A new collection of essays fruitfully explores the interconnections of politics, technology and geography, taking perspectives away from the centres of imperial power, and revealing clearly the webs of imperial power

Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, that era appears as a distinct phase of imperialism beginning with the defeat of Germany and Japan at the end of World War II. It marked the protracted end of formal European colonial imperialism, but also the expansion of a new form of imperialism centred on the US, if not also on the USSR in opposition. This American empire is often claimed, not only by its avowed supporters, to be no such thing, or at least to be a new kind of non-territorial hegemony. The studies in Entangled Geographies repeatedly put paid to any such apologetics for empire, in the past or in its present. The developing mechanisms and dynamics of imperialism are given forensic treatment in various case studies, which each start from unusual and even neglected angles, giving, in a sense, a ‘neo-colonised’ view of empire and technopolitics.

The later term is glossed as ‘the strategic practice of designing or using technology to enact political goals’ (p.3). This is a usefully flexible definition which encourages analysis to capture the interactions of technological and resource-led pressures with wider political and strategic imperatives on the part of imperialism. Along the way, a number of the studies point towards the emergence of institutional and technocratic tendencies during the Cold War which reflect patterns of present-day international and imperialist structures, notably where ‘humanitarianism’ comes into play. Part of the interest of this book is indeed the implications it has for the continuity of the present phase of imperialism with the Cold War past.

The old canard that the United States is not an empire, because it does not exercise territorial control over large parts of the globe, is firmly brushed aside in the opening essay by Ruth Oldenziel, who looks at the centrality of island possessions in the projection of American power over the world. The island offers a highly flexible base which usefully could be framed as ‘politically empty’, and yet loaded with advanced technology systems. These, in almost hidden ways, underpinned the reach and depth of the American imperial system (p.24). Thus at the very moment of decolonisation, the United States was making use of a very large number of colonised islands whose people were politically invisible. Their territories were used to construct the global satellite systems, for example, that were linked to submarine warfare systems, as well as carrying extensive and important scientific and commercial applications (pp.27-9). Unlike larger territorial units of older empires, the use of small islands could be easily retracted or expanded, and transformed, according to need, and in this the US was actually following the lead set by British naval imperial strategy before it (p.15).

For that reason it is perhaps not an accident that the best known example, to a British audience, of this American imperialist strategy should be the islanders of Diego Garcia, who were expelled from their home by the UK government, effectively to make way for the American military. Diego Garcia, according to Oldenziel, has been ‘transformed into a mobile invasion kit to alleviate the military’s dependence on vast German and Korean style bases or politically unstable regimes (p.30). As technology and the demands of commerce change and develop, islands turn out to be highly effective ways of shifting the weight of American imperialism from one stance to another. Islands that were once coaling stations in the Pacific can be turned into ‘America’s exclusive tuna-processing zone’, while others become low-wage sites, exempt from US employment law, in ‘free-trade zones for the garment industry and transnational Internet companies’ (p.31).

Oldenziel connects the whole breadth of military, economic and political interests and strategies across several phases of the American empire in an illuminating and judicious argument. In so doing she shows the emptiness of those formulations which cast present-day American imperialism in terms of its ‘soft power’, or its ‘networked’ nature (Negri and Hardt for example), or as a ‘post-territorial empire of production and consumption’ (pp.33-4). Looked at from the vantage of its myriad colonised islands, this empire is highly territorial, while its military networks are closely connected to its commercial and industrial structures, to the point of interdependency.

Diego Garcia itself is a neat microcosm of imperial displacement in which one leading imperial power (Britain) is shunted into a junior position in relation to another (the US). Nonetheless the sub-imperialisms of Europe did not shut up shop, but rather found ways of transforming themselves in the era of decolonisation. Eventually the structures of ‘globalised’ neo-liberal capitalism emerged from those developments, and several essays here, without making overly grand claims, do effectively give detailed vignettes of how all that happened. One of the clearest in its implications is the account, by Donna C Mehos and Suzanne M Moon, of the Dutch firm HVA, founded in 1879 as a trade company. It became a plantation operator in the Dutch East Indies, survived World War II, and then had to adapt its business repeatedly after it was expelled from Indonesia in the late 1950s (pp.46-8). It became in the course of the decades an international agribusiness consultancy, moving from being embedded in particular locales to abstracting its skills and the nature of its business into a form of ‘portable’ knowledge.

There are several interesting threads here, not least in the story of how a first-world enterprise was able to negotiate its dominant position under conditions of colonialism into new forms of activity that, while increasingly divorced from direct production, still reproduce a position at the top end of the economic hierarchy within international agri-business. The technical aspect of the firm’s evolution is the aspect of the analysis that fits into the technopolitical theme. In the course of the company’s development, local, agricultural skill became translated into an abstract expertise, and thus into an internationally tradeable commodity. Also noteworthy is how the company was able to operate across the ‘capitalist’ and ‘socialist’ divide during these transformations. However, the really striking implication is how such neo-colonial economic forms appear rather bound up with what some have lauded as ‘weightless’ economies of information, and other such neo-liberal evasions.

