Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy

by Laleh Khalili

Essential reading for the Iran Crisis - what happens when the seas close, and oil stops flowing?

'Urgent and polemical' Financial Times

'A brilliant explainer of how the world works' Simon Kuper, author of Chums

'The real stuff of the economy - blood, dirt, oil and violence' Dan Davies, author of The Unaccountability Machine

'Profound and compelling ... A book that I couldn't put down' Adam Hanieh, author of Crude Capitalism

Whether it's pumping oil, mining resources or shipping commodities across oceans, the global economy runs on extraction. Promises of frictionless trade and lucrative speculation are the hallmarks of our era, but the backbone of globalisation is still low-cost labour and rapacious corporate control. Extractive capitalism is what made - and is still making - our unequal world.

Professor Laleh Khalili reflects on the hidden stories behind late capitalism, from seafarers abandoned on debt-ridden container ships to the nefarious reach of consultancy firms and the cronyism that drives record-breaking profits. Piercing, wry and constantly revealing, Extractive Capitalism brings vividly to light the dark truths behind the world's most voracious industries.

Genres: Economics, Politics, Nonfiction, History, Audiobook

203 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 26, 2025

About the author

Laleh Khalili is an Iranian American and Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. She was formerly a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

She graduated from University of Texas, and received her PhD from Columbia University. Her primary research areas are logistics and trade, infrastructure, policing and incarceration, gender, nationalism, political and social movements, refugees, and diasporas in the Middle East.

Reviews

[Ben · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somewhat disappointed by this one. It looks and advertises itself (in name and introduction) as an exploration into the exploitation underpinning resource extraction. In other words, as an account of the colonial and neocolonial policies of developed countries with respect to key resources like sand, iron ore, coal and oil. For the first ~50 pages you get an excellent account of exactly that.

The rest of the book proceeds to unwind this central thesis via a myriad of somewhat random case studies, seemingly added purely on the basis of the author's extensive knowledge in one matter or another, rather than in aid of a cohesive whole. At least that's how it felt. I don’t really understand how this was not flagged during the editing process.

Interestingly, I found the discussion of the book (https://www.patreon.com/posts/427-man...) much more effective at painting a more cohesive picture. I'd probably recommend just listening to that instead.

[Jooseppi Räikkönen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Definitely not what is advertised in the blurb but this was fun. Khalili has an excellent nose for juicy anecdotes.

