The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial GuineaThe Licit Life of Capitalism is both an account of a specific capitalist project—U.S. oil companies working off the shores of Equatorial Guinea—and a sweeping theorization of more general forms and processes that facilitate diverse capitalist projects around the world. Hannah Appel draws on extensive fieldwork with managers and rig workers, lawyers and bureaucrats, the expat wives of American oil executives and the Equatoguinean women who work in their homes, to turn conventional critiques of capitalism on their head, arguing that market practices do not merely exacerbate inequality; they are made by it. People and places differentially valued by gender, race, and colonial histories are the terrain on which the rules of capitalist economy are built. Appel shows how the corporate form and the contract, offshore rigs and economic theory are the assemblages of liberalism and race, expertise and gender, technology and domesticity that enable the licit life of capitalism—practices that are legally sanctioned, widely replicated, and ordinary, at the same time as they are messy, contested, and, arguably, indefensible. |
Contents
THE Offshore | |
THE Enclave | |
THE Contract | |
THE Subcontract | |
THE Economy | |
THE Political | |
Notes | |
References | |
Index | |
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African American Angola Anthropology Bata body shops Cameroon capitalism capitalist chapter civil society colonial company towns contract form corporate corporate social responsibility corruption cultural daily documents Donald EITI process employees enclaves Endurance compound environmental Equatoguinean Equatoguinean government Equatorial Guinea ethnographic explained extraction Filipinos FIPCO foreign gas industry gendered global Guinea Ecuatorial histories housing hydrocarbon industry’s inequality investment Isabel labor liberal licit living Macías Major Malabo meeting migrant management Ministry mobility National Economic Conference national economy neoliberal Nigeria numbers Obiang oil and gas oil companies oil industry onshore operating companies participation petroleum political postcolonial practices production sharing contracts profit PSCs racial radical regime relationship República de Guinea resource curse responsibility revenue Riggs Bank Río Muni risk salaries sector segregation social sovereignty Spanish standardization subcontracting tax havens theory there’s transparency University Press Voxa white supremacy wives workers