Wow! eBook
Extractive Capitalism: How Commodities and Cronyism Drive the Global Economy
Author(s): Laleh Khalili (Author)
- Publisher: Verso
- Publication Date: August 26, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 208 pages
- ISBN-10: 183674028X
- ISBN-13: 9781836740285
Book Description
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.Whether it is 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 globalization is still low-cost labor and rapacious corporate control. Extractive capitalism is what made—and what maintains—our unequal world.
Editorial Reviews
Review
—Adam Hanieh, author of Crude Capitalism
“A brilliant explainer of how the world works.”
About the Author
An Iranian American, she received a BS in chemical engineering from the University of Texas and a PhD in political science from Columbia University. She was previously a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and a Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University, London. An internationally-renowned expert on the oil industry, global trade and geopolitics in the Gulf region with over 43,000 Twitter followers, Professor Khalili has worked as a consultant and an engineer and has written widely on globalization, capital and neocolonialism. She has written for the
Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times and Agence France-Presse and contributes regularly to London Review of Books.
