Abstract
What can world-systems analysis of the role of Africa in the creation of the capitalist world-economy tell us about Amazon’s model of control of global supply chains in the 21st century? How did patterns established by European imperialism and enslavement of Africans create long-lasting continuities of racial capitalism and migration that are used by Amazon to profit in the contemporary era? We argue that the analyses of imperialism and racialized labor in Africa that underlay the creation of the capitalist world-system presented by Wallerstein, Rodney, and others, most notably Cedric Robinson, help us understand the continuity of racism and racialized labor over the longue durée. Our analysis of raw materialist lengthened global commodity chains reveals critical continuities and parallels in the central role of racialized exploitation of labor at crucial eras of the modern world-system, including to the enormous rise of Amazon and e-logistics in the contemporary United States.
Introduction
What can world-systems analysis of the historic role of Africa in the creation of the capitalist world-economy echo in Amazon’s model of more recent capitalist globalization in the 21st century? How did patterns established by European imperialism and enslavement of Africans set the stage for long-lasting continuities of racial capitalism, migration, and labor exploitation that are used by Amazon to profit in the today’s digitally oriented world, even though it is in many ways vastly different from the globe of 500 years ago? Despite vast epochal differences in transport, communications, and manufacturing technologies, characteristics of states and the interstate system, relationships between states and firms, speed and scale of mobilities, cultural characteristics, and myriad other aspects of life, key elements of the 21st-century world parallel these long-lasting patterns. Racial inequalities, racialized labor, and global inequalities reconstituted, but in many deeper ways reproduced over the centuries, provide the foundation for the 21st-century success of Amazon, other corporate leaders, and the information and platform economy. Historically, these writers focused on how African racial groups were deeply impacted by the emergence of a broad (even global) vision of colonial slavery. But, just to be clear: while it is possible to discuss specific rationales for this work both hundreds of years ago and now, we realize that this does not automatically lead to a current reified and unchanging concept of race.
The claims of Immanuel Wallerstein and Walter Rodney in their analysis of the essential role of Africa in the economic ascent of Europe and the creation of an emerging new global system provide a strong theoretical and methodological foundation for a broad theory that recognizes the inseparability of global capitalism, imperialism, and racial hierarchies and racism over the past 500 years. The world today is grounded in the large-scale development of African colonialism, racism and the widespread emergence of imperial subjugation, slavery, exploitation and human enslavement and migration to other European colonies. These striking patterns led to the spread of a world capitalist system that expanded and consolidated over a period of multiple centuries, gradually encompassing the globe and justifying the sweeping hegemony of racial, military, and economic states and ruling powers.
We argue that the analyses of imperialism and racialized labor in Africa that underlay the creation of the capitalist world-system presented by Wallerstein, Rodney, and other early theorists of racial capitalism, most notably Cedric Robinson, help us understand the continuity of racism and racialized labor in the world economy over the structural evolution of this global system. Our analysis of lengthened global commodity chains (GCCs) in the 20th and 21st centuries, and particularly the meteoric rise of Amazon in the 21st century into a leader and progenitor of a model of logistics and information technology, deepens, and enriches our understanding of today’s 21st-century economy, undercutting Silicon Valley claims that ‘everything is different now’ (see Harris, 2023 for a long-term perspective on the development and ideology of Silicon Valley). Today, we see Amazon as a behemoth leader of online capitalist corporate enterprise now in firm control of a particularly virulent (and immensely profitable) type of online ‘platform capitalism’ (Liang et al., 2022; Srnicek, 2017; Steinberg, 2022; Vallas, 2019) in order to control worldwide logistic shipment and sale of consumer commodities in global supply chains (Goodman, 2024; Handfield and Linton, 2022). In today’s modern world, we see dramatically redefined capitalist strategies linked to globalized supply chains and drawing from more distant ‘outsourced’ manufacturing and production (Ciccantell et al., 2024; Potiker et al., 2024). But many of these are far less novel than it appears, as we will show in an attempt to expand the rapidly growing interdisciplinary field of critical logistics studies (Chua, 2022; Chua et al., 2018; Potiker et al., 2024).
In the first section of the paper, we will present our re-examination of the earliest work in world-systems analysis. Here we focus on Wallerstein’s, Rodney’s, and Robinson’s analysis of Africa and racism over the last five centuries and how this work reveals the creation of long-lasting patterns of the longue durée of the world economy. Next we present our model of raw materialist lengthened GCCs that focuses attention on both upstream and downstream ends of these GCCs and on the critical role of racialized and migrant labor in the creation and reproduction of these chains, as we develop our critical approach to both platform capitalism and the recent evolution of new logistical patterns and processes. Our empirical section will analyze Amazon and other transportation and delivery firms, focusing on case studies of Amazon’s operations in key hubs in the United States. We will draw parallels to the earlier analysis of the role of Africa, emphasizing continuities in issues of peripheralization and inequality, racialized labor, and chokepoints and resistance all across GCCs. We will conclude by highlighting how a return to earlier understandings of the capitalist world-economy – as well as the role of Africa, racism, and racial capitalism – can reinvigorate world-systems analysis and our understanding of the 21st century.
