Laleh Khalili’s Extractive Capitalism: A beautiful map of the entangled global economy

The University of Exeter academic's book exposes how essential commodities, data and labour exploitation fuel wealth that is increasingly concentrated in the hands of an elite

A Chinese container ship (AFP)

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In Extractive Capitalism, Laleh Khalili writes the kind of non-fiction that alters your sense of what counts as “the economy”.

The University of Exeter academic does not just describe oil rigs, shipping lanes, or investment funds; she reveals the networks of power that braid them together, and shows, with rare clarity and warmth, how those networks shape ordinary lives.

The result is a smart, propulsive and often thrilling book that belongs on the shelf next to the best narrative investigations of global capitalism.

Khalili’s core claim is simple enough to state and startling to watch unfold: modern prosperity is built on the extraction of oil, sand, minerals, data, and labour and on the legal, financial and military architectures that keep the spoils flowing upward.

From the “Seven Sisters” oil giants of the 20th century to today’s private equity funds and consulting giants, the players change but the pattern holds: wealth concentrates, risk and pollution disperse, and the costs are pushed down the chain on to workers, communities, and the environment.

A panoramic canvas, told in tight, gripping episodes, one joy of Extractive Capitalism is its form.

Rather than a single linear argument, Khalili offers a series of interlocking chapters, on tankers and canals, commodity traders, “flags of convenience”, superyachts, management consultants, private equity, the Chagos Islands and the Red Sea - each a vantage point on the same machine.

Read straight through, they accumulate into a prismatic history of how commodities move and how power is exercised.

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Crucially, this is not a book of abstractions. Khalili roots her analysis in vivid stories of ships idling off congested ports, of seafarers stranded without pay, of courtrooms where oil companies claim sovereign rights, of coastal villages watching their beaches vanish by night.

She writes with the steady tempo of a reporter and the perspective of a historian.

In the opening chapters, she connects the rise of the US-led oil order to colonial dispossession and industrial standardisation, the “cartel” logic of the "Seven Sisters" that shaped not only energy but infrastructures and accounting methods of the modern world.

Khalili’s working definition, plainspoken and powerful, anchors the book. Extractive Capitalism, she argues, is the system by which primary commodities (oil, iron ore, bauxite, coal, sand) are excavated, transported, processed and sold at markups that funnel profits to a narrow investor class while externalising costs on to workers, communities and the environment.

When labour has power and rights, firms automate; where “labour or life is cheap”, hand work and its hazards persist.

The example list is concrete: South Asian ship-breaking yards, African stevedoring, and the hyper-automated pumping and loading of crude.

This is also a book about the political scaffolding that keeps extraction humming. Khalili threads in Walter Rodney and Norman Girvan - two thinkers of dependency and resource sovereignty - to show how post-war nationalisations won real leverage but were met by new legal and financial instruments designed to preserve Global North control.

The point is not academic name-checking; it is to explain why petrodollars still flow in one direction and why “free trade” so often means free movement of capital, not of people or accountability.

Tankers, maps and a global traffic jam you can feel

Khalili is at her most electric on ships and seas. In the chapter “Shipping Oil”, she reconstructs the eerie spring of 2020, when demand collapsed, storage filled up and chartered tankers became floating vaults.

A viral live map showed clusters of motionless ships off Africa, the Americas and Europe as the price of West Texas Intermediate briefly plunged below zero, a bizarre but logical outcome of futures traders dumping contracts rather than taking delivery of oil they had nowhere to store.

The drama is told cleanly and without jargon.

Extractive Capitalism's richest historical set piece in this chapter involves Aristotle Onassis. He bought wartime tankers on the cheap, bet on oil and then audaciously tried to break Aramco’s grip over Saudi crude by winning a shipping concession from Riyadh.

Container-ship-transits-bosphorus-istanbul-18aug23-afp — Khalili says a racialised labour hierarchy structures shipping crews across the globe (AFP)

The response was swift: boycotts by the "Seven Sisters", coordinated pressure from western governments and ultimately a European arbitration that treated a private oil consortium’s contractual claims as if they trumped a sovereign state’s public interest.

It is a perfect parable of extractive capitalism’s playbook: when soft power and contracts fail, harder tools come out.

Khalili uses “flags of convenience” to show how shipowners offload risk and suppress wages by registering vessels in jurisdictions with weak labour and environmental laws.

She also connects the dots to the racialised labour hierarchies that still structure crews, officers from Eastern Europe, seafarers from the Philippines - echoes of the world novelist Abdul Rahman Munif captured in Cities of Salt.

Sand, frack sand and the vanishing beach

One of the book’s revelations is how closely the fortunes of sand track those of oil. If oil is the lifeblood of mobility, sand is the skeleton of modern life; concrete, glass, silicon chips, and land reclamation projects all depend on it.

But not all sand is usable: windswept desert grains are too smooth and uniform for strong concrete; what builders prize is water-tumbled sand of irregular shapes and sizes.

