Caravanserai
The Materiality of the 21st Century
Paul Ciccantell
August 1st 2026
I would first like to thank Devparna and Daniel for the opportunity to contribute to Caravanserai. Given the current antidemocratic actions of ASA leadership and the annual meeting boycott, I would also like to use this opportunity to provoke discussion and debate over the themes underlying my current book project, since I and many others will not be able to do so in person in New York.
What year is it? Three decades ago, some posited the “end of history” (Fukuyama 1992) as old historical patterns ended and a new millennium loomed. Planetary economic integration via globalization would bring peace and prosperity as national economic and geopolitical competition and conflict of the Westphalian world was replaced with a “New World Order” (Dicken 2011). The transition to postindustrial information and technology economies (Castells 1996) led by the wealthy nations would drive dematerialization (Cleveland and Ruth 1999; Wernick et al. 1996), with declining raw materials extraction, processing and waste production reducing environmental problems and transforming work as more and more of the world’s population became knowledge workers in a post-material and prosperous world reliant on renewable energy (Sovacool 2016; Smil 2010, 2023). The contrasts between these optimistic expectations and today’s reality are stark.
Globalization and the rules-based economic order fall apart as tariffs and trade wars proliferate. Global economic integration faces U.S.-initiated trade wars during both Trump Administrations, disrupting global supply chains. Geopolitical rivalries are more heated, both between the U.S. and its European allies versus Russia and between the U.S. and China as the U.S. political class forges bipartisan efforts to reduce vulnerability to China’s strength in many industries (Ciccantell, Sowers and Smith 2023).
A land war in Europe threatens to expand to engulf NATO. Reassertive Russia, the Cold War “loser” at the “end of history”, invaded Ukraine, which ironically contributed to the rebuilding and expansion of the NATO alliance while also disrupting global oil, natural gas, coal, and grain markets. The resulting fuel and food crises closely resemble those created by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the 1956 Suez Crisis (Thomas 1966; Shuckburgh 1986). The U.S. response of supplying growing volumes of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to Europe (Tusiani and Shearer 2023) looked like a new Berlin Airlift requiring billions of dollars with questionable long-term prospects. The U.S. returned to its role as producer and exporter of raw materials of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Ciccantell 2020), when agricultural products such as wheat, cotton and beef and extractive products such as copper, oil and coal were leading export industries (Mitchell 1998) supplying European industrial nations. Shuttered European coal-fired power plants re-opened and global coal trade and prices grow, halting progress toward decarbonization to address climate change in Europe.
Wars and threats of war over resource access haunt communities from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Greenland. A declining hegemon faces its Suez Crisis moment (Thomas 1966; Shuckburgh 1986) in the Straits of Hormuz. Communities and ecosystems far from core consumers confront incorporation into the Information Society as new resource frontiers for lithium and other critical materials as their land and water are enclosed, bringing severe social and environmental damage. The U.S. government subsidizes coal-fired power plants as Canda, the U.S., and Europe burn. Is it 2026 or 1939? 1956? 1973? 1914? 1873?
Current analyses sometimes describe the current conjuncture as a “polycrisis” (Tooze 2022) as economic, geopolitical, social and environmental crises and conflicts cumulate into a horrific stew. Fundamentally, the reality of the 21st century, as has been the case for the last 500 years, revolves around the materiality of the capitalist world-economy. Hegemons, core challengers, and rising economies seek to restructure industries, nature, geographies, and the broader world economy to serve their interests (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005, 2007). Today, some new materials are the focus of these efforts such as lithium and liquefied natural gas, but others have been central for a century or more, including oil, copper, and coal.
