows for people to understand what's going on in these very complex and difficult and sometimes invisible areas. And part of the reason that I want to do so is because I've always been very interested in the question of justice and equity and equality. And I'm politically oriented to the left, very obviously, and I'm very open about it.

And so it's been very important for me to, in some ways, question the fundamental basis of the world in which we live.

One element of this is something that Frederick Jameson famously said, which is that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. And I think part of the reason for that is because capitalism is incredibly mystified. It is made incredibly difficult. There is a lot of jargon around it. There is a lot of specialization. And I sort of hope that what I'm writing from here until I stop writing altogether will

demystifies some of that. And I think this book is an attempt to do so for a much broader audience. I love anything that is demystifying or myth-busting. So definitely having read this book, I can totally see how that is the impetus for the project. And thank you for giving us such a clear foundation to build our discussion on.

If we then start, well, we have to start somewhere, I suppose, in diving into the many hidden aspects of capitalism examined in the book. Why might a place to start be comparing the commodities of oil and sand? How does that help us understand extractive capitalism? So I think that commodities like oil and sand are incredibly interesting, but also interesting

contrasting lenses through which to understand capitalism. One of the things that they both share in common is that they are both incredibly valuable as commodities that are traded globally. Why? In the case of oil, because it is quite an expensive commodity, and it is because the vast majority of the world's energy and industry is reliant on

petroleum and its various products as well as natural gas increasingly in order to operate. Sand is really important because it is obviously the material that we use for some of the most fundamental but often forgotten elements of our lives. It's sand with aggregate, with pebbles and other kinds of mixtures of natural things is mixed with cement to create concrete which

is used to build the world. Sand is used for manufacturing glass. Sand is used for manufacturing elements that are used, for example, in computers and other electronics. And so in some ways, it's an incredibly important but very humble concept.

But also what is really interesting about both of them is that they are products. They're commodities. Actually, they're natural things that have been commodified, that have been produced over years.

not just millennia, but over millions of years. And so they are in some ways things, and I don't want to say commodities, they are natural things that actually in some ways contain the deep history of the earth. And yet we're using them as if they are nothing, as if they are expendables.

as if they are simply made, simply there in order to serve us. And in order to serve an economy that is supposedly constantly supposed to be growing. And so in that sense, that contrast between a deep time that has produced these incredibly important things and the process of commodification of them and the sale of them

It's an incredibly important contrast, but one that actually also defines so much in the capitalist world we live in. Very important natural and human things are transformed into commodities. And through that process of commodification or that process of transformation,

Both the humans and the natural world are devastated. And I think both of these things are both of these elements, both the contrast in their production and use and the effect of their indiscriminate use for the purposes of economic growth is something that I really wanted to draw out.

This is definitely important to understand in the context of oil and sand, but obviously we can take this idea of materials and how they're being conceptualized and used more broadly as well. And staying in this realm of kind of service in terms of the global commodities market, can you tell us about Rotterdam? This may not be the place that people initially think of as being so central to this trade, but it really is and has been for a long time. So why? Yeah.

So it's quite an interesting thing. And I've actually been thinking about Rotterdam quite a lot recently, in part because I have also been really interested in the idea that why would Netherlands, this tiny little country, which is always teetering on the edge of being swallowed up by the North Sea, has become such an important center of global trade? It is, for example, the single most important oil port in the continent of Europe.

Now, that's a really wild thing to say, but part of the reason that it is such a significant oil port is not because it necessarily sits atop a massive oil reservoir, although the Dutch did produce a small amount of oil and gas for a period of time, but because it is a node through which oil moves. There are a significant number of refineries run by

private companies, some of them private companies and state-owned companies, most of them Middle Eastern, that sit in the port of Rotterdam. And therefore, Rotterdam receives huge amounts of crude oil and ships out huge amounts of produced and refined materials, including fuel. On top of that, the history of the Netherlands is a kind of a merchant's

monarchy, if you will, merchant constitutional monarchy, makes it quite important in any kind of trade that has a maritime element to it. And that actually makes it in some ways very similar to Britain. This kind of a

this kind of a longer history of sitting atop routes of trade and reinforcing those routes of trade through imperial or colonial control over far reaches of the world is part of the reason why the Netherlands and the UK are quite significant in that regard. Now, what is interesting about

Rotterdam. And I think that this is also what makes it distinct from Amsterdam is that although Amsterdam is also, uh, close to the water, perhaps not as close as Rotterdam, the fact that Rotterdam was destroyed in the second world war actually made the sort of the planners, um, uh, in both the urban planners, but also as sort of the capitalist, um, uh, corporations, um, and, uh, and, uh, uh,

again, investors, very interested in Rotterdam as a particular node through which these kinds of trades could happen. So if you actually go to the port of Rotterdam and the city very helpfully provides boat tours that you can take in the port proper, what you find is that there are connections here in the port, for example, to Brazil, France,

What is that connection? It is both timber, but also very significantly orange juice. So orange juice is brought from Brazil and from other countries in Latin America and processed in the Netherlands. Oil, as I said, is brought from lots of different places and processed through those refineries there. And very significantly, Rotterdam is also the largest container port in Europe.