Demand has soared with urbanisation and electronics, triggering dredging, smuggling and quiet environmental ruin in river systems across the Global South.

Khalili moves from Singapore’s hunger for sand fill to the Great Lakes “frac sand” boom in the United States, where geology blessed certain regions with the strong, uniform grains that keep shale fissures propped open during hydraulic fracturing.

Then she links resources to resistance: the Standing Rock Water Protectors and Canada’s Wetʼsuwetʼen struggle against pipelines are presented not as isolated protests but as a coherent politics of land, water and sovereignty. The scale is global, the stakes intimate.

Traders, consultants and private equity

Khalili adeptly sketches the post-1970s rise of commodity traders, those nimble firms that profit from price swings, political risk and the “unmooring” of markets from physical delivery.

She tells the story of April 2020 through the “Essex Boys”, a clique of independent traders who helped “blitz” the WTI price into negative territory and reportedly pocketed hundreds of millions.

She does so, not as tabloid colour but as a demonstration of how financialisation reorders the oil world after nationalisation.

extractive capitalism laleh khalil — Extractive Capitalism is published by Verso (Verso)

From there, she turns to management consulting and “woke capital” - words that might sound like culture-war bait until you see how precisely she uses them.

The chapter on consultants reads like a primer in euphemisms: “efficiency” becomes layoffs and de-unionisation; “transformation” means moving public cash to private pockets.

A consultant’s gift is to translate political choices into inevitabilities, to smooth out the rough edges of cronyism with the lacquer of best practice.

Private equity gets similar treatment: a form of ownership that talks about ESG, which measures social and environmental impact, and “stakeholders”, while remaining structurally committed to extracting value quickly.

The playbook remains the same, whatever the pretence of ethical commitments and extraction continues, often through leverage, asset-stripping, and fee harvesting.

Khalili’s point is not that these firms are uniquely evil; it is that this is how the rules are written today and how capital behaves when those rules prize "churn and yield" over public welfare.

Empire at sea and onshore: islands, summits, and sieges

Some of the book’s most haunting pages return to places where law and force meet. The chapter “Guano to Guns”, on the Chagos Islands, traces a stark arc from 19th-century extractive fantasies to 20th-century militarisation.

“Improvements” in colonial behaviour give way to the displacement of islanders and to the transformation of an atoll into strategic real estate.

It is a reminder that extraction is not just about digging and shipping; it is also about clearing land and people to serve someone else’s plan.

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“Fiddling While the World Burns”, set at climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, captures the theatre of sustainability in a petro-state economy.

Pavilions gleam, pledges pile up, and meanwhile, the production and sale of fossil fuels, and the securitised, privatised logistics that carry them, roll on.

The juxtaposition is not cynical for its own sake; it is a reality check about who writes the scripts at these summits and who cleans up afterwards.

That realism sharpens further in “The World Burns: The Red Sea Attacks”, which reads like a dispatch from the front lines of a new era in maritime risk.

Here, geopolitical conflict and global trade collide: drones and missiles meet insurance markets and rerouted container traffic.

Khalili’s great service is to show how quickly “supply chain disruptions” become human events, more expensive food, longer voyages and dangerous work for crews who have no say in the wars that put them in harm’s way.

For all its systems thinking, Extractive Capitalism is full of people. There’s Abdullah Turayqi - the “Red Sheikh,” cofounder of Opec - whose life story embodies the hope (and limits) of resource sovereignty.

Educated, honest and committed to the idea that oil should be a public good, Turayqi was deposed after 15 months as Saudi oil minister, exiled but still admired.

Khalili’s portrait is generous, not hagiographic, and becomes a lens on the decades since nationalisation without democratisation and new market “innovations” that restored northern leverage after the 1970s.

The book never slips into despair; it just refuses illusions

There are also the seafarers and dockworkers, the coastal farmers and displaced islanders, the indigenous women leading pipeline blockades. The book never slips into despair; it just refuses illusions.

“Any real transformation,” Khalili writes, “has come and will only come through concerted political action.”

That line lands because Khalili has already shown what the alternative looks like: a resilient, adaptive capitalism that treats crisis as an opportunity to consolidate advantage.

Khalili has a rare knack for turning complexity into clarity without flattening it. She writes in crisp vignettes and precisely chosen examples, so the reader is never lost in theory.

A few pages on ship draughts do more than a white paper explaining why chokepoints matter.

A snapshot of a WhatsApp chat among giddy traders says more than a sermon about financialisation.

Extractive Capitalism is a triumph of synthesis and storytelling, a book that makes the hidden wiring of the global economy visible and treats its readers as capable of understanding hard things.

Khalili is sceptical without being cynical, angry without being fatalistic and endlessly attentive to the people the system renders invisible.

For anyone who has ever looked at a viral map of ships clustered at sea, a photo of a superyacht, a COP photo-op, or a receipt at the grocery store and wondered: “How does this all fit together?” This is the book to read, share and argue with.

Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy will be released on 26 August 2025 and is currently available for pre-order from Verso.

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