Ecological Imperialism Redefined: Imperial Strategies of Ecologically Unequal Exchange

Although more or less intuitively based notions of “unequal exchange” or “exploi­tation” are common in the social-science literature, particularly within the para­digm of world-systems analysis, attempts to analytically define such concepts tend to be flawed and confusing.^[1109] However, if empires through world history have in­deed been oriented toward “enrichment through expansion,” there is every reason to carefully consider if and how they have been engaged in unequal exchange with their conquered territories.

Predictably, the concept of unequal exchange makes little sense to mainstream economists, whose focus on monetary exchange values (prices) generally implies inattention to other metrics (e.g., energy, materials, embodied labor time, embodied land) by means of which an inequality of exchange might be assessed. Similarly, be­cause economists tend to understand “capital” as abstract monetary wealth rather than material infrastructure, it is difficult for them to see the relevance of positing an unequal exchange of material resources (including labor, which is actually a form of energy) that contributes to the accumulation and maintenance of capital. Discussions of unequal exchange have thus generally been confined to schools of thought concerned with finding non-monetary perspectives on resource flows, pri­marily Marxist and ecological economics.^[1110] In these discussions, unequal exchange has generally been conceptualized as the deviation of prices from “values” in inter­national trade, generating an asymmetric (net) transfer of value between different segments of society (generally nations). The underpaid value has been defined in terms of either embodied labor or embodied energy. Such “physicalist” definitions of value, however, are difficult to reconcile with what social and cultural theory has to say about the semiotics of consumption.

These considerations clearly have relevance for the study of largely mercan­tile empires such as the Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, and British, where par­ticular constellations of consumer preferences were intertwined with material processes of capital accumulation. In other words, the transoceanic trade in goods such as spices, sugar, tea, and beaver pelts yielded monetary profits that could be invested in more ships, armies, and ultimately factories. The accumulation of such infrastructures through market transactions clearly entailed asymmetric flows of timber, foodstuffs, ores, and other resources that could be approximated in terms of unequal exchange, but to approach such flows in terms of underpaid “values,” dissociated from the actual preferences of market actors, would lead nowhere. To demonstrate that a given pattern of market transactions entails a systematically un­equal exchange of embodied land or labor time can help to account for the accu­mulation of capital, but rather than proposing that land or labor is underpaid, it will suffice to show that market prices function as an ideology of reciprocity that mystifies such asymmetries.

In turning from mercantile to ancient tributary empires with little or no market institutions, we need to ask to what extent the accumulation of capital can be viewed as the product of (unequal) “exchange”: Can labor and resources appropriated through tribute at all be said to be exchanged? Although concepts of unequal ex­change have been developed to expose asymmetries in trade masked as market reci­procity, the underlying (and wider) notion of exploitative, net transfers of resources must obviously include tribute as well.