So it itself, as a country, has a small hinterland. It's not a huge, it doesn't have a huge population, but it is an incredibly important port for receiving material, receiving goods from the rest of the world, particularly China, for example, and distributing that both by sea and by land through Europe and other points.

And this history actually even predates the Second World War because Rotterdam was also, in a way, the port for the rural German industries and the rural with steel and coal being shipped out and used and or received and products being sent out. And so there's this, again, there are historical elements that makes Rotterdam quite a significant place. But there's also a much more recent history.

And that is that after the struggle, or I should say actually during the struggle for nationalization of oil in the Middle East, there was quite a lot of concern in the northwest corner of Europe about how this nationalization of oil could affect

the importation of oil and refined products into Europe and the potential glitch that this would produce in industrial production in these industrialized, hyper-industrialized northern European countries. And so,

Rotterdam ended up becoming a kind of a node for a commodity trade, a kind of a trade in oil that is not necessarily attached to oil companies, although, of course, Shell has always been

has always had a connection to the Netherlands Shell Oil Company, but rather a commodities trade that is detached from these oil reserves and which allows for the traders to buy from whomever they want to and sell to whomever they want to. And Rotterdam ended up becoming quite an important node for that from early on, from the 1970s onwards. And I think that also explains why Rotterdam is so incredibly important in this regards.

Yes, so many different factors there. The historical, but very much still, as you explained, so incredibly current as well. I want to talk a little bit more about this idea of the trade, of especially the ships coming into Rotterdam at such scale. That's not something that is just about kind of like dots on a map or the port and all the containers. There's a huge amount of labour and work involved in modern seafaring today, even if it's maybe not as shiny as the big billowing sails that we might think of in centuries past.

What, in fact, is modern seafaring like for the workers on board these ships?

So this is a fantastic question. And I want to preface it by saying that one of the things that makes the question of labour in shipping incredibly important, both historically and in the present, is the fact that the workers that worked both on the docks and on the ships were often quite militant. In the vast majority of instances, they were militant left, but in some instances, they were also militant right. But we'll set that aside.

And this militancy allowed for both dockers and seafarers to actually acquire gains in their workplaces that had often been denied elsewhere. The fact that they also sat atop routes of trade and facilitated global trade meant that they were given a kind of a leverage that maybe people in other kinds of industrial sectors did not have. And so

That history is really important to take into account as we, for example, see the increasing automation of docks. For example, Rotterdam has entire terminals where activists call it ghost terminals, in part

because there are so few people that actually work on these container terminals. All the cranes, all the trucks, all the different kinds of elements that are that actually lay ships or unload them have been very heavily, if not entirely, but have been

very heavily automated. And so this kind of element of automation is really important because what it does is in some ways reduce the number of workers that work both on the docks and on the ships. A sailing ship, a sailing cargo ship in late, let's say the 18th century or early 19th century had something like 200 seafarers that worked on the ship itself and

The biggest ships today, sorry, the biggest cargo ships today, because cruise ships are slightly different and I'll get to that in a minute. But the biggest cargo ships today have at most 40 people. I think 40 would be a huge number of seafarers aboard. And so I think that in itself causes specific kinds of dynamics aboard the ships. What are these dynamics? First of all,

Because the number of seafarers is so much fewer than what it used to be, let's say, 200 years ago, the stories that we hear about who works on the ships and the kind of conditions of labor they're exposed to don't spread as much as if you had a seafarer in your family as you would have done when every ship had 200 seafarers on it. So that's one thing.

The second thing is through a series of regulatory processes or deregulatory processes in the mid-20th century, and in part in order to break the power of seafaring unions in the global north, a series of provisions, legal and political provisions, were put into place that allowed for shipping companies to recruit from the global south, but on contracts that were not

equal to contracts given to seafarers from the global north. And this kind of a dual employment system or two-track employment system in which you ended up having often an officer class that is primarily European or from some of the more affluent countries of the global south and

And a crew that is often from one of the five countries that produce a lot of seafarers. And those are in order Philippines, China, Indonesia, India and Russia.

And so this kind of a dual system also means that you have huge numbers of, for example, Filipino seafarers working on these ships and their rights that they have and the contractual obligations that they have. Their rights are much more restricted and the contractual obligations are much more expanded. So they, for example, work.

nine to 11 months a year on a ship and can only really take a month or so off in order to see their families or have a moment of respite. Whereas contracts given to the officer classes, if they're European, often sees them working, let's say, four months at a time and then taking a much longer time because the pay is also higher.