Africa, Racism, and Early Major Theoretical Reflections: Wallerstein, Rodney, and Robinson
Wallerstein’s two volumes written in the 1960s, Africa: The Politics of Independence (1961) and Africa: The Politics of Unity (1967) present political sociology analyses of the events, processes, social groups, and social movements of the independence and immediate post-independence periods in Africa. The opening chapter emphasizes the high degree of socioeconomic and political development in many African states before the colonial period, highlighting the history that European colonial powers sought to ignore or discount to justify first the massive, forced labor migration of the Transatlantic slave trade and then their colonial exploitation of the continent. This historical neglect reflected how fundamental European racism was to the slave trade and colonialism (Wallerstein, 1961: Chapter 1). As Wallerstein reports on the slave trade, ‘it is hard to overestimate the havoc – direct and indirect – this trade caused or how it corrupted area after area of Africa’ (Wallerstein, 1961: 19). On the other side of this relationship, Williams (1944) revealed that 10%–20% of the capital invested in the British Industrial Revolution derived directly from the slave trade. This is best understood as a GCC that directly supported imperial control over and surplus extraction from Latin America and North America in mining and plantation agricultural production for centuries, simultaneously developing Great Britain and underdeveloping many peripheral regions, especially much of Africa.
In conversation with Wallerstein’s earlier work, Walter Rodney (2018 [1972]) also presented an extensive analysis of the relationship between Africa and Europe. Rodney (2018 [1972]: Chapter 1) emphasized the role of the slave trade and colonialism in both the capitalist development of Europe and simultaneously the underdevelopment of Africa. His argument is that commodity chains were built to simultaneously develop Europe and underdevelop Africa. He argues that
throughout the period that Africa has participated in the capitalist economy, two factors have brought about underdevelopment. In the first place, the wealth created by African labor and from African resources was grabbed by the capitalist countries of Europe; and in the second place, restrictions were placed upon African capacity to make the maximum use of its economic potential-which is what development is all about. (Rodney, 2018 [1972]: 30)
Just like development and underdevelopment, race and racism, and massive forced migration of enslaved Africans were simultaneously intrinsically and dialectically linked across the regions of the capitalist world-economy. Rodney (2018 [1972]: 102–105) notes that economic gain motivated the European enslavement of African people, and European racism toward Africans emerged and intensified because
having become utterly dependent on African labor, Europeans at home and abroad found it necessary to rationalize that exploitation in racist terms as well. Oppression follows logically from exploitation, to guarantee the latter. Oppression of African people on purely racial grounds accompanied, strengthened, and became indistinguishable from oppression for economic reasons. (Rodney, 2018 [1972]: 103)
Adding to the conversation on the historical origins of race and capitalism, the work of Cedric Robinson (1983) resurged over the last decade in debates on political economy. Robinson’s emphasis on the co-constitution and co-evolution of class and racial inequalities in racial capitalism opens opportunities to reconstruct and decolonize our understanding of the past and present (Kvangraven, 2022). While Robinson spent his career studying anti-black racism and the resistance to that racism in the black radical tradition, he was also particularly interested in the intra-European racialism that preceded Europe’s colonial relations with the rest of the world (Bourne, 2021: 11). He is a bit more nuanced and careful than the others by attending to historical variations of African and European racial identity, particularly how different forms of racism operate and how some concept of race (and particularly Blackness) transcend broader or very ahistorical views of it (Robinson, 1983). According to Bjelić (2022), ‘unlike proponents of postcolonial and decolonial studies, Robinson does not challenge Eurocentrism from a non-European perspective, but rather from the erased history of European slavery as the material variant of Western Civilization’ (Bjelić, 2022: 67). This shows that due to race’s nature as a social construction, racial categorization can vary across time and place while remaining a central organizing principle of exploitation in the world economy. Furthermore, according to Joshua Myers’ (2021) biography of Cedric Robinson, Robinson went beyond and called attention to the methodologically problematic core, semi-periphery, and periphery relations. It is also interesting to understand that he did that while working alongside Wallerstein at the Fernand Braudel Center. According to Robinson, the cultures, social consciousness, and histories within the system could not be reduced to an epiphenomenal reaction to economic relations, but rather were co-constitutive to the world-system, or put another way, both created and responded to capitalism (Robinson, 1983). Robinson’s conception of racial capitalism is also employed to re-examine long used and debated concepts such as ‘primitive accumulation’ (Issar, 2021) for understanding long-term change in the capitalist world-economy. Moreover, Robinson’s conception of racial capitalism informs recent work on why platform capitalism is needed to examine how Internet technologies reproduce racial inequalities (McMillan Cottom, 2020). Our analysis here seeks to understand 21st-century capitalism by emphasizing continuities with earlier periods of racial capitalism and the long tradition of coercive population movement to provide labor as the capitalist world-economy expanded. This coercive labor movement included not just the Transatlantic slave trade from Africa to the Americas but also forced labor of Native Americans in European colonies and coerced labor migration of Chinese workers in the ‘coolie trade’ of the 19th and early 20th centuries (Potts, 1990). These forms of coerced migration created human suffering and social and environmental destruction in the homelands of the forced migrants, often horrific working and living conditions for the them as a racialized and inexpensive workforce in receiving locations, and high profits for the European traders and colonial employers of these mandatory migrants.
