WHITHER FINANCIALIZATION?

“Financialization” has become a key term in the critical social sciences. Often used to describe a historical condition that is marked by “the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households” (Aalbers 2015: 214) over the past four decades, observers have found that almost everything has been financialized: economies, firms, sectors, public services, households, daily life, nature. In the wake of the global land rush, many scholars and activists have used the concept to make sense of finance's growing appetite for all things agricultural (for critical reviews, see Ouma 2014, 2015b). For them, this growing interest seems to be a textbook case of geographer David Harvey's idea of the spatio-temporal fix (Harvey 1982): after crises and devaluations in established domains of finance, capital sought greener pastures, extending its operational space into geographies and domains in which it was previously not much interested. Such a reading has gained widespread purchase. It is attractive, because it opens the debate on finance's penetration of farming to broader questions about the boom and bust cycles of globalized capitalism and their geographical ramifications. Scholars embracing “financialization” as an analytical tool have without doubt contributed to our understanding of the rise of global finance and its implications for the “real economy”. But the reiteration of the concept across the social sciences has not been unproblematic, and some of the problems characterizing the more general debate on financialization (Christophers 2015a) also permeate the land rush debate. This results in a range of analytical and epistemological challenges, which this book seeks to address.

First, much of the literature deploys “a restricted historical optic, … thus overlooking historic parallels and (dis)continuities” (ibid.: 192). After all, finance has a long history of penetrating farming in different parts of the world. The historical examples discussed in this book will show that we must carefully examine how current phases of financialization compare to earlier operations of finance capital formation in and through farming on a global scale.