Introduction

The issue of the role natural resources play in a country's economic development trajectory has attracted scholarly attention for a long time. The French physiocrats (Francois Quesnay and his followers: Mirabeau, Mercier de la Riviere, Baudeau and Dupont) drew attention to the importance of natural capital as the source of a nation's wealth. In Tableau Economique, wealth flows from nature, with agriculture and other natural resources including minerals being the fountain of national wealth. In the physiocrats’ scheme, it is natural wealth which is productive, exhibiting strong multiplier effects, while manufacturing and other secondary processing ventures are regarded as sterile activities. On the other hand, British classical political economists from Adam Smith onwards thought of non-renewable natural resources as assets with diminishing economic importance over time, and as such, they believed that nations that sought to achieve sustained economic growth had to gradually reduce their dependence on natural resources.

In the debates on the role of natural resources in economic development, it is the position of the British classical political economists which has become mainstream, asserting that the role of natural resources in economic development diminishes, over time, as an economy undergoes structural transformation. Wright and Czelusta (2007) have argued that since then, natural resource-based development has had ‘bad press’, which has been reinforced by the emergence of the resource curse thesis during the 1980s and 1990s.

While the dominant view in development economics is that the role and the share of natural resources in national output should decline over time as economic development progresses (Radetzki, 2011), natural resources are widely believed to play a critical role in initiating and sustaining economic growth. This chapter shows that even in current knowledge and digital-driven economies, natural resources are still the foundation on which the transition to knowledge-based economic activities relies. This is becoming evident as economies around the world seek ways to transition to a net zero emission trajectory, a move which relies heavily on critical energy transition (CET) natural resources. The chapter argues that natural resources provide the foundation for building productive capabilities which are critical to initiating industrialisation and sustaining structural transformation, especially during the early stages of economic development.

Introduction

The concept of natural resource sovereignty, though implied in the broader principle of national sovereignty, is a fundamental component of economic sovereignty. Prior to the 1950s, sovereignty over natural resources was assumed to be directly derived from territorial (national) sovereignty. Every sovereign entity was assumed to have sovereign rights over natural resources in its territory. But following the post-World War II political and legal transformation, the control over natural resources for a community, nation or people received special attention from the emerging twentiethcentury global community. One of the main reasons for the dedicated attention given to the principle of natural resource sovereignty after World War II was to unequivocally assert the rights of peoples under colonial rule and the newly independent states over natural resources within their territorial jurisdiction. The Declaration on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources (PSNR) is the framework through which attention to the rights of peoples and nations over natural resources has been discussed and has become an integral part of international law principles and practice starting from the 1950s. The principle was adopted in the United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1803 in 1962. This declaration was later affirmed in the two 1966 Covenants: on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The latter asserted that,

It is interesting that both ICCPR and ICERCR have the same wording in Article 1 subsections 1 and 2. ICCPR has even gone further, in the preamble, to assert that the realization of civil and political rights, such as free movement and association can only be fulfilled when conditions are created for everyone to enjoy economic, social and cultural rights.

This work follows a series of thoughts around the idea of seriality as a fundamental or absolute feature of reality. It begins with a counter-reading of a passage in Aristotle's Metaphysics, where the primacy of substance is established in relation to the specter of a universe of mere succession, in order to affirm the seriality of everything as the overflowing unity of one and many. Next, in light of the serial basis of counting, I examine the nature of quantification as a pervasive limitation of our times, the instrument of a “transparency” that works to obfuscate actuality. I then assess the principle of quality as the category to which critiques of quantification historically appeal, arguing for a renewed sense of quality as the spiritual core of life's spontaneous and infinitely evolving question of itself. Next, I consider seriality per se as the principle that promises a way past the dialectical oscillation between quantity and quality. Lastly, I turn to the topic of measure in order to articulate the poetic nature of seriality as process and activity, the immeasurable reality's never-ending reckoning of its own indivisibility.

The unifying theme or thesis of the text is that the principle of seriality resolves the apparent contradiction between the oneness of everything and the oneness of oneself, spectacularly filling like an infinity mirror the specular space between everyone's individualized being in the universe and the universe's being in all, healing by unfolding the wound opened in the wholeness of everything by our seemingly being only a part or segment of it. Seriality is the constantly manifest sacred threshold or halo between the ONE and the one, just as by “manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself.” This is revealed, paradigmatically, in the experiential spontaneity of creativity, which takes place as the emergence or revelation of serial form, as well as in the nature of the index or sign as “a thing which, over and above the impression it makes on the senses, causes something else [aliud aliquid] to come into the mind as a consequence of itself.”