The long-lasting impact on European societies of ‘the rise of racism as a widespread and deeply rooted element in European thought’ was that ‘by the nineteenth century white racism had become so institutionalized in the capitalist world (and notably in the U.S.A.) that it sometimes ranked above the maximization of profit as a motive for oppressing black people’ (Rodney, 2018 [1972]: 104). This is partially due to the co-constitutive nature of racism and capitalism, as well as the semi-autonomous nature of culture as noted by Robinson. As Rodney argued decades ago, commodity extraction and its trade required racism and racial oppression to supply huge flows of labor to enrich Europe and underdevelop its peripheries. The racism that continues to plague the United States and Europe built the commodity chains that drove economic ascent and hegemony over the last five centuries. As he puts it, ‘development and underdevelopment . . . have a dialectical relationship one to the other: that is to say, the two help produce each other by interaction. Western Europe and Africa had a relationship which insured the transfer of wealth from Africa to Europe’ (Rodney, 2018 [1972]: 86). His massive and detailed book demonstrates how the centuries of the European slave trade and colonialism led to Africa’s huge underdevelopment deficit. The consequences of coerced labor for indigenous peoples in the Americas under European colonialism and for Chinese workers and sending regions during the ‘coolie trade’ (Potts, 1990) were similarly constituting underdevelopment in indigenous and Chinese communities.
In his analysis of the impacts of colonialism, Wallerstein emphasized many institutional changes (including improved transportation and communication infrastructures), while highlighting how changes under colonial rule created the conditions for African anti-colonial resistance and independence struggles (Wallerstein, 1961: 34–39). To fully understand logistics, Wallerstein’s analysis of the role of shipping, ports, roads, and railroads and other infrastructure during colonialism in linking centers of resource extraction and population centers to exporting ports and Europe (Wallerstein, 1961: 38) reveals its central role (large rivers, newly built jungle highways, and railroads) and the racialized labor force. Created for the colonial era, it still exists, in a more fully developed sense for raw material extraction and export in the 21st-century logistics industry. Wallerstein’s (1961) analysis is a precursor to Rodney’s (2018 [1972]) analysis in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that emphasized both the devastation wrought by Europeans across Africa and how this made the rise of European development and power in the continent as colonial powers built GCCs based on African resources and labor.
Wallerstein’s (1961, 1967) books both identified patterns in African political and economic development that were shaping the newly independent states; many of these patterns were later confirmed by other scholars, most notably by Rodney (2018 [1972]) and other members of the Dar es Salaam School (see Plys, 2021 on the intellectual history of the school). Various political conflicts were exploited by and sometimes fomented by external powers (European states, the United States, the USSR beginning in the 1960s, and most recently China (Carmody et al., 2022)) to extract African resources at low cost using promises of aid, bribery, and military intervention under neo-colonialism (Rodney, 2018 [1972]). Even one of Africa’s never colonized states, Liberia, fell victim to the dangers of neo-colonialism (Mitman, 2021), something that Wallerstein (1967) recognized: newly independent African states viewed neo-colonialsim as a severe threat to their development and independence. Indeed, we also link this to the global and racialized labor exploitation developed by contemporary giant world corporations like Amazon.
Wallerstein’s and Rodney’s analysis of the relationship between Africa and Europe, as well as Robinson’s analysis of the co-constitutive relationship between racism and capitalism on a world-scale, identify several key themes that, as discussed below, have significant continuities through to the 21st century logistics industry. Africa became a critical periphery for European imperial powers, first as the source of enslaved labor for European colonies in the Americas, then as the source of ivory, rubber, and other forest products and tropical plantation crops extracted at the cost of millions of lives, and then as the source of a wide range of mineral products. These world commodity chains in raw materials in mining, plantation agriculture, and extraction of forest products were grounded in the naturally determined locations of mineral deposits, agricultural land, and forest ecosystems, requiring the creation of peripheries to extract and ship these commodities via imperialism and neo-colonialism which was always supported by racism (Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005). Commodities, whether racialized enslaved labor, ivory, and rubber from rainforests, or copper and other minerals, had to be mobile in Africa, while labor was tied to particular locations and controlled by colonial states, taxes, or other imperial means. A colonial process from long ago provided the groundwork for early studies of logistics and global supply chains, as cheap land, cheap labor, and government subsidies were critical to overcome the ‘first mile’ problem of raw materials extraction via mining, plantation agriculture, and forest products extraction under imperial and neo-imperial models (once more linked to racialized labor as noted above). Similarly, in recent decades, this all set the stage for Amazon’s ‘last mile’ problem of fast delivery to home-based consumers in the 21st century, as the company’s supply-chain management strategies continue to rely on racialized labor, devalued land, and cheap transportation costs (these low costs for big global corporations are also linked to issues like tax breaks, subsidies for warehouse construction, lax regulations and low community benefits – see both MacGillis, 2021 and Emmons Allison and Reese, 2023 for detailed discussions).
