Settler Capitalist Frontiers

This chapter shows how writing from the early colonial period registers the extractive relationship between land and people on which the emerging capitalist world-ecology relied. The chapter moves through two distinct historical and narrative stages where the first is the settler colonial text that, from the very beginning, narrated ecology as an emergency-inducing space that needed to be violently combatted, and the second the white pro-slavery and abolitionist text that registered slavery and the plantation as central to the growing US economy, but also as drivers of human and ecological exhaustion.