From the Plantation and the Deep Blue Sea: Naturalizing Debt, Ordinary Disasters and Postplantation Ecologies in the Caribbean

Abstract

This paper critically assesses debt as a response to ecological, fiscal and climate disaster that have emerged within the “blue economy” agenda in the Caribbean. Caribbean countries routinely suffer major losses of life, internal social and economic displacement, increased debt burdens, and significant economic damages due to hurricanes and ecological disasters in the context of an ongoing fiscal crisis. In response, regional public and national agencies have proposed “blue economy” initiatives to address the regional need for finance, renew financial flows, and compensate for extremely constrained fiscal resources and externally imposed austerity (or debt bondage). Major recent hurricanes and ecological shocks illustrate uneven and interconnected spatial histories of anti-Black dispossession, disenfranchisement and deprivation, offering important empirical terrain from which to appreciate how contemporary "disasters" have become new means to extend hierarchical plantation formations to the seascape through debt-driven finance and austerity. The paper demonstrates the ways in which coercive financial instruments like catastrophe insurance, debt swaps, ‘blue bonds’ and traditional public debt constitute tools to further integrate these societies differentially into racialized financial geographies and entrench a coloniality of being. As traditional plantation structures become exhausted and lack capacity to effectively ensure growth, these innovative finance mechanisms are required for “blue” accumulation. We situate spiraling debt burdens and these new instruments spurred by socially produced and postcolonial disasters within postplantation ecologies that describe socio-political relations and spatial dependencies linked to interwoven logics of disaster-based financial capitalism that seek to extend the extractive capacity of the plantation anew. These arrangements tend to naturalize and render disaster, death and debt as ordinary events and obligations arising from postcolonial statehood, and take for granted their origins in racialized plantation structures.

Keywords: Caribbean plantation economy, debt swaps, blue economy, conditional sovereignty, finance capitalism, blue bonds