Debt as a political technology: rubber, Firestone and the temporalities of settler colonialism in Liberia

This article examines the constitution of a settler colony in Liberia, along with its consolidation of modern governmental power, through a techno-political account of debt, rubber and the corporation. Although settlers, paradoxically, received very little of the money loaned to them by international finance capital, their indebtedness was crucially productive . Disassembling the workings of ‘debt’ during this period reveals it as not merely an ‘economic’ transaction but a modern political technology – an apparatus that enforces, as ‘security’, forms of financial, administrative and military control. In the nineteenth century, this debt apparatus was essential to the spatial expansion of settler power, enabling the progressive domination, taxation and extraction of labour from the indigenous peoples of the ‘hinterland’. From the 1920s, the Firestone Tire & Rubber Company was concerned to indebt Liberia to ensure temporal control. Producing plantation rubber necessitated the control not only of space (territory, bodies) but also of time (limiting future political possibilities).