This chapter explores the complex relationship between extractive industries, sustainable development, and Indigenous treaty law. It begins by examining the international law guidance available for extractive industries, analysing frameworks and principles that promote responsible and sustainable practices in resource extraction while considering the social, economic, and environmental dimensions. This chapter then focuses on the specific challenges of oil and gas exploration, highlighting the impacts on Indigenous communities and emphasizing the importance of meaningful consultation, consent, and fair benefit-sharing in alignment with Indigenous treaty rights. Furthermore, it explores the mining sector’s implications for sustainable development, considering the social, economic, and environmental aspects and emphasizing the role of Indigenous treaty law in ensuring responsible practices, equitable resource distribution, and the protection of Indigenous rights and lands. Thus, the chapter emphasizes the need for a balanced approach that respects Indigenous rights, integrates Indigenous perspectives and consent, and promotes sustainable practices.

This chapter presents agreements between Indigenous peoples and governments, specifically those in Bangladesh and Mexico that focus on their roles in promoting sustainable development. The introduction sets the stage for subsequent discussions by emphasizing the importance of global legal and policy frameworks in shaping these agreements, with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and the global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The two case studies from Bangladesh and Mexico are then analysed, shedding light on the unique characteristics, provisions, and outcomes of agreements between Indigenous peoples and governments in these contexts. A comparative analysis is conducted to identify commonalities, differences, and lessons learned from these case studies. Ultimately, the chapter concludes by highlighting the significance of ongoing dialogue, collaboration, and respect for Indigenous rights in achieving sustainable development goals globally. It underscores the importance of incorporating Indigenous perspectives and aspirations into the design and implementation of such agreements.

The epilogue begins with the reversion of the Bonin Islands to Japan in 1968, after twenty-three years of US postwar occupation. Reflecting on imperial nostalgia and the meanings attributed to a rising Pacific for the future of Japan, it returns to the book’s initial question about the Pacific’s place in the archipelago’s history. It argues that the ocean today is an “unending frontier,” a cognitive mode engraved in both the promise of continued economic expansion and in the hopes for a more sustainable economy. The effects of climate change raise new questions about the origins of industrial modernity. The epilogue suggests conceptual models inspired at ocean currents to rethink diachronic historical causations and challenge teleology. With the first industrial revolution in Asia, Japan’s imperial emergence lives in the upstream of present ecological transformations. Studying the historical processes that direct state and industry interests to specific places within the dynamic seascapes of currents, habitats, and mineral deposits, embed the human relationship with the ocean in its historically grown, volumetric dimension.

Drawing on an ongoing conflict over hydrocarbon development in a protected area in Southern Bolivia, this chapter explores resource frontiers as key sites of juristocratic reckoning, where international and national discourses of rights are simultaneously invoked and undermined by violent processes of accumulation by dispossession. A leading example of transformative constitutionalism, Bolivia’s 2009 Constitution defined the country as a “Plurinational State” and recognized an array of new rights for Indigenous, originary, and peasant peoples, including in relation to territory and the environment. Yet state dependence on natural gas extraction has produced a widening gap between legal discourse and practice. This chapter asks: What new forms of politics emerge as communities at extractive frontiers reckon with the possibilities and limits of law and rights to confront ongoing processes of environmental dispossession? The arrival of oil companies in the Tariquía Reserve catalyzed a wave of human rights education in remote rural communities, yet a series of failed constitutional challenges have exposed the limits of law and rights as instruments to counter state-led extraction. Rather than turning away from rights, the chapter argues that community activists in Tariquía see themselves as custodians of the 2009 Constitution against the state. Their embodied praxis of territorial defense points to a form of juristocratic politics from below, in which the state’s monopoly on political and legal authority is called into question.

