'Our land abounds in nature's gifts': Commodity frontiers, Australian capitalism, and socioecological crisis

Abstract

This thesis presents a history of the origins of capitalism on the continent of Australia. It begins from a contemporary conjuncture riven with socioecological crises that demand theoretical and historical explanation – a conjuncture of mass extinction, of collapsing ecosystems, of accelerating climatic change. From this vantage-point we look to theorise and historicise capitalism in Australia. Animating this history is our central research question: how have ‘commodity frontiers’ shaped the socioecology of Australian capitalism? This question brings the tools of historical materialism – especially in its eco-socialist and world-ecological forms – to bear on the historical origins of Australian capitalism, enabling an understanding of the production of nature and socioecological crisis in Australia. The argument begins from a definition of capitalism as a historically specific totality of socioecological relations: internally related processes of cheap nature, state formation, racialization, and gendered difference driven forward by the structuring power of the value form. These relations violently displaced extant Indigenous socioecologies, spreading across the landscape of Australia via the vehicle of ‘commodity frontiers.’ The thesis traces empirically the process of invasion, and the production of cheap nature through an incorporated comparison of three frontiers – wool, coal, and sugar. In exploring the internal relations of these frontiers through space and time we find them bound within the same totality, defined by dialectics of appropriation and exploitation, of crisis and expansion, of cheapness and of great cost. Put simply, the thesis grapples with the political and analytical challenge of the Capitalocene, and looks to contribute to its undoing through a retelling of the history of the invasion of this continent, and an apprehension of the nature of capitalism.