This is a root cause debate— The Dutch East India Company set a racist standard.

Social scientists committed to anti-racism and anti-capitalism have long criticized the dominant Malthusian framework for understanding the unequal distribution of food. Following Marx’ critique, David Harvey (2001, chapter 3) observes that Malthusianism still drives powerful governments and international institutions. Malthus’ conception of the relationship between resources and population, conceived at the beginning of England’s industrial phase in colonialism, systematically neglects the historical debts Europe’s abundance owes to the rest of the world. This chapter joins the Marxist critiques, bringing into greater clarity the racializing repercussions of the utilitarian philosophy underpinning both Malthus and colonialism. Against Marx, however, I will conceive the expansion of food production and the transplanting of populations not as a rationally guided process at all, but with Georges Bataille, as soaked with ambiguous desires and outbursts of destructive and self-destructive animosity. The early Dutch efforts to monopolize the spice trade in the eastern Indonesian archipelago should be seen as the quintessential example of such irrational mercantile usurpation.

In the first decades of the seventeenth century there was a strong tendency in the Dutch East India Company towards a division of labor based on visible corporeal difference as well as prejudice and brutality against Indonesians, other Asians, and African slaves. It was not yet racism as we know it today, not yet based on delineated and essentialized ‘races’. We could call it ‘protoracism’ in analogy with J.M. Blaut’s concept of ‘protocapitalism’ (1993). As a complex assemblage spanning Europe and the West and East Indies, the colonial-racial system developing with mercantile capitalism would quite rapidly pitch white Europeans against brown and black non-Europeans. It is crucial to theorize this system as one involving new regimes of production, distribution, and consumption of food. Keeping in mind Sidney Mintz’ study of sugar (1986), it is not difficult to show that all exotic foodstuffs imported en masse into Europe also circulated racial stereotypes.

Race is not simply a matter of stereotypes: new luxurious lifestyles enabled by the spices in Amsterdam went hand in hand with the ruthless dispossession of islanders in the Spice Islands on the other side of the Eurasian landmass. A key factor in the success of the world spice markets as it was appropriated by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and the English – and hence in the establishment of modern racism – was that they were predicated on absolute monopoly. Local farmers and merchants could no longer decide which foreign ships they supplied their precious crops to. The self-entitled right to monopolization exemplified the trend towards nationalism and protoracist violence that early capitalists were investing in.

Food, Sex, and Luxury

Hegemonic thinking about food and space in rich countries is still heir to the very English pessimism of Thomas Malthus. At the onset of the industrial revolution, his two disarmingly lucid postulates were:

First, That food is necessary to the existence of man.

Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state. (Malthus 1993, 12)

It is striking the Malthusian ‘principle of population’ directly links food to sex, but in the perfectly wrong way. Malthus reduces eating and sexual passion to their utility for survival. Given an irrepressible urge to reproduce, the mathematical argument goes, steadily increasing food production cannot catch up with a particular population’s exponentially growing progeny. Unless there is plenty of ‘free land’, as in the colonies, general happiness can only be achieved if the lower classes restrain their desire.

While Malthus’ anti-Enlightenment reminder that humans are but animals risking extinction is somewhat progressive, the problem with the postulates lies in that they are formed under the miserable umbrella of necessity. Scarcity is never necessary, while sexual desires aim at far more than reproduction. The moralistic obsession with sex downgrades demographic factors such as migration, war, disease, and individual and collective birth control. Malthus blocks any discussion of the diverse ways human societies (and many animals) enjoy a surplus of food. Humans create rituals and festivals around this abundance food to regularly waste it. Malthus was well aware of the gross socioeconomic inequalities that industrialization was spawning, but he was strikingly blind to how they maintain themselves by colonial displacement and massive class exploitation. Luxury is hoarded by an increasingly small elite; as Mike Davis (2002) argues, any famine is their responsibility.

Marxist critiques of Malthus such as Davis’ and Harvey’s as well as socialist alternatives have tended to retain the classical presupposition that food is a question of necessity first. The surrealist thinker Georges Bataille vehemently denies that life should be conceived this way. Under sway of Nietzsche and Freud he wrote in the early 1930s: ‘there is nothing that permits one to define what is useful to man’ (1985, 116). Savage pleasures, and the sacrifice or expenditure to obtain them, are what impels so-called civilized societies. Bataille mentions intoxication, diamonds, horse races, gambling, dancing, and the Crucifixion itself (sacrifice followed by the ceremonial ingestion of the ‘body and blood of Christ’). Bataille does not simply want to vindicate squandering and ritual against the rationalist pretensions of bourgeois society, but begins to offer a, in itself normatively neutral, heterodox conception of economic analysis.