The focus of a great deal of analytic attention in recent years, China’s 21st century Belt and Road Initiative to access resources and markets around the world parallel Great Britain’s 19th century construction of railroads and coaling stations to build a physical, economic, and ecological system that reinvigorated British hegemony. China’s rapid economic ascent since the 1980s to challenge U.S. hegemony (Hung 2015; Nayar 2004; Bunker and Ciccantell 2007; Ciccantell 2009) and its successful strategies to dominate many raw materials and manufacturing industries (producing more than half of the world’s steel and aluminum, leading manufacturer of solar panels and wind turbines for the energy transition, largest producer of electric vehicles, etc.) drove the escalation of geopolitical rivalry over access to raw materials and Chinese access to technology (Jaffe 2019; Mathew et al. 2018; Murtaugh 2017). China’s ascent has meant high rates of growth and construction of infrastructure which have driven a dramatic expansion of raw material consumption. World production of coal, iron ore, copper, natural gas, oil, rare earth materials, and a host of other raw materials is far higher than it has ever been. The world has not dematerialized (Smil 2023); materiality moved to China and increasingly to India which seeks to follow the Chinese model of development. Efforts to electrify national and global economies to address climate change further increase this materialization and contribute to the need to diversify the types of raw materials obtained in increasingly remote frontiers, further exacerbating environmental and social disruptions and destruction around the world (Bednarski 2021; Kara 2023; Sanderson 2022).
Other processes linked to this materiality demonstrate the same sorts of parallels over time and space. Giovanni Arrighi (1994, 2007) emphasized how the “autumn” of a hegemon’s power led to financialization and movement of capital to rising economies, accelerating hegemonic decline and rivals’ ascent, a pattern repeated in U.S. support for China’s accession to the WTO and integration of Chinese suppliers and labor into supply chains. Equally critically, this process of financialization (cites) also increasingly disconnects finance from materiality, creating growing opportunities for “innovations”, whether tulip bulbs, crypto currencies, or artificial intelligence that advises gluing cheese to make pizza that accelerate hegemonic decline and economic crises.
What happens when any of these linked processes becomes too disconnected from underlying materiality? Disconnected geopolitical strategies result in absurd undertakings, such as U.S. attacks on Venezuela and Iran, despite U.S. domestic self-sufficiency in oil and gas. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is both a misnomer and an information technology incredibly divorced from materiality, whether as a source of deepfake political advertisements, pornography, poor mental health advice, or its many other popular uses. Its most important links to materiality are its destructive impacts on energy and water use, destruction of farmland as data center developers seek cheap land with few residents to contest construction, and the community disruptions data centers bring, including to my tiny rural hometown in Ohio.
Similarly, changes in materiality can open the door to new military technologies that disrupt the existing balance of geopolitical and economic power. British innovations in steam power provided critical advantages in naval and coastal warfare, for example, much like 21st century drone and information technologies pioneered in Ukraine’s fight for survival threaten to make tanks and expensive missile defense technologies obsolete. Advances in materials used on batteries, optics and communications may alter geopolitical competition in the near term.
These material processes shape the social, economic, and political conflicts of the 2020s. The roots of the most challenging social problems are firmly grounded in the these material processes: growing inequality within countries and across the world-system driven by globalization, growing flows of international migration in search of economic survival and often physical survival amid growing armed conflicts, racism as a simple explanation of inequality and long term change from a political perspective, the rise of authoritarianism as the “solution” to these social and political problems, and climate and health anxieties.
In short, the first quarter of the 21st century did not bring the predicted transformation foreseen in the late 20th century. Instead, the capitalist world-system has seen a resurgence of longstanding processes of competition, conflict and environmental disruption and destruction. These processes are all rooted in the physical and energetic materiality of the capitalist world-economy. The challenges of the 2020s result from the convergence of material, economic, geopolitical and environmental problems as the world extracts, processes, consumes, and pollutes with ever growing quantities of material. The central goal of my book project is to analyze these physical and energetic material processes in the most fundamental raw materials-based industries and global commodity chains (GCCs), revealing how they have shaped and will continue to shape the 21st century.
How can a world-systems materialist analysis help us understand the current conjuncture? The central thesis of my book in progress analyzes the interconnected foundations of 21st century conflicts and chaos. The physical and energetic materiality of the world economy in the 21st century is changing and growing. This materiality in key economic sectors based on raw materials extraction and processing shapes and is shaped by socioeconomic, geopolitical, and environmental processes in the capitalist world-system.
