SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The term ‘emerging market’ is widely used in popular and scholarly fields to simply indicate an empirical condition of economic improvement. For Indonesia, this affirmative investor label covers economic activities including cheap commodity extraction via the plantation and the mine for the world market, despite the expropriation and ecological ruin such extraction generates. This article connects this emerging market present with the colonial past by tracing how extractive spaces and relations have been produced over time with the help of investment capital. Developing the concept of ‘extractive investibility’ in historical colonial perspective, the analysis begins by tracing Dutch East India Company (VOC) era interventions and the establishment of the Cultivation System and plantation economies on Java and Sumatra by the Dutch colonial state. The article then documents how the brief ‘Third Worldism’ interlude meaningfully challenged these colonial extractive relations. The analysis ends by detailing how the emerging market label was explicitly conceived to replace the term ‘Third World’ and continues to function as a discursive idealisation which directs capital back toward extractive spaces.