Colonial dispossession created the wage-dependent surplus labor surpluses modern corporations exploit.

Evidence

When European governments colonized African countries and seized their immense natural resources, most intensively in the nineteenth century, they didn’t immediately find workers. The countries’ populations were entirely unfamiliar with the compulsion stemming from market dependence. Long-standing and harsh processes of dispossessing people from their means of subsistence—land, fishing opportunities, and other resources—laid the foundations for the success of corporations such as Shell Global that now invest in new oil fields (in the Niger Delta, for example) and that can easily recruit people willing to sell their labor power for low wages. This same surplus population is the main reason why today Amazon has no trouble opening new facilities worldwide. In fact, the corporation is courted by local governments through substantial tax breaks as a potential employer. In Italy, where youth unemployment reached 42.7 percent in 2014 and peaked at 55.9 percent in southern regions like Calabria and Sicily, policymakers pursued Amazon aggressively. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 252

When European governments colonized African countries and seized their immense natural resources, most intensively in the nineteenth century, they didn’t immediately find workers. The countries’ populations were entirely unfamiliar with the compulsion stemming from market dependence. Long-standing and harsh processes of dispossessing people from their means of subsistence—land, fishing opportunities, and other resources—laid the foundations for the success of corporations such as Shell Global that now invest in new oil fields (in the Niger Delta, for example) and that can easily recruit people willing to sell their labor power for low wages. This same surplus population is the main reason why today Amazon has no trouble opening new facilities worldwide. In fact, the corporation is courted by local governments through substantial tax breaks as a potential employer. In Italy, where youth unemployment reached 42.7 percent in 2014 and peaked at 55.9 percent in southern regions like Calabria and Sicily, policymakers pursued Amazon aggressively. — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 252

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the goal of linking cases: the surplus population created by dispossession becomes the recruitment pool for both African-extraction (Kenya/Niger Delta) and European (Italy) operations — a single mechanism spanning Mattei’s case geographies.
• QUESTION: Italy’s 42.7 percent youth unemployment figure and Calabria/Sicily 55.9 percent peak are striking — worth verifying and keeping as concrete case data.
• SHARE: The Italy youth unemployment stat (55.9% in the south) is exactly the kind of specific figure a policy-economics friend would want.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 252; Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 252