There's also actually these forms of inequality also cascades through the way that the ships are organized. Now, if anybody has read Moby Dick or any of the great sort of seafaring novels, Joseph Conrad, from the 18th or 19th century, one of the things that becomes clear is that ships are extremely hierarchical organizations. So the captain is essentially the master of the ship and they literally use the word master as well. In fact, they don't...

Captain is when you're on a ship and people use the terminology, the master is actually used far more than captain is. Your snacking routine can get a little dull. Time for an Oikos remix or light and fit remix. Like a crunchy storm of sea salt praline pretzels, dark chocolate and butter toffee showering down into a smooth, creamy yogurt.

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And so the master of the ship sits atop a hierarchy, which is very pyramidical in its shape. And this hierarchy cascades in such things as, for example, living conditions. One of the things that I did for research for a previous book, Sinews of War and Trade, which is about shipping in the Arabian Peninsula, one of the things that I did as part of research for that was to travel on container ships as a kind of ethnography at sea. And

What was really clear was that the master and the first officers, whether the first engineer or the first mate who works above deck, are atop this pyramid. The master sits at the head of the table at dinner and the officers, the first officers, sit on either side of him.

then the second officers and then the other officers. And the officers eat often separately from the crew. They have different messes. They have different mess spaces.

And then the housing aboard the ship is also a pyramidical in this way. So the master has his own entire suite in the living quarters in the ship at the very top. And when you get to the sort of the levels that are closest to the deck, what you find is that there's anywhere between four and eight people, ordinary crew.

crew members sharing bunk beds in very small rooms. And so what you end up seeing is that the living conditions and the conditions in which people also eat and interact are very much dictated by this hierarchy.

There's also one other element of the life aboard ships, which is people don't often think about. And that is that as the efficiency becomes this kind of a desiderata of late capitalism, quicker turnaround times end up becoming something that the ships work towards.

And that means that a ship can arrive into the port and be out of the port in, let's say, 18 hours. There was a time when a ship arrived. This was even in the 20th century. When a ship arrived into the port, it would take a week or two weeks to arrive.

unload all of the cargo that it had and load up new cargo. But with containerization and ever faster automatic systems, what you see is that this turnaround time has reduced. And of course, the effect of that is that seafarers that have been at sea for sometimes a week, two weeks, depending on which seas you're traversing,

end up not having any rest and recreation time. They can't get off the port because also ports are now bigger and larger and therefore often located way outside of cities, sometimes 50 to 60 kilometers outside of cities. And of course, what that means is that in order to go from the

port into the city to go to a restaurant or to see a doctor or to buy some clothes or the ordinary things we all take for granted would cost a very expensive taxi, which of course is not covered as part of their expenses. And so these kinds of things make the life aboard the ship quite difficult for the seafarers.

And this is even before you end up having crisis situation, which you briefly mentioned in your question, which is the question of abandonment or the question of moments such as COVID, where, for example, you have a global crisis in the way people do work.

Yeah, that's a very intense experience of seafaring today that I think is definitely in the category of more hidden sides of extractive capitalism. So thank you for helping us understand what's going on very much behind the scenes in

In fact, it's on that idea of behind the scenes that I'd like to stay, even though I'm asking us now to go to the literal complete opposite type of seafaring experience. Can we talk about yachts? Yes, of course we can talk about yachts. Let's introduce the shininess of them as much as how we can understand things like global inequality by looking at them.

I mean, I think the shininess of them is also interesting because obviously the aesthetics of these kinds of luxury materials says something also about the way that people both like to represent themselves and are represented by the people who create the shiny things. So I'll explain what I mean in a moment.

Obviously, I'm not the only person who's interested in yachts because my stepdaughter, for example, watches Below Deck, which is a television show about the people that are working on the yachts themselves and sort of the drama of that all the time and recommends that we watch it.

So there must be obviously an audience about that kind of below stairs, above stairs life that a yacht personifies. But yachts are also symbols of inequality in a great many other ways. So let me explain.

Obviously, in moments of extreme inequality, such as the one that we're living in, where, let's say, the richest 0.1% of the population in the world owns something like 70% of the wealth of the world, yachts end up becoming a measure of the wealth of the people that hold all the wealth in their hands. And in particular,

A kind of a masculinist, mine is bigger than yours ethos is introduced in yacht ownerships where every yacht owner wants their yachts to be bigger or faster or more flashy than the others.