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

First expectations of a book with a title like Extractive Capitalism might be that its subject will be the despoilation caused by industries like metal and mineral mining, oil drilling and the new appetite for plundering something called rare earths on the lands where these are found in relative abundance. The wreaking of the environment is certainly one of Khalili’s concerns but the extract that really keeps here awake at night centres on the more abstract concept of value, the extraction of which is measured by the growth of poverty and inequality among human populations.
The clue as to what the book about is really in the subtitle, which lists ‘commodities and cronyism’ as the drivers of the extractive process as well as the reason why things seem to be getting so much worse for so many of us. Carbon-based fossil fuels like coal and oil cause damage by increasing the rate of global warming. The plunder of rare earth minerals like gives rise to pollution from massive toxic waste, water and soil contamination from chemicals, habitat destruction, and ecosystem disruption.
But Khalili focuses in the main on how the value of the things needed to reproduce modern society is converted into income flows for investors and shareholders and from there into things like super yachts and privately-owned Caribbean islands. Moreover, this system of extraction also sucks legitimacy out of things like the rule of law, the operation of tax systems, and the ways in which democracy is supposed to operate for the benefit of the mass of people.
Her account of the ways in which corporate interests dominate the operation of trade traces the histories of oil production in Mexico, Iran and Saudi Arabia, where the assertion of sovereign rights over the resources in the territory of nation states have been contested by commercial arbitration panels which are biased in favour of the commercial conglomerates. Yes, bold measures like the nationalisation of a resource like oil has engendered pushback by governments, but often at the considerable of risk of incitement of trade blockades and internal coups, as seen in the overthrow of Mohammed Mussaddegh in Iran in 1953, and is being threatened in Venezuela at this present moment.
Circulating across the world in the form of commodities empowers financial interests to enter the market to grab their share of value. So-called futures markets endow the traders operating in their realm with the ability to make (and also lose) fortunes based on prices that might apply across the work at indefinite points in time to come. This was seen back in the days of the pandemic when the price of oil plummeted as countries withdrew from production processes. A group of traders based in Benfleet in Essex saw this as an opportunity to buy a rapidly depreciating asset and finds find cheap ways to store it in anticipation of the end of shut-downs and a return to full-steam-ahead. The result was a blitzed profit of $700 million, all magicked up in the frothy world of finance and none returning to the countries and workforces that had got the stuff out the ground in the first place.
As Khalili puts it, commercial contracts and financial devices are the new instruments of conquest, colonialisation and commodification. Whilst the benefits of global trade are innovatively snatched up by traders, the opacity of the wheeling and dealing creates amply opportunity for the liabilities arising from bad trades to be shucked off. Some of the more heartless examples of this come from the shipping trade, a business that remains lucrative as long as there is demand for its services and a workforce is on hand which has no choice but to endure a harsh work regime.
Every year hundreds of vessels are stranded at sea when owners declare bankruptcy, or just mysteriously vanish from their trading responsibilities. Ships are not able to proceed on any voyage until liabilities are sorted out and wages due to crews will be withheld for months, and often not paid at all. At times like this the real business of extraction is revealed, with phantom owners creaming off unimaginably profits, with the workers who dig or pump up the goods and transport them across oceans being abandoned to months of hardship and squalor, waiting for the miraculous moment when privileged owners are eventually made to pay their debts.
It’s not only an overheated planet polluted by toxic slagheaps which haunts our future prospects, but also a poverty-ridden, unjust, disfigured social and economic system which we are still being made to endure.

[Peter Wood · Rating 3 out of 5]

A description of how the wealthy rule the world.
Some of the book seemed quite muddled, making it hard work to read.
Apart from a list of books in a Selected Bibliography, there are no specific references (other than to a particular book now and then). However, I suspect many of the books in the Bibliography do - does that make the stories less true? Probably not, as I have read a number of other books that tell similar stories.

Is it worth reading?
It is short, and “illustrates” that political advantage, power and money trumps morals and ideology.

[Diane Bryden · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book provides examples of patterns of capitalism and extraction in different industries, especially shipping going back to the 17th century and up to today. This is a “big picture” kind of topic and it can be hard to wrap your head around this way of looking at things. Given that, it probably isn’t the easiest read. But if you enjoy history and have some familiarity with how capitalism functions economically, it offers some interesting insights on how these things work.

[Randy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It covers some history of the world, which might have been intentionally ignored nowadays, and does a pretty good job in that, even though this short volume doesn't allow extensive discussion. And I think there're a few factual errors, but this doesn't diminish the author's points.

[Emre Askelund · Rating 1 out of 5]

Traff ikkje meg. Mye oppramsing og informasjon om ting eg ikkje kan nok om

[T.O. Munro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an enjoyable, instructive and revealing excursion through some of capitalism's many dark corners. As I went from chapter to chapter I was struck by a slight sense of disconnect or butterfly attention in the varied focus of each chapter. In reading the acknowledgments I understood why, in that this is essentially a collection of previously published essays all addressing a theme of capitalism but written from very different directions.

As with other print books, I was obliged to capture some pithy observations by taking a picture on my phone and there were quite a lot of pithy and articulate observations, jostling alongside pictures of the holiday views and meals I had enjoyed while reading it.