Rule of Itself

Seriality is a deceptively simple idea and phenomenon with connections to various interrelated concepts like sequence, succession, repetition, consequentiality, implication, order, iteration, list, coincidence, enumeration, pattern, and so on. To think clearly about seriality requires understanding the distinctions between seriality's proliferating possibilities while staying within sight of the principle of seriality in its simplicity. This is always somewhat difficult because of the way seriality mirrors the movement of thinking as a passage from thought to thought, to the point that the being or existence of a series may appear indistinguishable from the thinking of it. Just as, in thinking, we pass from thought to thought in a manner that makes one focus on the thoughts and forget or elide their passing per se, so in the perception of seriality is there a natural tendency to give attention to the elements of the series and their interrelationships and to disregard seriality as such. We think and talk all the time about series of this or that without properly considering that we are dealing with seriality, no less objectively than subjectively. As many forms of relation and non-relation fall within the general idea of seriality, so do thoughts follow upon each other in all sorts of related and unrelated ways, such that the two are always becoming entangled. Whenever we are perceiving a series, however seemingly random or formally defined, there remains this unshakeable sense of its inseparability from the seriality of experience itself, as if the unity or individuality of one's own being cannot but mark itself indexically across serially salient points of awareness, and vice versa, as if our integrity, the unity of oneself, were somehow inseparable from this indicating of unities, one after another.

Thus, in the case of the random or coincidental series, say a sequence of stars, there remains, despite the evident dependency upon seeing them as a series, the fact of their seriality being objectively or phenomenally there to notice.

One More One

Nothing adds up—everything does not—and yet we keep counting. From the mysterious event of every individual being to the immeasurable reality of the visible and invisible universe, plus all the measurements in between, there is no proper count of things. And even if there were a way to add things up, individually or universally, to count something or everything, what could the sum possibly be—save one more enumeration? One more … one. That we are living in a world irrationally attached to counting things (and the error of identity on which it is based) is clear from the endless array of crises articulated day by day in numerical form as well as the innumerable critiques of quantification altering us to the perils of continuing further down the road of number. With tragicomic circularity, our calculations predict catastrophes caused by humankind's addiction to quantification, our habitual ruling of life with “the regime of governance by numbers [which] loses all contact with reality, and substitutes the map for the territory.”

And in the background and foreground of this crowded, inversely panoptic world-theatre, behind and ahead of the day's reckonings, we point to the collective shadow of all the ones counting, a global mass projection of human numerousness onto the screen of life (a.k.a. “the Anthropocene”), as if the destiny of the human were to fill the cosmos with its own quantity. Indeed our very dubious unthinking assumption that there is a world, in the sense of a single total sum of all things, is itself an ironic shadow of Homo numerans: “the postulated domain of unified total overall reality corresponds to the idea of unrestricted quantification.”

Introduction

The African continent is long known to be endowed with a wide range of natural resources as noted in Chapters Two and Four. But using these ‘gifts of nature’ as a source of sustained economic growth and improved well-being for African people has been a challenge for the past six centuries. Prior to the colonisation of the continent, Africans in different parts of the continent exploited the rich natural resources to build thriving civilisations. There is now ample evidence of thriving African civilisations with advanced crop and livestock farming activities and metal works, particularly Iron and bronze since the fifth and fourth centuries BC (Davidson, 1966). During this time, African resources were used for the benefit of Africans who transformed the available natural resources into tools needed for production as well as final goods for consumption.

In other words, the process of value addition was localised, with little value leaking out. It has been observed that before the process of extracting significant surplus value from the continent was initiated by Europeans, the exploitation of natural resources and value addition were all domesticated. During this time, African societies were at par with societies in other parts of the world and maintained their political and economic sovereignty (Amin, 1972). It was when the continent started to lose one of its critical resources – human capital, that it gradually lost its ability to use its abundant natural wealth for the benefit of its peoples. The loss of control over what happened to natural wealth on the continent eventually led to the loss of economic and political sovereignty, culminating in the colonisation of the continent. The establishment of colonial regimes in Africa further entrenched the mechanism by which African natural wealth was extracted for the benefit of people outside of the continent.

The main channel through which Africa's economic sovereignty is undermined is the export of raw materials, which entails that the bulk of value addition and the capture of value added occurs outside of the continent. This process was entrenched during colonial rule but has continued to the present, leading to a situation where though the continent is abundantly endowed with natural resources it has remained the most impoverished region on the planet.