And what this translates to is an entire service industry, a service and manufacturing industry that is produced to cater to these kinds of luxury items. Now, this is as far

away as you can get from mass reproduction. This is ship manufacturers or yacht manufacturers in the global north producing extraordinarily beautiful objects whether they're sailing yachts or yachts with engines that are manufactured

often made to order, decorated to order, that are often intended to house dozens of people that if they are not sailing yachts, they have helipads, they have a whole series of

amenities attached to them. They can have multiple decks. Some of the flashier yachts have things like snow rooms inside, cinemas. And of course, things like saunas or pools are just basic. They're not even something to be commented upon. What I found

amazing is that some of these yachts are, in fact, despite being enormous and huge, they nevertheless have a service yacht also attached. And the service yacht, for example, carries all of the different service staff, but also all of the sort of toys that the owners of the yachts like to use, things like jet skis or water skis or smaller boats or you name it. So

There's this entire universe in which having yachts is a kind of a symbol of – it's kind of a very ostentatious symbol of wealth –

But also there are elements around the work, the labor that is produced, that is put to work in order to both build the yachts, but to get them operating that again remains somewhat invisible. Yachts often arrive in marinas that are very specifically built.

targeted for them and therefore they often have very, very heavy security. These marinas themselves have amenities, incredibly posh restaurants, fueling and various other kinds of services that are inaccessible to somebody who has just some sort of a rinky-dink little boat.

There are, of course, yacht clubs. And then there are, in addition to all of that, there is an entire class of people that work these yachts who do things like, for example, take the boat, take the yacht from the Caribbean in the winter to the Mediterranean in the summer while the owner of the yacht flies in their private jet to get to there. Yeah.

And the staff that work on the yachts also tend to be very transitory, much the same as the workers who work on container ships or on freighters. They don't, they are not actually long-term employees of,

the owners of the ship, but rather they work on contract. And so they are precarious. And often that precarity translates into not having a very good health care cover or not being certain about where one's income comes from, let's say a year from now. And that

Again, the master of the yacht, the captain of the yacht, can be contrasted to the ordinary workers in the same way that the master of a container ship can be. And that the master is often the one employee that the owner of the yacht has and tends to be a kind of a consultant, if you will, or counsel to the yacht owner who provides information, who does a lot of the kind of work that needs to be done in terms of

hiring staff who determines whether or not the boat needs to be repaired or painted or refreshed or a whole series of other kinds of decisions. Essentially, as a friend of mine mentioned, they are kind of like being a butler or an estate manager. And so they do all of the different jobs that they need to do on the estate side.

this small little fragment of an estate on water in order to have it going. That contrast between a yacht with, let's say, sometimes actually up to 100 people working on a yacht to serve both below deck and doing service work, massage therapists, waiters, I don't know, you name it, doctors, etc. That

to me is also an interesting contrast because what you have here is a very large number of service workers serving the extremely affluent customers that are sitting on the yacht and going from one location to another location. And their lives are also invisible, except for these stylized reality shows like Below Deck.

That is definitely an interesting comparison because from the outside, the shininess of it really does make it seem like yachts and container ships are completely different and have nothing at all in common. And yet, as you've helpfully explained to us, there is actually a lot more in common between them than we might think, particularly through this lens of labour.

I wonder if we can do that by adding in another topic into our conversation that hasn't yet come up and might sound like it's completely unrelated to everything we've been discussing. But I think you're going to prove that idea very much incorrect. Can we talk about how extractive capitalism that we've been discussing is entwined with Western militarism? Yeah.

Yes. And again, there is an element of this that I haven't actually written about in the book, which obviously is very clear. And that is that the kind of work that happens, for example, on naval vessels, on militarized or military ships at sea, also follows the same kinds of hierarchies, also follows the same kinds of sort of patterns.

inequalities between the people who are the officers of the ships and the ordinary seamen on board or seafarers on board. And I think that

Setting that aside, there is, I think, one element that I have always been fascinated with and which runs through all of the work that I have done, the three books I've written about different aspects of the shipping industry, and this being one of them, is that none of this global trade can actually function without there being an element of both military coercion and military productivity.

protection for these routes of trade. So you end up, what you end up seeing is that the process of extraction of commodities or the production of commodities is one thing. But also in addition to that, you end up having wars fought over trade routes, wars fought over maritime resources. Um, the, in the, in the late 19th century, guano, um, bird shit, uh, was actually an incredibly, um,

desired commodity in part because it could be used as a fertilizer for agriculture. And so you had guano wars. And of course, because guano often can be found in very large quantities on tiny little islands in the middle of the ocean where seabirds actually land and or nest, a lot of the guano wars...

ended up happening at sea. And so you would have maritime elements to this. Now there's also, so islands have been very important as kinds of resources for extracting what was then an incredibly important commodity, agricultural commodity. You can't see this, but I'm putting air quotes around commodity. But islands are

or also important, because if you are using your maritime vessels, your ships, both commercial and naval ships, covering the entirety of the world's oceans,

Islands end up becoming important as nodes for victualling and bunkering. Those are the two words I'm sure most of your audience know, but essentially for replenishing the food and water aboard the ships and bunkering is refueling ships.

And these islands acted as nodes for both starting up in the 19th century for coaling and now mining.

obviously for fueling ships with products that are derived from oil and sometimes gas. And so what you end up having is islands end up becoming incredibly significant to the world's largest maritime empires, whether it's the Dutch or the British up to the 19th and early 20th century, or the US empire with its global reach everywhere.

