Counter-mapping racial capitalism in the Niger Delta: Zones of unlimited extraction and cyclical dispossession from slavery to petroleum

Political ecology scholarship on the Niger Delta has extensively documented the social and environmental consequences of oil extraction, focusing on corporate governance, state violence, insurgency, and the resource curse. Yet much of this work treats petroleum as a distinct historical formation, analytically separated from earlier regimes of extraction. This article argues instead that the Niger Delta must be understood as a layered geography of racial-capitalist extraction in which successive commodity regimes build upon existing infrastructures and spatial logics. Drawing on Black Geographies and Black Ecologies, I conceptualise the region as a zone of unlimited extraction, where cyclical dispossession unfolds across the transatlantic slave trade, colonial palm oil economy, and contemporary petro-capitalism. Central to this argument is the concept of extractive anchors: spatial nodes such as ports, river corridors, and logistical infrastructures that persist across commodity regimes and stabilise the outward circulation of value. While the commodities of extraction shift, the underlying infrastructures and spatial configurations endure and mutate, enabling new regimes of accumulation to build on earlier extractive geographies. Using counter-mapping and GIS-based spatial layering of slave trade routes, palm oil infrastructures, and contemporary oil spill data, this article traces the longue durée of extraction in the Niger Delta, revealing how contemporary petro-infrastructure overlays and reactivates earlier corridors of extraction.