Critical Logistics Studies and World-Systems Analysis
Commodity chains, or ‘network[s] of labor and production processes whose end result is a finished commodity’, are the building blocks and sinews of the capitalist world-economy, and it is not surprising that they became a central subject in early world-systems analysis (Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1986: 159). These chains explain how local and national economies are integrated by specifying the links among the different processes or segments within their links. Efforts to create and restructure commodity chains drive the geographic expansion and reorganization of today’s global supply chains as core economies and rising challengers seek markets, raw materials, and cheap labor, facilitating capital accumulation on a world scale (Arrighi, 1994; Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005; Wallerstein, 1974). We focus on what we term raw materialist lengthened GCCs (Ciccantell et al., 2023; Ciccantell and Smith, 2009; Sowers et al., 2014). Our formulation returns to Hopkins and Wallerstein’s (1982, 1986) emphasis on examining class relations, spatio-temporal relations, capital accumulation, the role of states in the interstate system, and long-term social change. This builds on key pioneering insights about the roles of slavery and racialized labor in the construction, development, and long-term change of the modern world-system (Rodney, 2018 [1972]; Bush, 1999, 2009; Williams, 1944). It also integrates our recent work on capital-labor relations, contestation, and resistance at particular nodes in commodity chains (Bair and Werner, 2011; Ciccantell et al., 2023) and chokepoints that present opportunities for and constraints on labor and social movement organizations (Ciccantell et al., 2023, 2024; Sowers et al., 2014). Here, we provide a brief overview of crucial scholarship to better contextualize our argument that capital accumulation and race existed in a mutually constitutive relationship over the last five hundred years.
In their original formulation of commodity chains in the capitalist world-economy, Hopkins and Wallerstein (1982, 1986) sought to systematize the sometimes amorphous understandings of underdevelopment and the relationship between the development of the core and its lack in the periphery (see Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Frank, 1966; Jalee, 1969). The broad processes of surplus extraction, unequal exchange, and exploitation could be concretely examined by analyzing the material processes in particular industries that extracted raw materials (mineral and biological), migrant labor ( ‘free’ or enslaved), agricultural land and its produce, or other forms of wealth from peripheries to enrich core states and firms. European states’ trade networks and imperial expansion strategies from the late 1400s and early 1500s shaped the geographic expansion of the capitalist world-economy, the incorporation of lands and peoples as nodes in these chains that supported European industrialization, exploitative labor migration, and impoverished peripheries (Ciccantell et al., 2023; Ciccantell and Smith, 2009; Sowers et al., 2014).
The raw materialist lengthened GCCs approach (Ciccantell and Smith, 2009) was developed precisely because of the lack of attention to the upstream end of commodity chains. This model (Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005, 2007) begins from a focus on the material process of economic ascent of great powers, which, over the past five centuries, sought to obtain large and increasing volumes of raw materials necessary for their continued economic development in competition with the existing hegemon and other rising economies. The competitive advantages created by organizational and technological innovations in generative sectors and by subsidies (e.g. low-cost raw materials from peripheries) led to global trade dominance. The most successful cases of ascent restructure and progressively globalize the world economy, incorporating and reshaping economies, ecosystems, and space (Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005, 2007).
Where logistics is concerned, one recent analyst (Khalili, 2020: 11, quoting Rodney, 2018 [1972]) argues that the emergence of transport networks, like roads and railways, single-mindedly designed to move African raw material exports to the sea, were crucial ‘sinews’ of the world economy. While these commodity chains led to underdevelopment and resource drain in Africa, they were also critical to facilitate long-term change in the capitalist world-economy. Economies and states that created the most secure and lowest cost transport networks for their raw materials–based commodity chains gained critical advantages in the process of economic ascent and in challenging other states for hegemonic positions in the capitalist world-economy (Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005, 2007; Ciccantell and Smith, 2009).
Relevant here, our approach provides a lens to examine spatially based disarticulations (the marginalization or outright elimination of particular nodes) (Bair and Werner, 2011) and contestations over extraction, processing, transport, consumption, and waste disposal across these chains. This grounded analysis can examine development trajectories and the contestation and resistance over the division of costs and benefits in particular nodes in chains (Ciccantell et al., 2023, 2024; Ciccantell and Smith, 2009; Sowers et al., 2014). One particularly important form of resistance is the creation of diseconomies of resistance, in which labor, social movement organizations, or other groups utilize chokepoints and/or other opportunities to raise the cost of locating particular nodes of chains in specific locations (Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness, 2018; Ciccantell et al., 2023; Sowers et al., 2014).
Issues of race, racism, migration, and resistance are at the core of both European efforts to exploit Africa beginning in the 16th century and of the following, more recent, logistics industry, later reinterpreted in its operation as a network of consumer and production chains in the 21st century. Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese (2020) note that even today, logistics networks are run by white men supervising large labor forces of women and people of color in warehouses and other low-level jobs. These racialized workers often also have precarious citizenship status. Migrant workers are not excluded from these labor markets, but rather differentially included often with lower rates of pay or fewer labor protections (Mezzadra and Nielson, 2013). This, of course, is nothing new. As world-systems analysis shows, bordering in the world-economy has always been used by capital to differentiate norms of remuneration for work (Silver, 2003). Considering these insights together suggests that race and racism are constitutive elements of the logistics chain that are also foundational to justify hierarchy and exploitation across the capitalist world-economy (Balibar and Wallerstein, 1991; Potiker et al., 2024). This dynamic is a key corporate strategy used to divide workers, cut costs, and impede labor solidarity and cooperation. Similar to Rodney’s (2018 [1972]) analysis of the historical underdevelopment of Africa, racism is embedded in the very sinews of contemporary capitalism even in this era of e-commerce – and some of those racial groups arrive as migrants, even in places like the distinct regions of the contemporary United States (Potiker et al., 2024).