Now, in addition to islands, certain kinds of ports also end up becoming really, really significant to this global trade. And so they end up becoming also at once militarized, but also fungible to commercial interest. And so you end up seeing ports like Aden. I'm obsessed with Aden in Yemen that were incredibly important in the 19th century as ports.

Coaling as coal bunkering ports and then later as oil bunkering ports. Aden, I think in the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th was the fourth most important bunkering port.

port in the world after London, Liverpool and New York. That's how significant it was. But also because it sets astride Bab al-Mandab, the entryway into the Red Sea. And once the Suez Canal was built, it sits astride the travel to that route. And so what you find is that Bab al-Mandab and the port of Aden and of course the port of Hodeidah also, which sits on also close to Bab al-Mandab,

end up becoming quite significant in trying to direct or control or redirect trade going through the Suez Canal. And of course, given that that route is one of the most important routes of trade in the world, 12% of the world's goods travel through the Suez Canal. And it is the single most important route for travel between Asia and Europe.

that control over Bab al-Mandab ends up becoming really important. So Aden and Hodeidah end up having an outsized significance because of that positionality. So it's both these elements, the sort of the control over islands, but also control over literals, strategic, commercial, and military, which ends up

becoming a constant through history from the moment in which empires extended their reach out across the world's ocean until this very moment today.

That is such a great example of something that seems, oh, that's history. That happened a long time ago. And it's like, no, wait, hang on a second. That is still exactly the sort of thing that's going on today as well. And those links are much stronger than they might first appear. Is that true if we also look at development politics as well?

I think it is. I think that a number of really amazing scholars who have studied economic and political development, in particular in the 20th century, tell us that many developmental policies that emerged in the global north actually arose out of these colonial development policies that were very important for both

extraction of commodities from the countries of the Global South, the colonies, the former colonies, but also, and rather unbelievably, it sounds conspiratorial, but it is true, for ensuring, for the colonial metropoles, ensuring that these colonies

their colonies didn't develop industries independent of them because that kind of a self-reliance or autonomy would have spelled danger for the industries in the global north. So these developmental

policies end up being also incredibly development or de-development policies, if you will, when the emphasis is so strongly on the question of extraction of basic commodities rather than on industrial production. This kind of de-development and de-development policies have continued. I mean, what we're seeing now, and one of the things that I'm tracking, but also

wonderful writers such as Thea Riofrancos, who's also going to have a really great book coming out quite soon, I think, also with the word extraction in its title. But she focuses particularly on the kinds of rare earth minerals that are used in building, for example, batteries and

And she's particularly interested in lithium. And so what we're finding is that some of those same policies, that extractive policies that operate, that operated in the 19th century in order to make sure copper and rubber and coal and iron ore moved from,

Africa and Asia to the European countries or from Latin America to the United States. A lot of those kinds of processes followed in the 20th century. Oil ended up becoming really significant in that moment. And now what we're seeing in the 21st century is that those rare minerals that are used in batteries and other kinds of products

power or energy type sources that require these rare minerals for development, electric vehicles or whatnot, end up having the same kind of politics. But one thing that remains constant is that

in order to for this material that is being extracted through these de-developmental policies I mean Walter Rodney has written about this incredibly beautifully and candidly in his How Europe Underdeveloped Africa but

But these same policies also translate into very specific kinds of infrastructure construction, particularly around transport, which allows for the transportation of these goods, often from the interiors of countries in Africa or Middle East or Asia, to the places where manufacturing takes place. And that is Europe and North America, but also increasingly China and Vietnam. And so

And India. And so what you see is a very similar set of relations of extraction emerging. A news item that was going around yesterday, which to me was horrific, was that one of the tributaries of the Zambezi River has been, quote unquote, killed overnight because, I believe it

copper extraction mine run by a Chinese company had dumped so much acid into the river that had essentially killed the river, but also all the living things within it. And this kind of extractive set of policies is

which often work to the detriment of the people who live around the sources of extraction. History of Congo, for example, bears witness to this for the last 200 years, is something that we see continuing into the future. And it is horrific. Unless people organize around it and people

do on the sites of these kinds of depredations. But also, you know, unless people organize around this globally and transnationally and in transnational solidarity, we'll continue to see these kinds of devastating catastrophes again and again.

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Definitely a lot of urgency to understanding what has happened, what is happening and what obviously could happen in future. Speaking of what could happen in the future, can we talk about NEOM? Obviously, the name NEOM suggests that it's quite a new thing. Is it that new of an idea? Or I guess the things that it's representing? I mean, what is going on in this very future focused project?

Neom is really interesting. So Neom's name is a portmanteau of neo and mustaqbal, mustaqbal being the Arabic word for future. So it's like a new future. And it is interesting.

uh a i'm sure your audience all know this but in case there is one person left in the world that doesn't know it uh it is a futuristic city being built in a in an area in northwest of the um

Arabian Peninsula on the border with Jordan and on the Red Sea. And this futuristic city is supposed to be a very high tech, extremely sort of oriented towards future hub for both industry and technology.

