Materializing Land

Abstract In the current context, marked by relentless natural resource extraction, environmental risk, and innovative instruments of financialization, land is being thought anew. This essay introduces the special section on “Materializing Land” through an examination of three critical frameworks that the essays open up and that each pose a core question about processes of abstraction and materialization that have been integral to situating land within global capitalism: capitalism and/in nature, capitalism as world-historical force, and how land generates value within capitalism.