In sum, we argue that the capitalist world-economy and racism were – and continue to be – inextricably linked in a material and ideological relationship that is both profound and exploitative. This relationship rests on a long history of the creation and reproduction of commodity chains connecting extractive peripheries and more powerful core states. Indeed, we know from scholarship that giant companies like Amazon very skillfully control and facilitate the movement of consumer goods and containers across a range of national borders and via ports and other transportation modalities – indeed, sometimes even the warehouse workers in places like the United States, literally, ‘walk across borders’ to provide affordable labor here (Potiker et al., 2024). Our larger goal in extending our analysis to these raw materialist lengthened commodity chains is to analyze the role of transport and distribution as generative sectors driving economic development via economies of scale, reducing diseconomies of space, and expanding their geographic scale and scope. In attempting to contribute to a critical study of logistics, we emphasize the centrality of transport and distribution to capital accumulation and turnover, and the efficiency of capital investments at both the upstream raw materials and downstream consumer ends of these chains. In the United States and other core countries, we now know that many worldwide chains of consumer goods rely on production in places like China or other Asian countries (and Amazon’s leaders are also aware of this) – so border crossing, trade rules, and tariffs become tantamount.
Our methods to examine the growth of Amazon and its significance for reshaping elements of the 21st-century world economy combine several types of methods and evidence. We conducted secondary analysis of Amazon’s corporate documents and business press coverage of Amazon and other retail and logistics firms. We also examined the rapidly expanding work in critical logistics studies on Amazon and other leading firms in the platform economy. We developed databases on Amazon and other logistics firms and transportation industries. We also conducted qualitative field research on Amazon, including observations of operations, interviews with managers and workers, and active participation with stakeholders in several facilities, labor organizations, and communities (Potiker, 2023). This research included 27 semi-structured interviews with Amazon warehouse workers, labor organizers, managers, warehouse developers, and adjacent non-governmental organization members in the Otay Mesa region; participatory research with Amazonians United on Amazon’s central air hub in Northern Kentucky; warehouse employment data, commercial real estate industry reports, and leaked internal Amazon memos in the Inland Empire; as well as primary document source analysis from newspaper articles and industry reports (Ciccantell et al., 2024; Potiker, 2023; Potiker et al., 2024).
According to Bonacich and Hardie (2006: 163), there are two meanings of logistics, including the classic ‘nuts-and-bolts distribution functions that a firm must undertake, namely, transportation and warehousing’, as well as the more recent ‘management of the supply chain, including the relations between retailers, their producers/suppliers and their carrier/transportation providers’. Consistent with this view of logistics as a driver of the global economy, Allen (2020: 153) contends in an analysis of UPS that ‘the rise of modern logistics [is] the force reshaping global capitalism’, a point that takes inspiration from Marx, who, in Capital Volume II, argued that ‘circulation’ operates as a specific mode of accumulation by selling a ‘change in location’ (Chua, 2022). Furthermore, logistics has become a generative sector in and of itself, not just an intermediary between stages in commodity chains (Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, 2020). This results in entire urban, suburban, and semi-urban regions that develop to accommodate supply chain infrastructure such as highways, warehouses, railyards, and ports (Danyluk, 2021). These supply chain centered urban centers also bring change to the racial geographies of regions due to the racialized nature of work along the supply chain (De Lara, 2018).
If value is created through circulation by selling a change in location, then that same value added can potentially be leveraged and negotiated by logistics workers (e.g. truckers, warehouse workers, longshoremen, etc.) to achieve tangible gains in their work lives. If such workers can create a bottleneck or a chokepoint within the logistical network of a company, they can create substantial ‘stakes’ to achieve demands for higher pay, union recognition, or even political demands, such as when dock workers in the Northern California refused to offload South African cargo in solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement (Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness, 2018). However, chokepoints are place-dependent, meaning that they can only exist if they effectively ‘choke’ operations to something of a halt (Ciccantell et al., 2023).
Examining these lengthened logistic chains in the 21st century reveals that there is something rather
Warehouses (the traditional term for facilities in which firms store goods prior to distribution to stores and consumers), distribution centers (the term coined by Wal-Mart to describe their increasingly sophisticated and efficient regional warehouses that supplied their growing national and then international network of stores), and fulfillment centers (Amazon’s restructured facilities that were modeled on Wal-Mart but in recent years were reorganized to increase the efficiency of distribution to consumers’ homes) are key links in organizational strategies and in product movement across commodity chains (see Stone, 2013: Chapter 6). In and of themselves, warehouses and distribution centers are not new: they were critical elements of the rise of the world’s largest 20th-century retailer, the Atlantic & Pacific (A&P) grocery chain (Levinson, 2011), and later for Wal-Mart, the model for much of Amazon’s corporate strategy today (Levinson, 2011; Moody, 2020; Stone, 2013) as Wal-Mart drove a retail revolution (Vallas, 2019).
