Extraction, Global Commodity Trade, and Urban Development in Zambia's Northwestern Province

Meticulously researched, Kesselring’s book maps the copper production network, connecting people, resources, and places. Her rich ethnography takes us from pits in one of Zambia’s copper mining towns to the heart and forces of extractive global capitalism in the global north. She tells a compelling story of relationships and structures of mutual but asymmetrical interdependence that sustain this global extractive industry and its profits. She makes visible the often invisible “Swiss connection”, the other end of global extractivism. Her message, while Zambian and Zug residents may not share a class position, they are tied together by, and embedded in the unsustainable and exploitative global extractives economic order. Acknowledging this interdependence can be the foundation of solidarity, and transnational joint action between the polity in Zambia and Zug. * Asanda Benya, University of Cape Town, South Africa *

This is a highly consequential book for urban studies. This is a highly consequential book for urban studies. It shows how Solwezi, a small mining town in Zambia, is tightly entangled with the Swiss canton and tax haven of Zug. It presents a rich account of the history, spaces and experiences of one urban place associated with and impacted by mining; but it also demonstrates incontrovertibly how Zambia is impoverished by the same processes through which Swiss order and wealth is produced.

Rita Kesselring’s anthropology of the apparently separate but highly interconnected worlds of mine and municipality, expatriate golf estate and local town, “south” and “north” exposes the damage that analytically segregating these places does, both politically and in terms of how urbanisation is understood. In bringing these worlds together, this book marks a major new agenda for urban studies

* Jennifer Robinson, University College London, UK *