The United States was drawn into the Iran-Iraq Tanker War to deter and respond to attacks on international shipping in the Persian Gulf. In July 1987, the United States launched Operation Earnest Will (1987–1988) to provide naval convoy protection for international shipping. The USS Samuel B. Roberts struck an Iranian mine in April 1988 while returning from escorting a convoy through the central Persian Gulf. The United States destroyed Iranian warships and derelict oil platforms being used by Iranian forces as surveillance positions and to mount attacks on international shipping. The operations also led to the Oil Platforms Case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which addressed the legal principle of self-defense and freedom of navigation. The final judgment in 2003 challenged US attribution of the attacks to Iran and delivered a restraining definition of self-defense that the United States has not accepted. The Court found that the United States had not provided sufficient evidence to demonstrate that the Iranian oil platforms were directly involved in attacks on US or neutral shipping.

Phosphorus mining has devastated Indigenous lifeways on the Pacific Islands of Nauru, Banaba, and the Republic of Kiribati. This chapter explains why the colonial impact of phosphate mining and contemporary planetary concerns over food security must attend to how Indigenous peoples were severed from their ways of knowing and relating to lands and waters through western economic and cultural imposition. It situates the planetary boundaries and efforts in global food security with respect to achieving restorative futures that do not reproduce logics of violence and dispossession. Using materials and images from a recent exhibition, the chapter challenges us to think anew about how stories of phosphate circulate beyond academic appraisals or scientific assessments, and among families and communities to whom justice is owed.

This chapter offers a close reading of Chapter 5 of Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Its primary focus is the two new characters Heinrich meets: an old miner and a hermit. The miner embodies a poetic way of seeing nature as an interconnected whole that gives expression to the presence of the divine. The hermit embodies a poetic way of seeing history in a parallel way, in which past and future are joined together in a spiritual present. Heinrich witnesses how their conversation converges on poetry as the higher power that unites nature and history, giving him a first glimpse of his own vocation.

Roman armies entered Iberia at the end of the third century BCE and conquered the Carthaginians. Nonetheless, it required two centuries to bring what they called Hispania into the Roman orbit, due to the difficult terrain and the resistance of many local populations. Once established, the Romans brought considerable benefits to the inhabitants, including roads, bridges, aqueducts, the Latin language, law, and civic and cultural enhancements such as theaters, all of which left lasting traces into the present. They also converted to Christianity. As the Roman Empire faded in power, barbarians including the Visigoths invaded its borders. The Visigoths eventually arrived in Hispania and established their rule at the end of the sixth century, but they were overwhelmed by Muslim invaders from North Africa in the early seventh century. Nonetheless, although they left few traces of their own way of life, they preserved much of the Roman legacy.

One of the targets related to Sustainable Development Goal 12: Responsible Consumption and Production is to achieve sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources. Minerals are an important one of these resources. The demand for mining on land and in frontier territories, such as the deep seabed and outer space, presents vast challenges for international regulation. Mining faces local opposition, and its entire chain of production increases the material footprint on the environment. This chapter examines how the international regulation of mining has evolved in the 50 years since the 1972 Stockholm Conference and the extent to which international policy and law have reduced the environmental and other impacts of mining in a broad sense. This examination of the difficulties associated with the international regulation of mining provides an illustrative case of the legal complexities related to achieving sustainable production and consumption.

In this chapter it is argued that mines and quarries were part and parcel of economic activities in the countryside by non-state actors. Archaeological, legal and inscriptional sources are mustered in support of this argument.

This chapter describes the evolution of the mining sector in Rwanda, both its domestic mining sector and in relation to the trade of minerals from the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Trading minerals from mineral-rich Eastern DRC has benefited Rwanda’s domestic economy through providing access to foreign exchange revenues. However, dependence on minerals from the DRC has been a double-edged sword. While providing significant revenues and being central to national security interests, increased reliance on the DRC contributes to the empowerment of individual business and military elites that may later become threats to the RPF’s ruling coalition. The RPF has transformed the domestic minerals sector with increased investments in geological investigations, as well as significant increases in domestic production. Dynamics in the domestic minerals sector mirror the elite vulnerability characterising other sectors. Though individual elites initially benefited from privatisation efforts, there is increased reliance on government-owned firms (like Ngali) for its most ambitious upgrading strategies. Attempts at beneficiation have been impeded by difficulties in developing effective domestic state–business relationships and challenges in centralising control over supply chains.

How did Victorian authors conceive of the rise of an extraction-based society? This chapter looks to the literary archive for early impressions of industrial mining’s wider social significance. Thanks to the new role of fossil fuels in nineteenth-century industry, the Victorian period saw a massive acceleration of mining in terms of the depths plumbed and volumes extracted. Mining operations in Britain and overseas were becoming a source of wide public attention at this time as the economy and culture shifted toward those of an extraction-based society, one grounded in the extraction of finite underground materials. This chapter explores the depiction of extraction in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1843 protest poem “The Cry of the Children,” Joseph Skipsey’s 1878 poem “Mother Wept,” Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations, and William Jevons’s 1865 study The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines.

This chapter reads images of capital’s bloodsucking thirst in works of Mozambican literature as an aesthetic registration of the destructive impact of capitalist extractivism upon the life and land of southern Africa. Focusing on Noémia de Sousa’s poem ‘Magaíça’ (1950) and Orlando Mendes’s novel Portagem (1966), it argues that writers have turned to spectral motifs and gothic devices as a figural means of coming to terms with the historical legacy of migrant labour in the political economy of colonial Mozambique. This cross-border economic system subordinated the interests of the Portuguese settlers to the imperatives of capitalist accumulation in neighbouring South Africa, at the same time as it ensured the continuing immiseration of the colonised population. Mobilising an aesthetics of vampirism and spectrality, Mozambican texts have limned a world-gothic critique both of the local history of semi-proletarisnisation in the country, and of the insertion of the region of southern Africa into the global circuits of (post-)colonial capitalism.

The Introduction locates transparency in the global governance of agriculture and mineral supply chains. It proposes an analytical focus on the mediations of transparency to tackle the paradox of transparency, a process of mediation that incorrectly understands itself to be a process of disintermediation. This helps to investigate transparency beyond the normative and substantive assessment of its implementation. Rather than assuming that transparency is itself transparent, we ask: What are the technological practices, material qualities, and institutional standards producing transparency? How is transparency standardized, regimented by “ethical” and “responsible” businesses, or valued by traders and investors, from auction rooms to sustainability reports? Acknowledging that transparency is a global value, we question how transparency projects materially organize and semiotically regiment the global production and circulation of commodities across local settings. Focusing on moments and processes of mediation toward disclosure, immediacy, trust, and truth, we introduce how the chapters render transparency observable across sites, actors, institutions, and technologies.