Clearly, economies of scale are critical to reduce the diseconomies of space for retailers. This is a strategy embraced by the A&P grocery company producing their rapid early 20th-century growth, by Wal-Mart to drive smaller competitors out of business, and by Amazon’s economies of scale typified through their status as the ‘everything store’ (Levinson, 2011; Stone, 2013, 2021). It is, however, important to recognize that economies of scale offer a variety of other benefits beyond just efficiency, including increased negotiating power over suppliers, lower marketing costs, and ‘everyday low prices’ compared to competitors with higher costs (Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, 2020). It is unsurprising that strategies to exert control over and contain rising costs of labor are critical elements of organizational strategy (and, interestingly, racialized migrant workers are part of Amazon’s strategy on this). Economies of scale and the ability to overcome diseconomies of space (e.g. Amazon’s efforts to resolve the ‘last mile’ problem by creating their own logistics delivery network) are not simply evidence of economic efficiency and increasing labor organization and expense; they are also critical sources of power over competitors, consumers, states, and, in fact, workers (see Alimahomed-Wilson, 2021 for a discussion of how Amazon’s internalization of logistics helps avoid union workers). While state investigations of A&P, Wal-Mart, and Amazon as the largest retailers were not uncommon over the past century (Stone, 2021: 202), these studies are typically limited because of the economic and political power of these firms, along with challenges from workers (Alimahomed-Wilson, 2021).
Following the logic of their precursor, Wal-Mart, the geographic dispersal and small-scale local and regionally focused economic activity represented an opportunity for Amazon to use its economies of scale and economic and political power to minimize worker pay and accrue incredible profits. In this new era of e-commerce, the problems of diseconomies of space (with the ‘race to the bottom’ in outsourcing of production and the consequent damage to labor rights and renumeration) now constitute new specific threats like the ‘last mile’ delivery cost problem. What appeared as an inefficiency, and economic opportunity, for Amazon was in fact a protective diseconomy of space for local and regional firms, economies, and communities that promoted the interests of firms, workers, and governments (Smith and Ciccantell, 2024). The pressures for de-globalization represent an effort to re-evaluate the benefits, costs and risks of globalization by a wide range of actors, a re-evaluation that often includes critiques of Amazon and its dependence on GCCs that extend thousands of miles in search of low-cost raw materials and labor (Ciccantell et al., 2023; Smith and Ciccantell, 2024).
While employment in this sector in the United States grew since the logistics revolution began in the 1960s (Bonacich and Wilson, 2008), over the past decade a distinct subtype of logistics employment burgeoned: specifically, that linked to e-commerce called the ‘e-logistics revolution’ (Alimahomed-Wilson, 2021). The conditions for workers are part of the growth of platform capitalism, particularly the reclassifying of workers in the United States from employees to independent contractors, a change tracible to the 1970s deregulation of the trucking industry (Vallas, 2019: 53). However, what separates the e-logistics revolution from the traditional logistics revolution is both the speed and geographic scale at which the supply chains operate. In the classic Wal-Mart model (Bonacich and Wilson, 2008), retailers often utilized a hub and spoke system in which a major distribution center sits at about equal distance from several retail stores in a region. Amazon also follows this pattern with more than 100 ‘fulfillment’ hubs by 2024, spread across the United States (Custommapposter, 2024) that create large employment opportunities across the company’s platform economy (Hassel and Sieker, 2022). Since a key problem with this approach for corporations is that a bottleneck at a single warehouse can prevent goods from getting to the storefront on time, giant firms attempt to set up many alternative hubs (Ciccantell et al., 2024; Potiker et al., 2024). Once more, many of these hubs take advantage of specific locations that rely on migratory and racialized labor (for instance, the Latino/a migrants in the Inland Empire or Otay Mesa in southern California or Central American workers in the airport center in Kentucky) (Potiker, 2023).
However, the e-logistics revolution is governed by a distinct logic, one that prioritizes speed and new geographic patterns to ensure that goods arrive directly to consumers exactly when promised. In practice, this means that e-commerce has sped up the supply chain. This causes a host of changes in the way goods move to ensure the timeliness of deliveries, which is now the main priority. This is true even if it means utilizing transportation modes that are seen as ‘too expensive’ or ‘less efficient’ in the past, including a greater reliance on airfreight, less than full truck load shipments, and smaller ocean vessels (Alimahomed-Wilson, 2021). Additional changes related to e-commerce concern the changing spatial distribution of warehouses. Amazon fulfillment centers and distribution centers are often clustered in semi-urban and suburban areas that feed sortation centers in the core of urban areas – and there are normally several sortation centers in a single urban area as well. An advantage to this approach for corporate interests is that bottlenecks that might happen at a major distribution center in Amazon’s supply chain network, often can shift the supply chain around it by either using a different distribution center in the area or using their extensive airfreight network to bring goods in from another region. These patterns of major distribution centers, warehouses and transportation networks in these sprawling supply chains also emerge as loci for both organized labor and for worker challenges for major corporations, including Amazon and other businesses delivering to customers (Potiker et al., 2024).
These physical facilities and the transport systems that connect them to both global production systems and to consumers are linked together and controlled by Amazon’s innovations in information technology, a foundational element of 21st-century platform capitalism, what Srnicek (2017) calls a new economic system based on new information and communication technologies. Liang et al. (2022) identify four key elements of this new system: crowdsourcing, the sharing economy, the gig economy, and the technology platform. For Amazon, the gig economy of subcontracting, temporary work, and other forms of nonstandard employment help reduce labor costs and increase control via precarity of employment (Vallas, 2019; Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, 2020; Hassel and Sieker, 2022).
It is critical to recognize, however, that, despite the novelty of some elements of platform capitalism, there are many historical continuities. For example, as Steinberg (2022) argues, many dimensions of platform capitalism were in fact created by the ‘Toyotism’ system that allowed Japanese automakers to decimate their US competitors in the late 20th century. Toyota developed sophisticated data-driven systems to make decisions and to carefully control costs and product quality long before the Internet and cloud computing (Steinberg, 2022). Similarly, we argue that, over a much longer time period, patterns developed by European imperialism, commodity chains dependent on enslaved labor and migration and systems of global inequality, created key elements of the platform economy, including the use of mobile racialized labor (see the way ‘hubs’ conform to this, above).
