Palm Oil: the Grease of Empire by Max Haiven (assessment)

Haiven, Max. 2022. Palm Oil: the Grease of Empire. London: Pluto Press.

Initially of the nineteenth century, palm oil – the generic time period for the totally different oleaginous substances derived from the African Oil Palm Elaeis guineensis – was solely simply changing into fascinating to European merchants. However by the early twentieth century, colonial botanists posted to West Africa have been changing into intensely involved with discovering the number of the oil palm that might supply the very best yield, and thus the very best income, for this crop that had change into central to the economic revolution. However whereas native customers had complicated and systematic naming techniques which rigorously encoded the properties of various types of Elaeis guineensis, these have been thought-about a hindrance by colonial scientists. The (British) Assistant Conservator of Forests for the jap province of Nigeria concluded in a report:

“The names given by the native to palm fruits are most unreliable; at totally different durations of improvement or ripeness of the fruits distinctive names are given them.”

There was thus little recognition by the British that naming techniques in Igbo or Efik would possibly reveal the knowledge that colonisers have been searching for, and but on the identical time their data was rigorously recorded by colonial botanists, whose scientific experiments ended up revealing exactly what native producers had recognized all alongside: probably the most processable palm selection was a sterile hybrid. After additional complicated encounters which have constructed on this data over the previous hundred years, the palm in its super-productive kind has taken over landscapes throughout Southeast Asia – the place the business has constructed on techniques of unfree labour and the infrastructures that colonisers had already put in place for rubber.

Conflicting epistemologies have been thus thrust into co-existence via this one encounter-amongst-many. Whereas native types of data have been concurrently derided and stolen, their repurposing within the type of colonial science later grew to become central to how palm oil, in its highest yielding kind, has been in a position to infiltrate markets at a world scale.

At the moment the oil palm is the very best yielding oil crop ever recognized to exist. As my opening instance exhibits, nonetheless, this actual fact is because of complicated and localised histories and encounters: inspecting the historical past of this crop present the way it was by no means inevitable that palm oil would take the shape it does as we speak. Historian of palm oil Jonathan Robins argues that “nothing within the ecology or economics of the oil palm created violence; as a substitute the arrival of the oil palm business uncovered the tensions and injustices already current in rural communities. Whether or not oil palm functioned as a instrument for improvement or for oppression hinged on native and nationwide histories, not on world political actors and financial forces”. Oil palms have been made into what they’re as we speak in Southeast Asia and all over the world via technical, political, and financial means which might be extremely domestically particular, entangled with numerous lives, environments, histories and materials circumstances.

But regardless of this specificity, the bodily proliferation and the constructions of inequality that so usually accompany palm oil are additionally very a lot a world phenomenon. It’s made low-cost by an extended historical past of environmental and human abuses which have taken comparable types all over the world. Its frequent cultivation in monocrop plantation kind continually reproduces the violence and “persistent poverty” that has been theorised concerning different plantation contexts all over the world, during which employee’s our bodies are commodified and rendered disposable, their lives and tales seemingly inconsequential.

In his latest e-book, Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, Max Haiven explores this means of how palm oil emerged on the intersection of capitalism and colonialism, creating the inequalities and associated types of environmental destruction that characterise the palm oil business as we speak. He argues that via tracing the story of palm oil, we will come to know capitalism as a “type of human sacrifice”. This can be a kind that “defines itself”, coming to itself masks the causes of its personal destruction, making deaths from publicity to poisons, overwork, abuse, and poverty – all of that are related to oil palm labour – appear as if they’re “in some way unintentional, incidental, or inevitable”. Most significantly, he factors out the racialising results of this. Haiven attracts on secondary literature on the oil palm to construct his case, as he himself, has in reality by no means seen an oil palm (as he states within the e-book).

The political goals of the e-book are laudable, convincing, and pressing. We hear in depth about how palm oil might now kind a part of the lives of incarcerated males within the USA (largely African Individuals), who come to depend on prompt ramen noodles for his or her sustenance – and as a type of resistance – within the face of insufficient jail meals provision. But the paper on which Haiven depends to narrate this story in reality makes no point out of palm oil. Haiven as a substitute asserts that it’s “possible” that these noodles contained palm oil—which certainly it in all probability is—however this implies whereas we’re informed that palm oil is possible necessary to this story of capitalism and colonial and up to date racialised energy and abuse, readers might wish to ask extra about why, or how this got here to be. Native vignettes drawn from secondary literature, moderately than being generative, as a substitute change into subsumed by broader assertions concerning very world processes during which the place of palm oil itself stays unclear.

