A/HRC/41/54 secured commercial expansion across Africa, 21 at the core of which was extractivism. The natural resources extracted from the African colonies supplied the colonial centres with the raw materials, minerals and food that the European powers needed to accumulate capital and fuel their development. 22 African colonial extractivism also featured mass land dispossessions, environmental destruction and the exploitation of non-white labour using indentured servitude and enslavement. 23 24. Similar dynamics occurred over the course of colonial intervention in South-East Asia. As with Latin America, European colonization of South-East Asia began in the sixteenth century and continued through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. European powers set up several extractivist systems in South-East Asia. For example, the Dutch created a cultivation system that compelled Javanese villagers to produce export crops for the colonial Government.24 One account holds that colonial intervention in South-East Asia left a legacy of domestic economies stratified into two largely insulated parts: a modern, export-oriented enclave and a large, backward and stagnant agricultural sector. 25 25. At the heart of European colonial domination, first in the Americas and then in Asia and Africa, was the concept of race as “a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to others”.26 Colonialism consolidated “race and racial identity as instruments of basic social classification”27 and made the former “the fundamental criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, places, and roles in the new [colonial] society’s structure of power”. 28 For centuries, colonialism justified and relied upon brutal regimes of slavery and then indentured servitude to establish and sustain transnational extractivist processes in exploitation and settler colonies. In the settler-colonial territories of the Americas and Australia, indigenous extermination and land dispossession formed part of this picture, and indigenous peoples and people of African descent were commodified to ensure the supply of cheap labour. In African and Asian exploitation and settler colonies, Europeans murdered, forcibly displaced and indentured, all to ensure their economic prosperity. As European colonialism oversaw global capitalist expansion, the racial ordering it produced to achieve and sustain this expansion meant that “both race and the division of labor remained structurally linked and mutually reinforcing”. 29 This structural encoding of the racialized division of labour remains a defining feature of the global extractivism economy, in which labour remains racially stratified.30 26. The preceding analysis focuses on racialized labour in colonial extractivism, but race and racial ordering permeated the global capitalist order, privileging the political, economic and cultural interests of Europeans and imposing them on colonized peoples and territories. 31 The overwhelming material and social benefits of the colonial extractivism economy accrued along racial lines. One scholar makes the point, for example, that “slavery, in America, was deliberately established and organized as a commodity in order 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 See Mathew Craven, “Between law and history: the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 and the logic of free trade”, London Review of International Law, vol. 3, No. 1. See, e.g., Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1997). Ibid. At its peak, the cultivation system provided over one third of Dutch government revenues and 4 per cent of GDP. See Melissa Dell and Benjamin A. Olken, “The development effects of the extractive colonial economy: the Dutch cultivation system in Java”, Review of Economic Studies, forthcoming. See Douglas S. Paauw and John C.H. Fei, The Transition in Open Dualistic Economies: Theory and Southeast Asian Experience (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1973). Anibal Quijano and Michael Ennis, “Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism and Latin America”, Nepantla: Views from the South, vol. 1, No. 3, p. 533. Ibid., p. 534. Ibid., p. 535. Ibid., p. 538. See, e.g., Hannah Appel, The Licit Life of Capitalism: U.S. Oil in Equatorial Guinea (Durham, Duke University Press, forthcoming), chap. 4. Quijano and Ennis, “Coloniality of power”, p. 540. 7