Historically, each of these different forms of economic organization created distinct landscapes for workers and labor. For instance, the classical Fordist era of manufacturing allowed traditional labor unions to improve workers’ lives because labor campaigns could directly target the geography of in-country production facilities. The shift to Post-Fordism in the late 20th century changed the global economy, and with it, the landscape confronting workers and labor interests. Far-flung and flexibly organized decentralized commodity chains were made up of groups of workers who engaged in various acts of transportation and logistics, like longshoremen, warehouse workers, and truckers, and consequently, a key labor strategy emerged that focused on creating bottlenecks or ‘chokepoints’ (Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness, 2018; Bonacich and Wilson, 2008) in strategic locations within commodity chains. The dominance of customer-driven e-commerce, however, is yet another significant economic shift with ramifications for workers. It makes finding strategic nodes in Amazon’s and other leading corporation’s supply chain networks all the more important and perhaps all the more difficult, given the increased flexibility that Amazon and other e-commerce actors are building into their networks to enable them to shift or restructure around potential bottlenecks (Potiker et al., 2024). Indeed, it seems obvious that giant firms (like Amazon) establish hubs and distributions centers to take advantage of the existence of pools of low-wage, predominantly racialized and migrant workers in various regions of the United States, including the work of Mexican and Central American workers in places like Otay Mesa (Potiker, 2023), the Inland Empire, and airport nodes like one Amazon operates in Kentucky.
Amazon and 21st-Century Capitalism
Here we will examine the physical dimensions of Amazon’s supply chains, highlighting its dependence on globalization, racial/migratory workforces, and the challenges to this model in the 2020s. To understand Amazon logistics system, we also need to appreciate how that company ‘controls’ and ‘internalizes’ logistics processes to the maximum effect. Part of this links to the use of data and surveillance as part of ‘rule by algorithm’ within warehouses (Emmons Allison and Reese, 2023: 98). This is different from other logistic patterns that involve warehouses and nodes controlled by other mainly logistic-focused firms. By having direct ‘control’ of all aspects of these chains (including the various logistical works and trucks decked out with Amazon’s logos), it may be easier for this company to fully be ‘in charge’.
Furthermore, Amazon tends to create redundancies in its network to hedge against possible disruptions, such as using several hubs in the same area instead of using a ‘super-hub’. This, in turn, creates a flexible system of nodes within their distribution network, allowing for substitution in the face of a supply chain problem at any particular node (Potiker et al., 2024). Furthermore, these hubs, in many cases, lean on racialized migratory labor forces as critical.
We can identify several critical material trends in logistics. First, the rapid increase in the scale of container shipping that moves manufactured goods, but also a surprisingly large share of grain, metals, and other bulk commodities flows around the world, has continued (Khalili, 2020). However, the incredible risks in this scale of shipping were dramatically illustrated when EverGiven, an enormous ship piled high with containers, blocked the Suez Canal for almost a week (Tharoor, 2021). Economies of scale reduce per unit costs but also create huge new risks in supply chains.
Second, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed several critical challenges for logistics and GCCs more generally. Lockdowns, worker illnesses, port closures and backlogs, airfreight disruption, and border closures disrupted supply chains across all industries (AJOT, 2021b; Bloomberg News, 2021; Lynch, 2021; Murray and Monteiro, 2020). However, in contrast to the pandemic-era struggles of most industries and firms, the demand and profits for Amazon soared in large part due to these disruptions (Stone, 2021).
Third, ongoing consolidation in ocean shipping, railroads, and other transportation industries and policy efforts in the United States and other nations to counteract consolidation, increasing market power, and rising prices created intense conflicts in the United States and other countries. Allen (2020: 169) highlighted industry consolidation in logistics networks and analysts emphasized rising container shipping costs (Murray, 2021a). Concerned about high shipping costs, President Biden issued an executive order for the Federal Maritime Commission to investigate this trend and the concentration in container shipping (Murray, 2021b). There were similar concerns about concentration and shipping costs in the US railroad industry in the context of the Canadian National-Kansas City Southern merger (Blum, 2021).
Fourth, while these disruptions created opportunities for organized labor at port chokepoints (AJOT, 2021a). Amazon’s corporate strategies focus on avoiding the risk of chokepoints and the power of labor. This tension is exemplified within Amazon itself. On one hand, MacGillis (2021: 133) emphasizes
the bigger Amazon got and the more it dominated local labor markets, the less competition it faced for workers, and the less it needed to pay to hire them. . . [and] it made it much easier to stamp out union efforts to organize warehouse workers when workers left before developing ties.
On the other hand, ‘the tighter the supply chain, and the faster goods move into, through, and out of, Amazon’s capital-intensive facilities, the more vulnerable is its logistics system to disruption’ (Moody, 2020: 28). As argued elsewhere (Ciccantell et al., 2023; Potiker et al., 2024; Sowers et al., 2014), these vulnerabilities or chokepoints in supply chains are key potential locations for workers and social movement organizations to exert power over large corporations such as Amazon. Indeed, scholars document increased labor organizing at Amazon chokepoints in recent years in places like Southern California, Chicago, and Staten Island (see Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, 2020; Emmons Allison and Reese, 2023; Hsu and Selyukh, 2022). Importantly, a major Amazon strike facilitated by the Teamsters Union occurred in the 2024 holiday season spanning multiple strategic locations, including Atlanta, New York, Illinois, multiple hubs in California, and even warehouse workers in Staten Island (Isidore and Yurkevich, 2024; Mena, 2024), which is more evidence that workers are organizing to leverage chokepoints into tangible gains.
