Appel, Hannah. The Licit Life of Capitalism: US Oil Industry in Equatorial Guinea. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2019, 332 pages

In the last pages of her brilliant account of oil extraction in Equatorial Guinea, Hannah Appel reminds us that “many of capitalism’s most egregious excesses are lawful” (280). This quote defines the core premise of The Licit Life of Capitalism, the result of 14 months of fieldwork between 2007 and 2008. In the purest tradition of contemporary economic anthropology, Appel investigates the excesses of capitalism, exploring the introduction of a neo-liberal post-colony, with all its structures and constitutive patterns of racism, patriarchy, and dispossession, and the violence of the licit capitalist system of oil extraction. The book demonstrates the process of disentanglement between the Equatoguinean reality and an offshore industry reliant on global inequalities. Appel describes her work as a “political history of the conditions of possibility” (5) of the current form of oil extraction in the small, insular state. The book begins with the same colonial conflation of public office with private gains, found later in post-colonial Equatorial Guinea. From Spanish colonial authorities to Macías and Nguema, Malabo’s rulers established parts of the possibilities for transnational oil companies in their daily practices in the country. Appel traces the belief that Equatorial Guinea is disconnected from some of the world’s largest corporations to the use of technological, legal, and discursive strategies. While this disentanglement appears successful at first glance, she demonstrates how these processes failed to account for the industry’s deep entanglement with the historical phenomena of colonial domination. This book is inscribed in feminist approaches to capitalism and the Black radical tradition of scholarship. It forcefully embraces critical theory to provide a globally applicable argument about capitalist extraction and its constitutive excesses against emancipation. Chapter 1 highlights the similarities between oil extraction and offshore financial placements through an ethnographic account of an offshore platform operating off the coast of Equatorial Guinea. These platforms rely on the idea of frictionless operations, operations that are smoothed by the disentanglement with the realities of a corrupt regime and unstable service provision. The permissiveness of the offshore, favoured by its distancing from Equatoguineans’ lives, is part of what Stoler termed “imperial debris” and reflects corporate concerns about physical and reputational risks. The hidden conditions of operations in the open oceans, the specific infrastructure, and new “technosocial” (59) organization allow for the continuity of colonial subjugation and their translation in racialized wages, distinct living conditions and responsibilities. Appel frames the capitalist dream of a frictionless world, with oil streaming from offshore rigs to tankers with little to no terrestrial existence, in a reality of profound onshore political and social impacts. Her analysis translates the pervasive logic of white supremacy in labour practices and throughout the corporate structure of the offshore oil and gas industry, from the physicality of its extraction. In her second chapter, Appel turns to expats’ living conditions. Her account of the racial segregation, patriarchal, heteronormative structure, and religious morality prevailing in the compounds exposes the reproduction of a Texan puritan social life of the 1950s. These enclaves operate in a similar offshore perspective to the extraction of the oil itself. They are framed as disentangled from the Equatoguinean life while replicating inequalities at the core of market efficiencies. Through unique access, provided in part by her “own whiteness and […] young womanhood” ( 88), Appel details the performative separation between the company and the ‘outside,’ whites and non-whites, and Western citizens and non-Western citizens. The description of segregated housing depending on one’s position in the company, which aligns with racial considerations, reminds us of South-African apartheid or the US Jim Crow era. The villas of British and American managers, in …