For nearly a century, seasonal, often female, manual labor remained fundamental to making peat available for industrial enterprises and electric power plants. Focusing on the trajectories of peat workers, this chapter discusses the seasonal nature and gendered organization of labor. It reveals that, as an embodied, more than-human activity, peat extraction was an experience marked by social inequality and difference as well as by the uncertain material environments of extraction sites, where the weather, dysfunctional technology, and the physical interaction with peat caused injuries and accidents. Examining the overlapping temporalities, modes of production, and agencies (human and nonhuman) in the making of peat fuel, this chapter foregrounds the forgotten margins of Russia’s fossil economy as focal points of the intertwined exploitation of humans and nature upon which it relied.

The historical trajectory of states-in-waiting was determined by many overlapping factors: their international-legal status vis-à-vis the United Nations, their popular support within their territories, the presence or absence of regional allies, their role in global Cold War politics, as well as the influence and impact of their international advocates, who often served as the connectors between these geopolitical spheres. In addition, a territory’s possession (or lack) of economic resources desired by multinational corporations shaped the pathways of particular nationalist claimants. In Southern Africa, the presence of natural resources made advocacy networks thick, overladen, multiple, and intertwined. Beyond the international-legal dimensions of Namibia’s struggle for national liberation, the territory was integrated within international politics through mining interests. Claims to territory and its resources are central to the demand for sovereignty.

Chapter 2 explores the Ecuadorean rainforest landscape, its inhabitants, and their first interactions with the oil industry before large-scale oil extraction started in the late 1960s. It starts by looking back at the millennia of gradual changes when the history of crude oil and the tropical rainforest environment started to intersect. An exploration of the geographical properties of the Amazon landscapes, as well as their flora and fauna including human inhabitants, visualizes the lively environment encountered by the first oilmen visiting the area in the period between the 1920s and the 1960s. Two multinational oil companies, the Leonard Exploration Company and Shell, undertook major efforts to discover petroleum reserves in the Ecuadorean Amazon. Even though their exploration programs failed in the end, their pioneering work of mapping and surveying the rainforest and its subsoil laid the foundation for large-scale petroleum extraction decades later.

Chapter 6 turns to the potential extraction of metals from areas beyond national jurisdiction: Antarctica, the deep seas and outer space. Each of these areas contains, with varying degrees of plausibility, large reserves of metals that are indispensable for a global transition towards sustainability, particularly in the energy and transportation sectors. At the same time, extractive operations would be virtually certain to generate various types of adverse environmental impacts while also raising challenging questions related to fairness and equity: in different ways, the legal regimes applicable to each of these three areas beyond national jurisdiction give effect to collective rights that are most clearly enshrined in the concept of the common heritage of humanity. The chapter assesses institutional responses to this technological field under three international institutions: the Antarctic Treaty System, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, and the Outer Space Treaty.

Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations documents the lives and experiences of everyday people through the lens of human movement and mobility from 1400 to 1800. Focusing on the most important typologies of preindustrial global migrations, this volume reveals how these movements transformed global paths of mobility, the impacts of which we still see in societies today. Case studies include those that arose from the demand for free, forced, and unfree labor, long- and short-distance trade, rural/urban displacement, religious mobility, and the rise of the number of refugees worldwide. With thirty chapters from leading experts in the field, this authoritative volume is an essential and detailed study of how migration shaped the nature of global human interactions before the age of modern globalization.

Almost 100 years ago, the American Geographical Society (AGS) published an edited volume titled Problems of Polar Research, which started with the assumption that much remained to be learned about the Arctic and Antarctica. Edited by the geographer W. L. G. Joerg, an employee of the AGS, the volume contained chapters by many of the leading polar authorities of the day, most of whom were active participants in exploration and science.1 ‘Problems’ had a double meaning: the authors referred to inadequacies and gaps in the contemporary state of knowledge, but also to the excitement of the potential for advancing understanding in difficult conditions. The volume sought to inspire its readers to think further and address the challenges. We approached this present volume with a similar view.

From William Bartram to John James Audubon to Susan Fenimore Cooper, early American writers on natural history challenged anthropomorphic thinking and human exceptionalism. Imagining human diminishment amid scenes of natural wonder, they offered a way forward in thinking about “the world we did not make” (William Cronon) that remains largely untraveled today.