From Disrespect to Desalination: Fighting for Elite Sovereignty in Colonial Curaçao

• In Event: Political Ecology (Co-sponsored by Environmental Sociology Section)

Abstract

Contemporary scholars argue that today’s environmental crises and their solutions are shaped by colonialism. However, they focus on colonial dynamics in the present, comparing these to an ideal-type of past forms, as opposed to examining the mechanics of historical colonialism and how they have shaped the environmental present. This flattening of the past and the power dynamics involved thus also flattens analyses of contemporary colonial dynamics relating to the environment. I remedy this by examining the politics behind one colonial environmental and development policy - the establishment of desalination on the island of Curaçao, a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean. Today, Curaçao’s freshwater supply is almost entirely supplied by desalination, as a desert island with little rainfall. Desalination on the island was established in the late colonial era; one of the world’s first on-land desalination plants was built there in 1928. How was this antecedent of the environmental present established?
Existing sociological scholarship has argued that 1) such environmental policies are determined by the material interests of political and economic actors, 2) or that they are modernization processes to overcome environmental problems, or in fact 3) that these were state-led efforts to shape colonial subjects into modern ones. However, I show that the establishment of desalination was the contingent outcome of Curaçaoan elites attempting to advance their own political sovereignty, driven by their subjectivity under colonial rule. Their advancement of this elite sovereignty was not simply based on their interest in more power, but also arose from their subjectivity under empire. They felt disrespected by the colonial authorities, and thus resisted policy alternatives the authorities had proposed. This paper elucidates how subjectivity shapes political-economic outcomes with respect to the environment under colonial rule. It also shows how colonialism shapes the environment by elucidating the mechanisms of power at play.

Author

• Archana Ramanujam, Brown University