Khalili's opening chapter naturally enough focusses on colonialism and the fact that the scramble for Africa in the 1800s was all about gaining control of valuable resources. She highlights how multinational corporations were some of the earliest tools of colonial control and perhaps none more so than the East India Company with its own military and navy which dominated India. Having read recently about Nigeria & Venezuela's experience of oil riches, compared to Norway's a key difference is how the colonies' resources were extracted and exploited by foreign capital to whom the profits and benefits of a massive natural resource accrued, while the european state could invest for the future of its citizens. [Thatcher in Britain followed an ironically more colonial approach than Norway, selling off everything to foreign powers and companies such that the RW cries to drill baby drill in the North Sea as an act of national energy self-sufficiency are utter BS. The products of further drilling would have no impact on our energy prices or supply.]

As Khalili notes By the end of the 1950s, 65% of the world's oil was controlled by oil companies headquartered in the US [who] paid a pittance for oil concessions that gave them effective sovereignty over not just other countries' resources, but also the political and socioeconomic policies that those countries enacted Using the bogey man of the communist threat, whenever a local leader stood up to try and claim some fair share of this largesse to support the local population, an unholy trinity of corporate overreach, CIA dark ops, and boots on the ground would overthrow democracy and install western friendly dictators as happened in Iran in the 1950s with the installation of the Shah and as - in an incompetent attempt to repeat history - Trump is trying with Iran and the Shah's descendent even now.

Khalili points out also how sand is another commodity, less valuable per tonne than oil, but still essential to our construction and electronics industries. I found it curious too how Khalili cites works of fiction like Cities of Salt which have tried to throw a light on the worst excesses of extractive industries. Having an interest in cli-fi or climate change fiction, there is perhaps an over arching genre of cap-fi (including Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and even Anna Sewell's Black Beauty) which look at the ways extreme capitalism - unfettered by morals or appropriate regulation - has wrought environmental and social ruin on the world.

One chapter looks at sea transport. She highlights Aristotle Onassis's shrewd move into the less labour intensive business of oil transport where pipes and pumps and machines elided the need for armies of potentially unionised stevedores emptying cargo holds. Indeed so much of modern capitalism from supermarket self-checkouts to AI seems to be about bypassing the troublesome complications of employing (and rewarding) people. Although capitalism with its obscence champions in Musk and Bevos seem to have given little thought to who the feck is going to buy this stuff when nobody is given the opportunity to earn money.

Staying with ships, Khalili writes about the awful conditions that many merchant vessel crews work in, hugely expensive vessels where flags of convenience are chosen precisely because of the lack of regulation and protection for crews some of whom can be stranded on the ships as complicated legal wranglings play out over ships and cargos. For example after the Ever Given blocked the Suez canal for some days, I didn't realise that once freed the ship was taken to a holding lake and kept there for months while the owners were sued for the loss of trade from canal traffic that those who ran the canal had incurred.

Khalili goes on to look at yachts, the ultimate rich man's plaything (until space rockets came along). The problem as we have seen with billionaires is that it is physically impossible for them to spend their wealth as quickly as the accumulate it so they just go on getting richer. Yachts represent one way to try and spend their riches as fast as they accrue them (Note I won't say 'earn them'). Apparently Alisher Usmanov's yacht is so luxurious it has two helipads and a room where snow machines can produce four inches of the white stuff on demand!

Another chapter resonates particularly in the light of Peter Thiel is running a secretive conference of ultra wealthy people looking at a variety of interests including artificial islands, surving word war 3 and other means to barricade themselves against the social, political and environmental consequences of positioning oneself at the apex of the pyramid of toxic inequality. Khalili notes that Billionaires have always been keen to escape from the hoi polloi: to heavily securitised compounds, private islands, exclusive ranches... As long ago as 1919, the Russian revolutionary Nickolai Bukharin diagnosed this tendency as being caused by 'the fear of impending social catastrophes.'

Further on, Khalili writes about how general McChrystal transition from an army career into a management consultant career with the implicit understanding that gung-ho military machismo is a good model for business leadership. One could also note how some politicians carve out post-political careers built on fame and dubiously transferrable skills (cough)Tony Blair(cough).