However, the point of this essay is not so much the fascinating case study, as the parallel the authors are able to draw with the work of the United Nations’ aid programs, including the Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Health Organisation. The structure of expertise and organisation again became focused on the abstract ‘portability’ of skill rather than local knowledge. Along the way experts from Third World countries were incorporated into these international structures. Once again, it is possible to see here further implications for the ways in which imperialist hierarchies can in fact reproduce themselves in despite of formal decolonisation. Indeed the HVA was able to become, through its management skills, a partner for the World Bank, and so ‘the HVA became a player in the global technopolitics of aid (p.67).

The structures of international humanitarianism come in for careful but searching investigation at different points in *Entangled Geographies*. Another essay, which explicitly eschews political criticism, looks at the development of Médecins Sans Frontières, and its pre-packaged ‘kit’ system approach to technical capacity, which determines the organisation’s impact in particular contexts. This is thought-provoking in the way that it parallels tendencies revealed in other essays in the book. Taken together, what several of the discussions point towards is the way in which capitalism’s general tendency to commodify knowledge and expertise becomes reproduced at many levels and has definite consequences for the way in which ‘international’ bodies, whether commercial operations or ‘humanitarian’ ones, operate in practice.

MSF and the United Nations are humanitarian organisations of one kind, but other initiatives routinely claim humanitarian grounds and motivation for agendas which are more obviously and more closely part of the imperialist programme. Here the editor, Gabrielle Hecht, contributes a study of the South African nuclear programme, and how it fitted into the geographies of the Cold War. Apart from usefully puncturing some facile myths about the neatness of Cold War dilemmas, Hecht’s account points out whole layers of hypocrisies just from a few observations comparing South Africa’s position in the past to Iran’s in the present. The tensions and ambiguities of ‘non-proliferation’ competed with those imperatives demanding that ‘peaceful’ nuclear technology should be allowed to circulate. From the start also, nuclear technology was seen by de-colonised nations as a means to assert their independent stature, and so it remains, the only question now as then being which countries should be deemed ‘responsible’. South Africa was of course judged a responsible and crucially non-communist nation (p.88).

Part of the calculus on the nuclear issue was the importance of uranium, of course, and South Africa’s possession of considerable reserves of the mineral. The intersections of this issue, with the politics of anti-communism, de-colonisation and South Africa’s relations with Western powers, make for more than just a fascinating story. They highlight the way in which, however crucial resources and raw materials are to the strategies and agendas of power and imperialism, resource exigencies in themselves do not necessarily trump the overall strategic logic of imperial systems. Control of material resources is the key goal, but shifting geographies of power can make the means by which the United States, for example, secures satisfactory hegemony a kaleidoscopic game.

A similar lesson is revealed by Itty Abraham in the story of the princely state of Travancore, today the Indian state of Kerala, and its still-born attempt to remain outside the new state of India. The use of commodity resources for export might have made a regional independence possible. At the centre of this were the so-called rare earths, thorium in particular, which were just emerging as technologically important. Yet in a sense, possession of thorium actually inhibited the state elite from really pursuing an independence policy, since the rare earths were too important for the Indian state not to control. Ultimately it was important for the United States to feel secure that stable access to these resources would be guaranteed, which could not necessarily be achieved by a weaker state like Travancore than by a united India.

Political context can change everything, since here the really crucial variable was the overwhelming popular support for a united and democratic India. The idea of an autonomous princely state comes over as the pipe dream of Travancore’s local ruling class. Under different political and strategic circumstances, for example oil resources in the Bolivian province of Santa Cruz more recently, American imperial interests might look more favourably upon the desire of local elites for autonomy from a larger, and more democratic, entity.

This is not the only essay in this collection in which the power of the masses makes itself felt in the arenas of geopolitics and technopolitics. Interestingly, a few essays focus on the Soviet Union and its version of imperialism, producing convincing and thoughtful parallels with those cases seen from the point of view of the United States and its subordinates. It turns out that the Eastern European satellite states were able to use both the reality and possibility of social unrest as a bargaining chip in their technopolitical relationship with the Soviet Union, at the same time as nuclear technology helped to secure Soviet hegemony (see chapters six and seven in particular).

As always with a good collection of scholarly studies such as this, a brief review cannot discuss all of the contributions, each of which deserves notice. While all the chapters contribute to a larger exploration of the themes promised in the title of the book, the approaches and perspectives of different authors are various, and no definitive overall conclusions can be drawn. Nonetheless, the wide-ranging case studies explored here on their own, and as a whole, are undoubtedly fruitful. The collection shines a light on the complex webs of imperialism in those military and economic aspects bound together by the issues of technology and resources, which exercise deep but not absolute determinations upon the course of history.