Capitalism and Emptiness: Amazonia Since Independence

The occupation of Amazonia outsiders in the era of the nation-state relied on an enabling deceit: the notion that the rainforest was empty. The idea of an Amazonian void incentivized investment in the region and the transformation of the rainforest itself into capital. Perceived demographic and economic emptiness legitimized the quest for territorial control that consumed national governments and which justified support for private investors and colonizers. As the nineteenth and twentieth centuries century brought to the region increased connectivity, colonizers and state agents embarked on myriad investments to people the Amazon, to extract its natural resources, and to exploit its peoples. The framing of Amazonia as empty has been frequently acknowledged and critiqued by scholars and activists. Still lacking is a systematic overview of the specific ways in which “emptiness” was operationalized to shape distinct forms of capitalism in modern times. This paper interrogates the role of emptiness in the investment, accumulation, and extraction of capital in the rainforest. Through a long-term, transnational perspective, it examines the Amazon since Independence as a unit, aiming to produce a broad typology of capitalist regimes in the region over time. Because Amazonian biomes and indigenous peoples were both the main casualties of these processes and key elements within them, the paper pays attention to the roles of environmental elements and ideas about them, and of Amazonian Indigenous peoples.