This book has approached the question of natural resources in Africa from a different perspective. It makes the argument that natural resources in Africa can be utilised to reclaim Africa's economic sovereignty which is central to the economic development and industrialisation of the continent. In making this argument, the book acknowledges that African countries have political control (de jure sovereignty) over natural resources in their respective territories, but most countries have little control over what happens to these resources once an extractive license is issued. This is evident in the fact that the bulk of primary commodities in Africa are shipped out of the continent in raw or semiprocessed form, with most African states having no say over what happens to these natural resources once they are extracted. The inability to influence what happens to natural resources extracted from the continent is an indication of weak economic sovereignty. Although the primary commodity companies that operate across the continent obtain licenses and pay royalties and other taxes levied for extracting natural resources, African states have no say after primary commodities are extracted partly because the bulk of primary resources extracted leave the continent and get processed into final and intermediate goods elsewhere. As long as the processes of adding value to primary commodities take place outside of the continent, African countries have no control or role to play in the process of adding value. This is the source of economic sovereignty weakness because the most powerful process (transforming natural resources into final and intermediate goods and services) occurs outside and beyond the continent's reach. As the book illustrates, it is the capacity to transform primary resources into goods and services needed in society that strengthens a country's economy and influence.

As the book argues, allowing the process of turning natural resources into final and intermediate goods and services outside of the continent is effectively an act of ceding power and agency to countries that transform natural resources into goods and services. The cumulative effect of allowing this process is that it weakens a country or continent's economic sovereignty, both in terms of the diminished ability to build productive capabilities needed to add value to natural resources, as well as the compromised capacity to exercise financial and monetary sovereignty.

As mentioned earlier, Toyin Falola can arguably be called a public intellectual having achieved the status of Africa's most prolific and consistent historian. Of course, this would mean several things to different publics around the globe. Falola's Pan-Africanist outlook, activities and range have transformed him into a very unique type of scholar. He is indeed more than just a scholar and he has succeeded in redefining and expanding what it means to be a scholar-cum-activist-cum-public intellectual in an age of transnationalization. As noted earlier, his readiness to undertake works of remarkable quality in the genres of prose, poetry, cultural criticism, political commentary and of course, history, his initial and ostensible academic specialty, is particularly noteworthy. Although based in the United States, he visits Africa at least six times a year hosting conferences and organizing transnational research networks all over the continent.

By highlighting his terrifically versatile and prolific writings, it is necessary to focus on how the concepts of transnationality, interculturality, transdisciplinarity, locality and cosmopolitanism work within his output and how they can be employed in examining other outstanding scholars working on African(a)-related issues. It is also important to accentuate various ramifications of his multitudinous scholarly output.

Indeed, there is an aspect of his work that is often overlooked by scholars and even when studied is not as rigorously analyzed as other aspects of his corpus. This relates to his role, functions and achievements as a transdisciplinary scholar. To undertake an original analytical exploration of this crucial angle, means we have to go beyond the studies that have been produced on his intellectual life and work. Indeed it is possible to re-evaluate Falola's role as a transdisciplinary intellectual employing methodological grids that are quite novel. If for example, Falola has been concerning himself with important intellectual questions such as the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, African feminisms, postcolonial governance and contemporary African migrations to the North Atlantic hemisphere, then we have to go beyond the field of historical studies to engage with his work.

Apart from the questions outlined above, the other major research questions at this juncture are how has Falola addressed issues such as African precolonial heritage and marginalized or suppressed swathes of African history and existence?

The five interviews that make up The (Latin) American Scene offer to readers, however inadvertently, an especially timely if stark occasion for reflection on the current state and uncertain future of the field of Latin-Americanist criticism and humanistic scholarship in the North American university and public sphere.

Convened and guided with great acumen and rhetorical skill by Fernando Gómez Herrero, they were initially recorded between twenty and twenty-five years ago. In the course of conversations with Gómez Herrero, Walter Mignolo, Rolena Adorno, José Rabasa, John Beverley and Roberto González Echevarría, then all senior, well-established academics and by now all well into retirement age—if in many instances still active scholars—reflect back on the state of the field dating from a point in time as early as three decades before that.

Meanwhile, however, as this is being written (ca. February 2025) the United States and with it the world are witnessing what will surely be remembered as one of the most signal and disastrous turning points in its modern, twenty-first-century history: Donald Trump's return to head a state over which he now makes good to exercise almost unlimited control. Whatever the particulars of the new, far-right, quite arguably neofascist, ethno-supremacist polity that now consolidates itself, joining similarly autocratic if nominally “democratic” regimes across the globe, from Italy to Argentina to India and from the Philippines to Hungary to Russia, the effect here is to cast an unaccustomed and lurid light over a subset of academic and intellectual life whose very chronological double remove suddenly makes it seem weirdly even more particular and remote: speaking from a generation ago at a point in the United States and global history when, whatever its own catastrophic and dystopian aspects, our contemporary civilizational collapse (surely the term is justified) would have been scarcely imaginable, the informants responding to Gómez Herrero's adroit and always provocative questions and prompts—often as illuminating and compelling as the words they elicit if not at times a good deal more so—reflect back in turn on a still earlier, preceding generation.