While it is relatively easy to identify historical parallels between today and earlier periods, developing a methodology for making analytically robust comparisons that can help us both understand the current conjuncture and work to build a better future is far more challenging. Which comparisons could provide us with the most insights into understanding the current conjuncture and, more importantly, address the “polycrisis”? My goals here are 1) to describe a world-systems theoretical and methodological materialist approach to analyze the current conjuncture; and 2) to provoke discussion and suggestions on two key questions. Which historical comparisons might provide the best insights into the current conjuncture and possible paths forward? What forms and examples of resistance to aspects of the current conjuncture could serve as potential models for restructuring 21st century materiality in more just and sustainable ways?
My use of materiality focuses on physical and energetic materiality that Bunker and Ciccantell (2005) termed New Historical Materialism or, more bluntly, “raw materialism.” The raw materialist model (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005, 2007) begins from the focus on the material process of economic ascent in the capitalist world-economy. The key problem for rapidly growing economies over the past five centuries has been obtaining raw materials in large and increasing volumes to supply their continued economic development in the context of economic and geopolitical cooperation and conflict with the existing hegemon and other rising economies. Economies of scale in resource extraction, processing and transport offer opportunities to reduce costs and create competitive advantages relative to the existing hegemon and other rising economies, but raw materials depletion and increasing distance create diseconomies of space (increasing costs due to the need to bring raw materials from ever more distant extractive peripheries to the consuming regions) that make finding economic, technological and sociopolitical fixes to sustaining economic ascent via increasing economies of scale difficult to achieve, maintain, and eventually reconstruct on an even larger scale (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005).
Successfully resolving this contradiction relies on the creation of generative sectors: industries that create backward and forward linkages; create patterns of relations between firms, sectors and states; stimulate a range of technical skills and learning and social institutions to fund and promote them; and stimulate the creation of a financial system to meet complex and costly capital needs across borders (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005, 2007). In short, generative sectors drive economic ascent of states and economies. Building these generative sectors is a highly contentious and tenuous process that must be maintained in dynamic tension; it is far more common for efforts in rising economies to create and maintain these sectors to fail than to succeed. While the unit of analysis is the world-system as a whole, this analytic approach focuses attention on the role of states, firms, and the relationships between states and firms in shaping long term competition and ascent in the world-system.
These processes of economic ascent and economic and geopolitical competition with existing hegemons have driven long term change in the capitalist world-economy over the past five centuries (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005). The most dramatic and rapid processes of economic ascent restructure national economies and the world economy in support of national economic ascent. The competitive advantages created by organizational and technological innovations in generative sectors and by subsidies in the form of low cost raw materials from peripheries lead to global trade dominance. Economic and political competition from the existing hegemon and other ascending economies shapes and constrains long term success, making economic ascent and challenges to existing hegemons extremely difficult. The most successful cases of ascent restructure and progressively globalize the world economy, incorporating and reshaping economies, ecosystems and space. The historical sequence of rapidly ascending economies from Holland to Great Britain to the U.S. to Japan and now to China led to dramatic increases in the scale of production and trade, building generative sectors in iron and steel, petroleum, railroads, ocean shipping, and other raw materials and transport industries that drove the economic ascent of their economies and states and impoverished their raw materials peripheries that supply key inputs to ascendant economies (Bunker and Ciccantell 2005, 2007).
The raw materialist lengthened global commodity chains model (Ciccantell and Smith 2009; Sowers, Ciccantell, and Smith 2014, 2017) begins analysis of any commodity chain by focusing on raw materials extraction and processing and on the transport and communications technologies that link the multiple nodes of the commodity chain from its raw materials sources through industrial processing to consumption and eventually waste disposal. This materially and spatially grounded approach allows analysis of the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of these chains at each node.
Building on key pioneering insights about the roles of slavery and racism in the construction, development, and long-term change of the modern world system (Rodney, 1982, Bush, 1999, 2009, Williams 1944), this approach integrates recent work on capital-labor relations, contestation and resistance at particular nodes in commodity chains (Bair and Werner 2011) and chokepoints that present opportunities/constraints for labor and social movement organizations (Sowers, Ciccantell and Smith 2014, 2017, 2018). One particularly important form of resistance is the creation of diseconomies of resistance, a situation in which labor, social movement organizations, or other groups utilize chokepoints and/or other opportunities to raise the cost of locating particular nodes of a commodity chain in a particular location (Sowers, Ciccantell and Smith 2022).