And it is the sort of the vision of the Saudi enfant terrible, Mohammed bin Salman, who seems to really like steampunk movies and computer games. And his vision of Neom emerges. It's very similar to these kinds of sci-fi fantasies.

Elements of NEOM include or originally included something called the line, which was a hundred mile or thereabouts long tunnel.

parallel set of lines of buildings that are as tall as the Empire State Building. And this parallel set of lines essentially are the city in which people live. Then there's a thing called Oxagon, which is a reclaimed area for industry. And then there is a ski piece that is built, a ski resort, that

that is built not too far away. Of course, this area in Saudi Arabia is quite mountainous and it does receive some snow, although probably they're thinking about seeding clouds and manufacturing snow as well. Plus a number of others, never mind five-star, but six-star, six and seven-star kinds of resorts targeted directly at the richest people in the world. Now,

So ends up being, Neom is as an idea, maybe, you know, the very specifics of it may be new, but in fact, it has a very long history. Every time a new king or a new person has come to power in Saudi Arabia, they have tried to put their own stamp on the economy by creating these economic cities, which transform

try to escape the control of, for example, the merchant classes that might want to have a say in these kinds of decisions or in the economic decisions that shape them. An older example of this is the King Abdullah Economic City, which is a couple of hundred miles away from Jeddah, which was intended to steal the port of Jeddah's trade.

which was supposed to be this kind of a modern new city. In some ways, it was a kind of a precursor, if you will, to NEOM. And even only a handful of years into its construction, the WikiLeaks leaked diplomatic cables had American diplomats saying things like, this is a white elephant, right?

The King Abdullah Economic City was supposed to, upon its inauguration, have something like one or two million population. About five or six years after its inauguration, it has around 20,000 people living in there who are placed in there in order to work in the port and other attached services. And the port really only gets the sort of the overflow from the port of Jeddah. So

There is a kind of a precursor to Neom's incredibly inflated promises. But there is also another element that goes into Neom that kind of makes it particularly unique. And that is that Mohammed bin Salman really wanted an area. He specifically, he says so in an interview with Bloomberg or Financial Times,

I can't remember which one, but he says that, well, imagine if you could have the city of New York sitting somewhere without any regulation or without anybody looking over your shoulder. So essentially let's imagine a place without any accountability to a larger public. Um, and this, uh, this space could be a space for the whole world, meaning for the, for the capitalists and venture capitalist, uh, class in the world to come and play. Um, and, uh,

And because of that particular vision, because of this kind of a fantasy of unfettered capital being given a playground out in this corner of Saudi Arabia, this project also ended up being a kind of a feeding trough for every management consulting and architecture firm that you can imagine. And originally, it was supposed to take one or two billion dollars to build it. Now, estimates are that in order for it to be completed, it requires some news item came out a couple of weeks ago.

of days ago. The estimates are it would be $8 trillion and it wouldn't be finished till 2050. And so it is also a white elephant, a white mastodon, and I think probably in this case. And it is, you know, it is on the one hand something new, but on the other hand, it has got its precursors in these kind of a fantasy free zones of Saudi Arabia itself.

Definitely something to keep a close eye on as ideas and bills continue to develop on that project. But speaking of massive infrastructure projects, I wonder if we can shift from talking about some of the Western side extractive capitalist ideas to looking at China's Belt and Road Initiative.

There's obviously been a lot of attention on the many, many projects under this umbrella. But what do you think have been some of the important but maybe less noticed impacts of it? So the Belt and Road is a really interesting initiative because, OK, so there's several strands of history that goes into the Belt and Road project.

One is that in the mid 20th century, China was actually engaged in a number of South-South projects, which were supposed to be projects of solidarity. For example, they built roads in northern Yemen, which connected Hodeidah to Sana'a. And so these were quite important projects. And they were really done as matters of South-South solidarity and as positing an alternative to sort of the capitalist Western bloc.

But as China sort of gave, Chinese economy gave way to capitalist or liberal economic precepts starting in the 1980s, one of the things that started happening was an element that we see in places that use planning in order to industrialize, which is that industrialization

industrialization for domestic consumption eventually gathered speed to such an extent that there was a need for essentially finding new markets for the products of this hyper speedy industrialization. In

In addition to that, when moments of economic market crashes happened, for example, in 2008, the stimulus packages that China put forward were

were actually not intended to rescue banks as they did in Europe and North America, but rather intended to, were poured into major infrastructure projects. So this is the second strand of history that comes out of this whole process.

