Modern extractive plunder mirrors Conrad’s fictional Eldorado buccaneers

Evidence

Over a century has passed since Conrad immortalized in fiction the unregulated plunder that he witnessed in the Congo. In a gesture of imaginative cynicism, he christened the worst of these plunderers the Eldorado Expedition. They were “sordid buccaneers: reckless without hardihood… To tear treasures out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe.” Over great swathes of Africa and much of the global South, Eldorado Expeditions are rising from the dead. They are still the self-declared standard-bearers of progress and are still tearing at the bowels of the earth. Today one finds in their motley ranks a mix of international and indigenous colonialists. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 337

Categorization

• XREF: Bookends ch19’s claim that ‘writing up a place serves as proto-violence’ and Conrad references in Savage Continent context.