Equally important, this approach provides a lens to examine spatially-based disarticulations (the marginalization or outright elimination of particular nodes from a GCC) (Bair and Werner 2011) and contestations over extraction, processing, transport, consumption, and waste disposal across these chains. This grounded analysis can examine development trajectories and the sociopolitical conflicts over the division of costs and benefits in particular nodes and across these commodity chains. This approach highlights the role of contestation and resistance to the construction and reproduction of a particular commodity chain in particular places, as, for example, labor movements and social movement organizations seek to achieve their goals despite resistance from firms and states that oppose these goals, for instance indigenous groups resisting the redefinition of Amazonian ecosystems into reservoirs for hydroelectric dams (Ciccantell 1994) or the Sierra Club's efforts to end coal use (Ciccantell and Smith 2009; Sowers, Ciccantell, and Smith 2014, 2017; Ciccantell and Gellert 2018).
Ciccantell and Gellert (2022) demonstrate that race and racism shape resource frontiers and extractive peripheries and constitute a central element of world-systems-based analysis of the upstream end of GCCs. The impacts of resource frontiers and extractive peripheries on existing populations, and especially indigenous populations, are almost universally negative (see, e.g., Hall and Fenelon 2009; Gedicks 2001; Bodley 2014; Mann 2006), engendering often strong and violent opposition from indigenous groups (Ciccantell and Gellert 2022). Overall, as Rodney (1982) argued regarding Africa, racialized indigenous groups are the most frequent victims of severe underdevelopment in resource frontiers and extractive peripheries (Ciccantell and Gellert 2022).
Raw materialism focuses analytic attention and explanation on the material characteristics and processes that shape and constrain social structures, processes and actions. By beginning from this material foundation, situations that appear to be puzzling, contradictory, random, indeterminate, overdetermined, or an outcome of a grand conspiracy become theoretically determined and empirically explainable. For example, why does global consumption of coal continue to increase in the 2020s (Ciccantell and Gellert 2018; Gellert and Ciccantell 2020), despite decades and even centuries of data on the negative economic, social and environmental consequences of coal extraction, consumption and pollution (Jevons 1865; Freese 2003)? The widespread geologically determined location of coal deposits and the ability to use an ancient tool, fire, to release energy contained in coal created opportunities for and constraints on human use in the capitalist world-economy formed a path dependency (O’Hearn 2001) over the past 400 years. This path dependency shaped economic growth, technological change, political processes (Malm 2016; Mitchell 2011), social and environmental destruction in extractive regions (Freese 2003), and what increasingly appears to be a rapidly approaching climatic tipping point that threatens human life and ecosystems globally (Ciccantell and Gellert 2018; Gellert and Ciccantell 2020). Increasing coal consumption continues because the same technological, economic and geopolitical advantages that coal provided for British economic development in the 1600s and 1700s are still available to China and India in the 21st century (Ciccantell and Gellert 2018; Gellert and Ciccantell 2020). The materiality of coal may thus fundamentally shape the destruction of the capitalist world-economy and human life in the 21st century.
The methodological approach rooted in raw materialist lengthened GCCs begins from the material characteristics of raw materials and the commodity chains and industries that are built with these raw materials. This method is fundamentally comparative across raw materials based GCCs and across time, both in terms of commodity chains in the same material at different points in time and between broader cases and processes of economic ascent, hegemonic competition, hegemony, and decline in the capitalist world-economy. These comparisons are nested within the broader long term evolution of the capitalist world-economy as a system. The focus is on the 21st century and what appears to be a transition to a period of declining U.S. hegemony, increasing economic and geopolitical rivalry with China, the EU, and potentially other ascendant economies like India, as well as a transition toward new energy and raw materials GCCs in the move away from fossil fuels toward a renewable energy led global economy.