Management consultancy in general, and McKinsey in particular, some in for some sharp criticisms with vision and outside perspectives being lauded over pragmatism, and expertise. As Khalili eviscerates McKinsey's deep involvement in the government of the Blair era, it rang horribly true to my own lived professional experience.

As an education adviser in Kent I saw the implementation of 'building schools for the future' where the philosophical thrust was to be avant garde and new. Future schools would not have classrooms or walls, facilitators not teachers would manage classes of 60 or 90 in large open plan spaces working as team assisted by technology. Progress in schools involved embracing this vision even though, almost as soon as the schools were opened, desperate teachers were making artificial walls out of filing cabinets in a desperate bid to define spaces in which the children could actually hear what they were being asked to do.

Alongside this came the spectre of PFI - private finance initiative. Schools were not built or owned by the council, they were owned by companies who rented them to schools and charged £50 or so for the company employed caretaker to change a light bulb or put up a display board. Always to my mind with capitalism, is that if the private sector is doing something, the private sector expects to make a profit and that profit is being paid for by taxpayers or service users.



Khalili also looks at the bizarre city plan of Neom - an intended 170km long pair of parallel buildings the height of the Empire State building. Tbh it sounds as shite as the vision for BSF and unsurprisingly the idea has been too crazy to attract investors for more than a 2.4 km length. As Khalili notes Many of the promised features involve subtracting ordinary humans from the social equation. Robot maids and self-flying taxis won't organise a union, and hologram faculty won't give children any revolutionary ideas.

The problem with wealth is that it is sticky (as Pratchett effectively noted in Commander Vimes reflection on boots). If you have a lot of wealth you attract and accumulate more wealth, if you have little then you have to spend it all just to survive. Extractive capitalism accelerates this tendency for wealth to accumulate at the top in a process that the xylem transport of a giant redwood can only dream of. My own worry is that, once corporations have control opf materials and resources, they will move on to acquire control of land and people in deregulated 'investment zones' 'free ports' and other means of syphoning public cash and state subsidies into corporate pockets, until - like The Shine in Claire North's magnificent Slow Gods we are all owned - or we all rebel!

[John Keith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Such a shame it was a bit muddled, switching and changing to air personal grievances with some useful facts. Lacking a conclusion as well, found this frustrating as the topic is ever more relevant in these murky Trumptonian times.
This would have made a great first rough draft which with better editing could deliver the much needed hammer blow to the 1% who control and exploit the world and the economy.

[Tom Lewandowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Felt more like a collection of essays than a unified narrative. Nonetheless a useful compilation of stories of the corrupt way that western companies and countries stripmine the world for resources

[Matthew Gibb · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a really brief book,so one cannot expect to learn a great deal about oil and so-called clean energy in depth. Nevertheless,the chapters are short and can be quickly read or listened to. What's funny is how to writer references much better,longer books and perhaps I'll read the book,The Have and Have Yachts,which makes the world's asymmetry and how it benefits just a few people a little bit clearer. The chapter about how the US took the Chagos Islands,which are just below the Maldives for bird guano and later oil palm was totally new to me. Diego Garcia is the name given to the US military base there seems to harken back to Spanish colonization. Another chapter titled,Hell on Earth,is about how Saudi Arabia is spending a trillion dollars to build an ultra-modern city,which is sometimes called the Line,since it is long and straight called Neom.These three stories are at the middle of this book,which could have been much more,but instead merely introduces a few interesting ideas without ever getting into more satifying depth.

[Anya Kuteleva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Extractive Capitalism is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in how commodity markets and political connections shape the global economy. At its best, the book is genuinely illuminating — certain chapters offer sharp, well-researched analysis that left me with a much clearer understanding of how resource wealth gets captured, concentrated, and corrupted. I came away from those sections having actually learned something, which is the highest compliment you can pay a book like this.