That is mirrored within the e-book’s reliance on statements concerning each palm oil and capitalist energy as magical, uncanny, and cosmological on the expense of inspecting what might have in reality been extremely localized encounters between coloniser and colonised. Processes of magic could also be of relevance, however so would have been (and are) the on a regular basis moralities, pressures, encounters, needs, that rubbed alongside technical developments elsewhere, epistemologies from different locations, and entrenched financial and political energy, violence, and types of management that weren’t summary however extremely grounded.

Although Haiven’s pressing linkages between capitalism, colonialism, and palm oil are the power of the e-book, the reader might generally really feel that they miss the subtleties of the human tales which might be central to the story. This units the e-book in distinction to different latest volumes on the oil palm. Sophie Chao, for instance, presents detailed ethnographic circumstances that draw their theories concerning the oil palm as an entity from the lives and dilemmas of each affected Indigenous Marind communities in West Papua, and staff within the Indonesian palm oil sector. Journalist Jocelyn Zuckerman takes us via extremely numerous contexts during which palm oil is discovered, however centres her work on first hand archival and investigative analysis. And Jonathan Robins, in his definitive quantity The Oil Palm, permits his theories of this substance to develop from his complete accounts of how the oil palm has been made by human actors with numerous goals all through its historical past.

Thus, though Haiven situates his work alongside that of anthropologist Anna Tsing, their work is extremely distinct. Tsing, focuses on how friction characterises “world connection” in what she calls “zones of awkward engagement”. In her phrases: “common claims don’t really make all the things all over the place the identical”, and although capitalism, science, and politics all depend on claims to and goals of universality, in reality they’ll “can solely be enacted within the sticky materiality of sensible encounters”. Feminist approaches to understanding capitalism have urged the identical, being “involved with the means and mechanisms—the very processes of technology—via which techniques and socialities are made”.

Haiven, alternatively, is worried with how palm oil would possibly as a substitute—in “greasing the wheels of empire”—have “overcome friction”. Thus we’re left not with tales of native frictions and encounters however as a substitute with universalising narratives. In distinction with Haiven’s said goals of difficult how capitalism (and the types of human sacrifice it engenders) is made to appear inevitable by the system itself, the e-book thus might danger making the method of palm oil’s entanglement with capitalist endeavors appear extra inevitable than ever.

In a story that centres magic and cosmology, there may be little room for understanding how and why, for instance, palm oil as we speak defies the notions of centre and periphery that so usually characterise universalising claims about capital, as a very powerful latest centres of consumption are usually not within the “West” however in India and China. We might miss how and why, for instance, staff within the palm oil sector in Indonesia would possibly categorical violent types of love for his or her seedlings, or how or why Indigenous communities navigate their emotions of pity for the oil palm, the subtleties of the dilemmas expressed by palm oil boycotters, or the managerial and authorized means by which unfreedom is and was ruled on Indonesian plantations.

When the intertwinings of palm oil, colonialism, and capital are articulated as all-encompassingly cosmological, we’re left questioning what occurs within the gaps of such narratives: why makes an attempt by Europeans to introduce the palm to Malaysia might have failed at one time, and succeeded in others, the position Nigerian naming techniques performed in growing palm oil science in Malaysia, or how in Brazil a substance that was part of the subjugation of enslaved peoples additionally grew to become a instrument for his or her survival and resistance. As Sophie Chao places it, there’s a danger of “idea assert[ing] mental mastery over the messiness of on a regular basis, lived lives”.

And so Haiven’s narrative provocatively leaves its readers with questions. To my thoughts, the first query is methodological: how can the broader structural narratives of capitalism and colonialism—the ability and devastation of which Haiven rightly centres—be made to co-exist with extra grounded and localised tales during which the frictions which might be constitutive of those energy constructions are made and remade? How can one come to know palm oil as at all times each native and world, with out providing primacy to at least one and diminishing the opposite?