My underlying question is: why does materiality still matter in the 21st century? The world economy extracts and consumes more and a wider variety of materials than ever before. Dematerialization, as Smil (2023) makes clear, is a myth. Despite vast differences from earlier periods in some ways, the underlying material foundations and patterns remain largely intact.
Perhaps the most startling case of material continuities across the centuries is coal, the ultimate old industrial raw material that still fuels the 21st century and one of the key case studies in my book. Coal shaped the last four centuries of the capitalist world-economy. Coal was the keystone raw material of British industrialization and the broader Industrial Revolution (Malm 2016; Ciccantell 2022a). Despite wide recognition of its negative economic, social and environmental impacts, coal remains a keystone of the 21st century energy system, particularly in China and India but also in the U.S. under the second Trump Administration.
Similarly, petroleum and natural gas, the fuels of the 20th century (Yergin 1991, 2011) and my second key case study, remain central in the 21st century. In addition to European efforts to escape vulnerability based on their dependence on Russian oil and gas developed after the 1990s “end of history” and renewed oil wars in the Middle East, the development in recent decades of a global liquefied natural gas industry (Grigas 2017; Tusiani and Shearer 2007, 2023; Ciccantell 2020) literally moving air thousands of miles via hundreds of billions of dollars of investment provides another critical case study of today’s materiality. What the first Trump Administration termed “freedom gas” plays critical energetic, economic, and geopolitical roles in the current conjuncture (Ciccantell 2020), despite this resource’s contribution to global climate change, providing a critical case study of the lengths to which states and firms are willing to go to maintain existing patterns.
Other critical case studies in my book of today’s materiality include: iron and steel, another quintessential element of the Industrial Revolution that remains a fundamental building block of China’s and India’s economic ascent; aluminum, a key component of industrial and technological development during the 1900s that remains ubiquitous today; copper, yet another long-used material that has become incredibly important as part of electrification for the energy transition; and the range of critical raw materials for the energy transition, particularly lithium and cobalt. Some of these critical materials and their new GCCs are located in traditional extractive peripheries (e.g., lithium in Chile, cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo), while some are found in new locations, including via seabed mining. The material characteristics of these raw materials mean that electrification and the move to renewable energy face different challenges than is the case for older materials. The negative impacts on people and environments in extractive regions, however, look very similar to those of earlier materials and periods in the world economy (Kara 2023; Sanderson 2022; Bednarski 2021; Walter et al. 2024; Swift 2025; Livingstone 2026; Bartlett 2025; Kowasch et al. 2025; Liu and Agusdinata 2020; Lee 2025; Sun et al. 2025). Growing demand for these new materials reshapes the global economy and geopolitics in myriad ways. I plan to conclude the book by arguing that the materiality of the 21st century reflects many continuities with past patterns, while there are reasons for hope that the worst potential future can be avoided.
What can a raw materialist analysis of 21st century materiality tell us about potential routes towards a more just and sustainable future? First, the urgency is real as coal, oil and natural gas consumption continue to grow as the energy transition and dematerialization stall and wildfires threaten ecosystems and communities in places traditionally safe from them like my relatives’ cottage in the Scottish Highlands. Second, in this era of hegemonic decline and growing geoeconomic and geopolitical rivalries, there is no single target for national or transnational organizations or social movements. However, rivalries over access to raw materials can offer states and communities opportunities to bargain with external powers and firms, much like Nasser and the Non-Aligned Movement did during the Cold War. Third, there are now well-established technological and economic alternatives to efforts by the U.S., China and other states to revitalize fossil fuel dependency. Wind, solar, tidal, and battery technologies all offer alternatives even within the 21st century capitalist world-economy. Fourth, the information technology that the technology oligarchs seek to use to squeeze every bit of value out of society and nature for their own benefit and the concomitant massive increase in inequality create growing resistance that opens up consideration of less destructive and more just alternatives. Given the fast-approaching horrific outcomes of current patterns, we must create something better quickly.
To return to my goals for this post, I would like to solicit input from this community on my two questions underlying my current project. Which historical comparisons might provide the best insights into the current conjuncture and possible paths forward? What forms and examples of resistance to aspects of the current conjuncture could serve as potential models for restructuring 21st century materiality in more just and sustainable ways?
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