Matthew Shutzer

Primitive Accumulation and Environmental History: India’s Political Ecology of Coal

The acquisition of agricultural land for coal mining is a major source of political conflict and violence in contemporary India. As the world’s third largest producer of coal, India’s vast energy economy depends on everyday transactions with local communities involving the buying, selling, and forceful acquisition of coal-rich land. The ability of both private firms and the state to purchase coal for national auctions, or to speculate on the rising value of coal land, or to invest in greenfield coal developments entails the recognition of coal property as a tradeable asset. But how did coal property come to be recognized as such? This presentation explores the making of coal property as a legal concept in the aftermath of India’s first major coal commodity boom (1893 – 1908). Speculative investments in the export-led growth of coal during this period generated a crisis in regional land markets that revealed a fundamental absence within colonial law, namely, a legal categorization of coal property. While the financialized value of coal soared across India and the British Empire, its extraction entailed the exchange or forceful acquisition of land without any definable property claims in the commodity being sold. British and Indian jurists subsequently assembled a concept of coal property out these pressures of market exchange, embedding histories of dispossession, fraud, and violence within the sovereignty of law.