Embodied Experience shows how literature reveals and heals binary structures which debase women and matter. Its ethical materialism affirms that literary belongings matter, and that it matters when characters sensuously connect to these things and to the knowledge they harbor. Delving into literature’s thing-life archaeologically, it finds characters digging deep into things, finding them radiant and baffling – only to begin again: this is the fluid story of belonging with. In quarrying things, the book benefits from Spinoza’s Ethics, especially his idea that there is joy in activity and that, in striving to live, one lives virtuously. Thus, female characters who embrace their bodies and mind as one also claim the right to vitality and ethics without having to sacrifice energy and volition. These archaeological journeys highlight how the authors discussed themselves initiate a theory and praxis of human–nonhuman camaraderie that embodies belonging with, and Embodied Experience suggests that readers should emulate them in discovering these prismatic interrelations.

This chapter operationalises a theory of value formation that suggests processes of valuation have two dimensions: evaluation and valorization. It argues that the value placed on a diamond after the practices of valuation have taken place has been altered by the very act itself – how the valuation has been done, by who and for what the purpose. The grading, pricing and trading of polished diamonds exist within a socialized sphere of interconnected relationships reinforced and impacted by power structures and institutional status at every point in the market. Using the diamond market case study, the chapter demonstrates how the institutions that structure the market are not static but dynamic, constantly challenged by the network of actors within the market. The resulting valuations and exchanges that are therefore both highly performative and hierarchical.

The starting point of this chapter is the observation that would-be dictators are abundant around the globe, but some succeed in setting up and sustaining a rebel army while others do not. As argued in this chapter, a key ingredient for rebel success and conflict longevity is funding. One source of financing is the stolen spoils of nature. Think, for example, of blood diamonds. Beyond this particular example, we also discuss in this chapter systematic evidence on how access to mineral rents triggers an escalation of fighting activities of armed groups. In addition to resource rents, it is foreign funding that results in prolonged conflict, and may lead to proxy wars between fighting factions supported by rival foreign powers. The destructive potential of these sources of funding is examined by drawing on examples and empirical evidence from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and India.

The 1860s marked a key moment in the history of extraction and the rise of extraction-based life, a social order premised on the removal of subsurface resources and, especially, on the coal economy. This decade saw the explosion of an economic discourse around coal exhaustion in Britain, thanks to the publication of William Stanley Jevons’s The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines[GK21] (1865), and the expansion of overseas imperial extraction projects following, for example, the discovery of diamonds (1867) and gold (1869) in South Africa. In this chapter, I explore the role of extraction in the 1860s’ most characteristic genre: sensation fiction. After an overview of the chronotope of exhaustion and how it manifests in fiction, I turn to two sensation novels premised on extractive plots: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret [GK22](1862) and Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone [GK23](1868). Together they suggest the extent to which British national life was, by the 1860s, already imagined to be fully dependent on extraterritorial mineral inputs.

In Chapter 7 I move onto the case study of Botswana, which in contrast to Somalia and Uganda has experienced structural transformation due in large part to its diamond industry. Industrialization in Botswana has led to a sectoral shift out of agriculture as workers have left rural areas to move to cities and join the modern workforce, thereby leading to a decline in the relative value of rural land. I employ both qualitative and quantitative evidence to show that ethnic fractionalization has declined in Botswana since the mid-twentieth-century and examine parliamentary debates around ethnic identity. Moreover, I show that this shift has happened not because of but largely despite efforts of the Botswanan state, which has both discouraged rural-urban migration and failed to alleviate institutional ethnic inequalities that persist to the present day. Finally, I consider alternative explanations for ethnic homogenization in Botswana and find them all wanting.

Technical innovation in agriculture preceded that in mining, and the value of colonial agricultural production exceeded that of diamonds throughout the nineteenth century. After the Cape received responsible government in 1874 a colonial scientific bureaucracy was gradually expanded to include a veterinary surgeon, a Department of Agriculture, and a state botanist, geologist, entomologist and marine biologist. The discovery of diamonds in the 1860s and Witwatersrand gold in the 1880s reshaped the contours of race and science. Mining became reliant on increasingly sophisticated technology and on cheap black labour. Rapid growth in the mining sector has been analysed by historians in terms of the relationship between capital and labour. Scientific and technological innovations were also critical: applied geology, water pumps, explosives, stamping gear and the recently discovered cyanide process for gold extraction. The geostrategic importance of southern Africa became a point of growing competition, and the borders of a unitary South African state in 1910 emerged out of wars of conquest against African societies and intense conflict between English- and Dutch-speaking citizens. Imperial conquest and expansion were in turn associated with rapid technological change: steamships, railways, transatlantic cables and breech loading rifles. Together these constituted a ‘full-blown socio-technical imaginary’.

Why do states pursue different policies in response to international agreements? This chapter recaps from previous sections to explain how the findings in this study on the Kimberley Process can be used to understand the role of international agreements more generally. Since the Kimberley Process is often indecisive, it is an interesting puzzle why states, even those that often ignore international agreements, will use scarce resources to raise their level of compliance with the Kimberley Process. This chapter recaps the major findings from the five diamond-wealthy countries in sub-Saharan Africa that are examined: Angola, Central African Republic, Namibia, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe. These cases provide a large variation in compliance and cooperation with the Kimberley Process, due to the extent that diamond dependency constrains the ability of state actors to implement their preferences surrounding policy, the preferences of private actors, and the relative amount of power within and between these groups. This research shows that state responses to international agreements can be best understood as a process that takes place domestically as different actors compete to get their policy preferences implemented and domestic economic changes lead to changes in policy implementation.

There is an assumption that truth commissions have not taken on corporations for their complicity in past human rights abuses. The aim of this chapter is to expose the truths about corporate complicity hidden in truth commissions’ reports. It analyzes truth commissions’ potential as a non-judicial transitional justice corporate accountability mechanism. It considers models that truth-gathering instruments might incorporate in future efforts at corporate accountability.

The chapter begins with an analysis of truth commissions’ efforts to unveil the story of corporate complicity in past violence. It challenges the notion that economic actors were peripheral to, or unwilling partners in, authoritarian state and armed conflict human rights abuses. Itmagnifies the details of these truths that have been overlooked. It then attempt to explain how the truth about corporate complicity made it into these reports, drawing on our Archimedes’ Lever analogy. In the conclusion, it explores strategies to promote corporate accountability through new truth-gathering processes.