And then the third element is that when Xi Jinping came to power, one of the things that he wanted to do, like most of the leaders that come to power in China, was to leave a mark on the sort of the Chinese political economy by coming up

with some kind of catchy program of action that he could name as his own. And so what happens in that moment in the early 2000 teens is a kind of an agglomeration of the different infrastructure projects that China was engaged in, infrastructure and extraction projects that China was engaged in in Southeast Asia,

in the Middle East, in South Asia, and in Africa. And then a few years later, also in Latin America, was the agglomeration of all of these projects under the title of Belt and Road. In many instances, the elements of the project, whatever the infrastructure sort of principles

plan was, was already underway. In many instances, loans were given already for the construction of a port or the construction of roads. One very significant element of this was, for example, a road that was going to go from the coast of China, where a lot of the manufacturing is, through most of Asia, dipping through China

dipping through Pakistan and ending at the port of Gwadar, close to the border with Iran in Balochistan. There was supposed to be another element of this. Of course, this has actually come to fruition, which was a railway that goes all the way to actually Rotterdam. It goes through Hamburg and then an extension to Rotterdam. And then it was going to have a

maritime element that was going to go around the Southeast Asia, Southeast Asian archipelagos and have its own landing points in different locales, particularly in East Africa and in the Eastern Mediterranean. And so you saw the Chinese active involvement in buying port concessions

and in lending money to build new ports in places like Mombasa and Hambantota in Sri Lanka. And these projects, as well as rail projects in Kenya and in a few other places. And one of the things that has been interesting about these projects is that they are problematic, but not in the way that they're often portrayed in Western media.

So often when they're portrayed in the Western media or by Western policymakers, particularly very belligerent American policymakers, these are portrayed as China creating debt traps for the countries which have borrowed money in order to build these infrastructures.

And the argument of the debt trap is used again and again. If you look at it, you'll find that the problem is that in most instances, in fact, the debt that many of these, Sri Lanka being a very good example of this, are actually trying to pay back or borrowings from European and US sources that they're trying to pay. And

There has not really been any examples of, you know, China demand it in very, in a lot of cases, China actually restructures its debt or writes off its debts or,

Where the problem rises is in the way that Chinese projects in many of the countries, particularly in the interior of countries, where there are extractive or infrastructure construction, transport infrastructure construction projects are happening, is the replay of the labor manager crisis.

managerial divide there, where local labor is exploited or not brought in at all, where there is a distinct separation between Chinese workers and managers. And let's say, for example, Kenyan workers are working on the railroads. And the extent to which China can actually exploit labor in these particular ways

is dictated by the capacity of the countries in which these projects and plans are happening. So a friend of mine who's an expert on China often points to the fact that the exact same project in Ethiopia and Kenya will have completely different outcomes because the Ethiopian government has had higher

capacity in dictating the constraints under which China can operate, whereas Kenya has not. And so I think that that kind of a distinction is something that we need to be paying attention to. I also mentioned earlier about the kinds of environmental damage that is emerging out of some of these large-scale projects. To that, we should also add

that there are some incredibly unscrupulous mercenary groups, one of them run by Eric Prince, an ally of Donald Trump, whose headquarters of his business is in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, and who provides logistical and security support to, for example, Chinese companies that are going in to East Africa. So there are a lot of

different actors that are involved in this process of extraction. Some of them are unexpected. As I said, Eric Prince

is an ally of Donald Trump, but his company is actually listed in Hong Kong. And most of the investors in his logistic security company are in fact Chinese state-owned enterprises. So really this kind of a political capitalism makes for very interesting bedfellows in this instance.

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Yeah, definitely makes for some interesting bedfellows and creates interesting connections. I mean, Rotterdam coming up again in this part of our conversation definitely shows how interconnected all of these things are, despite perhaps media reports that say, you know, this is all one, this is all over here and that's all over there. There's in fact, a lot of

connections both in the national side and the corporate side that are increasing in a lot of ways and particularly given as you've mentioned this is a topic you've been looking at and working on for more than just this book are there any other really significant shifts or trends that you want to highlight in terms of where we might see these unexpected alliances or connections?

One of the most interesting ones that is happening right now, and I really want to point to it because I think I don't ever want to finish a broadcast without bringing up the question of Palestine, is that what we're seeing with the extraordinary violence that has been unleashed in Israel's genocidal war against Palestine has been the extent to which you are seeing

realignments in the region. And one of the pieces that I write about in the book, which was written at the time where the genocide was in its fullest flow in late 2023, 2024, is the rise of

Houthis in Yemen in support of Palestinians. And again, this is one of those interesting elements where, of course, a lot of the Western media tends to portray the Houthis as some kind of a mindless proxy of Iran. But I was actually seeing news items yesterday where apparently the Iranians are

pleading with the Houthis not to re-engage in their blockade of Bab al-Mandab in support of Palestinians. And the Houthis are actually going their own way and they are re-engaging. This connection to me is absolutely fascinating. And part of the reason that it's fascinating is because of the extent to which the Houthi blockade of Bab al-Mandab is not only a

for, it's not only causing political embarrassment in some senses for Israel. For example, their demand in late 2023 and early 2024, the ships that were going to, the ships that were going through the Red Sea declined

