Lou The Frog’s Reviews > The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil in Equatorial Guinea > Status Update

Liberalism's promises “have always been compromised by a variety of economic and social powers from white supremacy to capitalism. And liberal democracies in the First World have always required other peoples to pay . . . that is, there has always been a colonially and imperially inflected gap between what has been valued in the core and what has been required from the periphery” (51–52).

The contract forms I trace [...], specifically the ways in which they organize inequality, offer a productive glimpse into Mehta’s (1997) empirical puzzle, wherein “something about the inclusionary pre-tensions of liberal theory and the exclusionary effects of liberal practices needs to be explained” (59)

"Stoler (1989) writes that “colonial cultures were never direct translations of European societies planted in the colonies, but unique cultural configurations, homespun creations in which European food, dress, housing and
morality were given new political meanings in the particular social order of colonial rule” (136)"

"In other words, the offshore is
real. Its effects are real. It is not without friction; it is not the capitalist utopia
of placeless economic interaction."

To look at what, precisely, the US oil industry brings with it from place to place is to
look not only at the mobility of technical, legal, and infrastructural forms,but also at the mobility of segregation, white supremacy,16 gendered domesticity, and what Chatterjee (1993) has called “the rule of colonial difference,”

“A strongman president can make all the
necessary decisions. It’s a lot easier to win support from the top than to build it from the bottom. As long as we want cheap gas, democracy can’t exist”
(in Silverstein 2014, 7)

_Petroleum was like a life jacket for
the regime, an oxygen balloon to help it float. An oxygen balloon for dictatorship and a lead weight for democracy._