Palm oil is a commodity like no other. Found in half of
supermarket products, from food to cosmetics to plastics, it has
shaped the world in which we live.
In
Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, Max Haiven tells a sweeping
story that touches on everything from empire to art, from war to
food, and from climate change to racial capitalism. By tracing the
global history of this ubiquitous elixir we see how capitalism
creates surplus populations: people made dependent on capitalist
wages but denied the opportunity to earn them - a proportion of
humanity that is growing in our age of racialized and neo-colonial
dispossession.
Inspired
by revolutionary writers like Eduardo Galeano, Saidiya Hartman,
C.L.R. James and Rebecca Solnit, this kaleidoscopic and experimental
book seeks to weave a story of the past in the present and the
present in the past.