Few concepts capture the conundrum of these capitalocenic times as well as “away”, and plantations are a classic example. Though predating European colonialism, it was in the 15th century that the logic of the plantation – geared toward the proliferation of sameness – “crystallised into a coherent way of organising the world”1. Plantations enabled the mass production of tropical cash crops, to be exported to metropoles for processing and reexported to the colonies at profit. These plantations operated through alienation: of land, through violent dispossession and enclosure; of labour, through the extraction, trafficking and enslavement of Africans; and of resources, e.g., monoculture of nonnative species like eucalyptus. From this vantage point, plantations emerge less as a deforestation-combatting panacea, and more as figures that embody the alienating and destructive logic of capitalist extraction, proliferation and accumulation, which histories of colonialism facilitated, and continue to vitalise and sustain.
These pre- or pericapitalist2 systems of production depended vitally on the spatial deferment that developments in maritime and military technology brought. It opened up an ‘outside’ or ‘away’ to the world of Europeans, which could be farmed, mined, or extracted, for the economic benefit of a Europe blighted by an agrarian crisis, desperate for both land and labour. The proliferation of plantations from the 15th century created a model for European colonisation and set the scene for the emergence of global capitalism and its trade in commodities3. As both pre- and prefiguratively capitalist, they are projects in the worldly-deterritorialisation of some and reterritorialization of others; that is, one other, imbuing it (the West) with the power to gobble up the Rest4. This model was constitutive to the rise of a new economic order that continues to this day, laying the political-economic foundations for the extraction of resources from newly colonised lands and the accumulation of wealth into European hands.
Outsides were produced in the image of the plantation, whose spatiotemporal, technical, social and economic form would become the model for European colonisation, and the monocultural, productivity, and, crucially, (ontologically-)Severed logic of the capitalist system built in its image, with the blood of slaves, indigenous, peasants and other ‘sub’ or nonhuman beings. They speak to the unevenly distributed and felt consequences of capitalist production. “Away” points to the spatial or temporal deferment/relocation of unsightly, unsound or otherwise unbecoming (for the producer) kinds of practices or forms of production. Often this means a poorer country with laxer environmental legislation. “Aways” are actively constructed by certain kinds of exploitative and extractive production systems to feed urban and/or (neo)colonial centres of demand, and are done so in marginalised places with the smallest reserves of social, economic or political capital5. They are also what make supply chains possible.
The Tree with a Thousand Faces 