They had nothing to do with Israel. And in fact, many ships did that. This kind of disavowal is a real political embarrassment for Israel. But what they also showed was the extent to which their strategic location and their political positioning could actually have very significant implications

impact on global trade. As I mentioned earlier, something like 12% of the world's trade goes through the Suez Canal. And because of the Houthi activities and because of the incredible increase in insurance fees for ships that were going through the Red Sea, what we saw was a

an almost overnight rerouting of global trade around the Cape of Good Hope. So what you see is this

incredible drop, something like 60% of container ships that went through the Suez Canal had to be rerouted. And so this also shows that this incredible machinery of global trade, which we seem to think of as very robust, can

actually be quite fragile. We saw this during COVID and we certainly see this through the Houthi blockade of the Red Sea, which has been, which has restarted again. What is fascinating to me, of course, about this is that in the 1960s,

Yemen, the northern Yemeni Zaydi Imam, so the ruler of Yemen, was from the Zaydi community. And there was an Arab nationalist revolt against him, supported by Gamal Abdel Nasser. And it ended up, this kind of an internal revolt, civil war in northern Yemen, ended up becoming a proxy war, on the one hand, between the Arab nationalists and anti-colonial forces, and

Excuse me. And and the Zaydi Imam and the Saudi Arabians who are supporting him, as well as the British. The British didn't want to be seen to be directly engaged. And so they actually sent arms to the forces of the Zaydi Imam, arms and other other material using Israeli soldiers. So the Israeli soldiers were coming in on the side of Saudi Arabia and the Zaydi Imam dropping bombs.

material and arms for the Zaydi imam's forces to fight against the Nasserist and anti-colonial forces on the other side.

What is fascinating about these unexpected connections and interesting reversals is that the Houthis actually arise out of that Zaydi community. And so there is this kind of a complete reversal where you see Egypt being the closest ally of Israel in the region, other than perhaps United Arab Emirates.

And you see these descendants of the Zaydi community being some of the most staunch and stalwart supporters of the Palestinian struggle for autonomy and liberation. And these unexpected connections, of course, emerge constantly. But I think that because of the multiple realignments that have happened in the Middle East, you see them constantly.

very clearly highlighted today. That's definitely a lot for us to keep looking out for and having an understanding of kind of what's happening beyond the headlines from that analysis. And definitely something I think listeners will be able to take away quite directly from this discussion. Are there any other things you want to highlight that you most hope readers take away from the book?

I think one of the things that I really, really wish that everyone reading the book sort of keeps an eye on is A, the condition of the most invisibilized workers in the world, whether they are the people that are working in the cobalt mines in Congo or the seafarers that are stuck aboard ships or have been abandoned aboard ships.

But I also would really like, I would love for more people to be curious about things that seem incredibly arcane or difficult or technical. Things like derivatives, things like artificial intelligence, things that are hoisted on us, often to the detriment of our lives. And I would really love for people

readers to become curious about these supposedly difficult things and learn more about them. Because ultimately, I think part of the political education of our time is, and I'm going to start with what I said at the very beginning of the interview, is demystifying what seems incredibly difficult and incredibly closed off as a source of knowledge to us. Yeah.

Definitely a great way, I think, to end our discussion about the book. Nicely circles back to where we started. But before I let you go, is there anything you're currently working on or looking to work on now that this book is obviously off your desk? Whether or not it's a book project, anything you want to highlight? So I have a fantasy, which if my various...

admin positions allow, I'd love to actually get a little bit of research time off so that I can work on this. I'm really interested in a project which looks at the political processes that have changed. This is going to sound so complicated. The processes of valuation of oil. So the process

title of the project is what is the value of a well and I'm really interested in how geologists accountants financiers and environmentalists actually look at an oil well and put

a number on it, whether that's a number of volume or dollar value. And I'm interested in how politics dictates that process of valuation. In order to do this project, I would obviously have to look at the processes that happen in the countries that I know best, Arabic speaking, Middle Eastern countries, but also in places like the United Kingdom and the United States where oil is produced. So there are oil wells.

And I would have to also get people that have some expertise in geology and accounting, because obviously I'm no expert. And so it would be a kind of a joint project where we all put our heads together and think about this. But as I said, this is kind of a fantasy for a time where, you know, we're not inundated with admin jobs and other kinds of commitments.

Well, always good to put dreams out in the world. Who knows? That might lead to something. So definitely sounds like an interesting idea. And while you pursue the possibility of it, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Extractive Capitalism, How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy, published by Profile in 2025. Laleh, thank you so much for being with me on the podcast. Miranda, thank you so much. It has been an incredible pleasure and you are so well prepared. It's such a pleasure to speak with you. Thank you.

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