Extraction, Global Commodity Trade, and Urban Development in Zambia’s Northwestern Province: An Ethnography of Inequality and Interdependence

Rita Kesselring provides a deep, open access ethnographic account of wildly uneven, deeply interconnected development trajectories of Solwezi, a rapidly growing copper mining town in Zambia, and Zug, an increasingly important urban hub for metal trading firms in Switzerland. In so doing, she provides a valuable and compelling case study of the unequal interdependencies, both financial and personal, that global capitalism creates between towns and cities in the Global North and Global South, all of which suggests new ways of fighting for more equitable relationships.

Through detailed storytelling, Kesselring explores the lives and routines of financiers in Switzerland as well as those of state officials, public office bearers, residents, architects, mine managers, and mine employees in Solwezi. From there, she follows Solwezi’s copper to harbors in Eastern and Southern Africa and beyond as it makes its way through warehousing, certification, customs clearance, shipping, financing, and trading. Highlighting the key actors in this value chain, Kesselring reveals not only the central role Switzerland plays in Southern Africa’s mining industry, but also the central role that Southern Africa plays in Switzerland’s ever-growing status as a leading service commodity trading hub-this thanks primarily to the constant flow of wealth from Zambia to Switzerland.

What emerges from this startlingly detailed portrait of inequitable interdependencies is a new path for a way forward. It is only through joint solidarity action between such vastly different but inherently connected places, Kesselring argues, that the world can arrive at more equitable North-South economic relationships.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Rita Kesselring is Associate Professor of Urban Studies at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Her academic work focuses on the intersections of political, economic, legal and urban anthropology. She is the author of Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (2017).