Globalization and the Race for Resources

Co-winner of the Distinguished Book Award given by the Political Economy of World Systems section of the American Sociological Association

Globalization and the Race for Resources explores how five nations—Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, the United States, and Japan—achieved trade dominance by devising technologies, social and financial institutions, and markets to enhance their access to raw materials.

Through ecological and economic explanation of resource extraction and production, Stephen G. Bunker and Paul S. Ciccantell reveal globalization as the result of the progressive extension of systematically integrated material processes across cumulatively greater space. Drawing from extensive historical research into how economic and environmental dynamics interacted in the extraction of different materials in the Amazon, especially in the development of the iron mine of Carajas, the authors also illustrate the profound connection between global dominance and control of natural resources.