That said, the book struggles with cohesion. It reads less like a unified argument and more like a collection of loosely related essays — because, it turns out, that's essentially what it is. The recycled-article/lectures origins are hard to miss: the tone shifts, the framing resets, and the same groundwork gets re-laid more than once. If you've read Khalili's work, some of this will feel familiar.

Worth picking up for the strong individual chapters, but don't expect a tightly woven narrative from cover to cover.

[Jay Bridget · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author is clearly knowledgeable, and the references to different books, the importance of certain commodities, and machinations of private equity and commoditiy trading were all interesting. I wanted to like this book, However, this reads like an undergraduate essay, there's no sources cited (just a selected bibliography at the end), the narrative jumps around with unclear direction, and the conclusion was so abrupt and forgive me but non-conclusioney that it felt like it was missing pages.

I've listened to interviews with her and they were great, almost feels like this was written by a different person. Really surprised at Verso or whoever edited this. Would only recommend for looking at the selected bibliography at the end.

[ashe · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would side more with a 3.5 rating for this book as it met my expectations on the topic and more.

Khalili brings to light the history of extractive capitalism; how it began, how it was made to continue, and where we can see it going. For the most part, I found it interesting to see what had been, and still is, considered an extractive resource. The book speaks most to coal, oil, sand, and human labor as being some of the most sought resources.

Khalili’s musings and anecdotes helped make the conversation in the book personal and relatable. It also assists in the realization of how bad the economic impact is on the planet.

[Richard Marney · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author argues that the global economy is fundamentally shaped by the relentless extraction of commodities, labour, and data, which enriches a tiny elite while devastating communities and the environment. She traces how colonial histories, financial engineering, and military power enable this system, using vivid stories—from oil tankers and sand mafias to stranded seafarers—to expose its hidden workings. Ultimately, the book is an urgent call to recognize and resist the ruthless logic that prioritizes profit above all else.

[Samoyes · Rating 1 out of 5]

This take a macro level view of extractive capitalism with a focus on shipping and containerisation. However, there was too far of an assumption of previous knowledge on matters for this to be a good read. I needed more explanation in order to really enjoy this and glean a full understanding of the topic.

[Johannes S · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am fond of Khalili as a writer, this collection of essays is a look into global flows of commodities and their ruthless extraction. Though I would say it's a collection of vignettes that one shouldn't expect too much from. In themselves each chapter highly readable, it's a quick and easy read all in all.

[Mate Veres · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thi book represents an improvement over her previous work, Sinews of War and Trade. However, it ultimately reads as a collection of disparate case studies examining economic exploitation by certain elites across various global contexts. The book lacks a cohesive analytical framework or clear thesis, leaving me questioning the actual purpose of this book.

[nin. · Rating 3 out of 5]

i didn’t really understand the way the book was structured.

[Tyler Wilding · Rating 1 out of 5]

Desperately needs more editing and focus. Some anecdotes were interesting but otherwise a surface-level critic of capitalism. Didn’t finish the last third.

[Wesley Edits · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good information people should read about but the book itself is a bit disjointed.

[Frieda Strachan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A depressing read so hard to enjoy, despite being very thorough and timely.

[Miles Xavier · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very middling book; quite surfactory. While somewhat pointed at times, it lacks any cohesive depth. Reads as almost a book of introductory paragraphs. Meh.

[Selah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not what I was expecting; this book was more a collection of various entertaining essays than a cohesive project criticizing the system of extractive capitalism. Nonetheless, a fun and easy read.

[Julian Pritchard · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are a lot of interesting ideas in this book but they aren't necessarily explored in enough depth. I'd be interested in reading her other work.

[V · Rating 3 out of 5]

Inledningsvis riktigt bra och med spännande perspektiv på nuvarande världsläget med olja/naturresurser/usa/iran/israel osv, men lite för anekdotisk och lång.