Logistics has always been a central element of Amazon’s business, beginning with the challenge of shipping consumers’ purchases from the ‘World’s Largest Bookstore’ (Stone, 2013). Amazon’s logistics evolved from individuals carrying boxes of books to the US Postal Service, UPS, and FedEx, to closely coupled partnerships with these firms, to often acrimonious contract negotiations as sales volumes exploded, to building an increasingly extensive internal logistics capability of trucks, airplanes, delivery vans, and hundreds of fulfillment centers and other facilities (Allen, 2020; Hassel and Sieker, 2022; Stone, 2013, 2021).
While the firm was not averse to outsourcing and subcontracting parts of the chain, it is important to emphasize, again, that Amazon’s dominant recent logic is to
Amazon’s scale and network of distribution centers creates potential chokepoints that labor and social movements could exploit. The company consistently recognizes this and strategizes to avoid being vulnerable to these potential chokepoints; indeed, some suggest that Amazon learned from other companies. Currently, Amazon is opening distribution centers and delivery stations across the United States, seemingly every few days. Two key recent strategies include the opening of the CVG air hub in Northern Kentucky in the Cincinnati Metro Area for Amazon’s air network and the development of the Otay Mesa San Diego warehouse next to the Otay Mesa port of entry on the United States–Mexico border. Coupled with the Otay Mesa warehouse is a second warehouse in Tijuana just a few miles to the south. The warehouses are used as part of a cross-border trade nexus.
All of the major hubs mentioned above (CVG, Otay Mesa, and Tijuana) rely on a heavily racialized workforce akin to the earlier stages of the world-system described by Wallerstein, Rodney and Robinson. In fact, it is important to assert that these theorists saw racism (and exploitative migration) as constitutive to accumulation, exploitation and inequality in both the early world-system and today’s profits by giant firms. Indeed, CVG relies on migrant labor largely from West Africa and Guatemala as well as a high number of black workers from the southern United States (Potiker et al., 2024). The Otay Mesa facility relies on Mexican labor that commutes each day across the border from Tijuana (Gurley, 2022). These workers exist in a legal gray area, making exploitation of their labor easier for the company. The wages of the workers in the Otay Mesa facility are the lowest of any facility in California because of the heightened precarity workers face (Potiker, 2023). The Tijuana warehouse relies on labor both from Mexico and migrants within Mexico. Tijuana is a migratory city with many people from Central America, the Caribbean, and Southern Mexico who originally had attempted to come to the United States before being stuck in Tijuana due to migration policy in the United States. The workers in Tijuana make in a day about what a worker in the United States makes in an hour.
A leaked internal Amazon memo detailed the company would run out of workers in key regional labor markets, including inland Southern California, within the next 5 years (Del Rey, 2022). In terms of the current hybrid model (which includes a lot of high labor churn in the warehouse), the tension between vertical integration and flexible gig labor shows itself in expecting workers to remain with the company for less than 3 years (Tung and Berkowitz, 2020). Despite warehouse workers’ formal status as employees, Amazon privileges short-term productivity over employee permanence. The result is hiring more than the equivalent of its entire frontline workforce every year, double the attrition of the nearest comparable industry wide attrition rates in retail (Del Rey, 2022). Automated supervision is often responsible for firings via surveillance technologies, based on time off-task and unmet quotas. One shift the memo recommends involves utilizing human resources to a greater extent in warehouse location decisions ‘to apply labor forecasts to future site selection’ (Del Rey, 2022). This suggests the company may target specific regions based on worker characteristics, likely further contributing to Amazon’s already heavily racialized and immigrant frontline labor force (Reese, 2020). Amazon recently decided to build major distribution centers in Otay Mesa San Diego, and El Paso. Part of the reason for building these warehouses is to access migrant labor that commutes across the border each day for work. These workers exist in a state of heightened precarity due to racialization and citizenship status and therefore are captive to the labor markets along the United States side of the border (Emmons Allison and Reese, 2023). Worker turnover and shortages are exacerbated by the consequences of dangerous working conditions at Amazon facilities. In 2021, Amazon’s injury rate remained double the non-Amazon industry average, including longer recovery times for serious injuries (Strategic Organizing Center, 2022).
The Inland Empire in southern California is one region fully transformed through Amazon warehouses. This region is located 40–60 miles inland from the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which together handle about 40% of container traffic coming into the United States, making them the largest container ports in the nation. Connected through an extensive road and rail network in proximity to one of the largest population centers in the United States, the western portions of Riverside and San Bernardino Counties are now the largest or one of the largest logistics warehouse hubs in the United States and one of the largest in the world (Emmons Allison, 2020; Gutelius and Theodore, 2019). The growth of online retail launched inland southern California into the highest concentration of warehouse workers in the United States. Amazon is at the forefront of this transformation, accounting for half of all freight moving through the region by 2018 (Flaming and Burns, 2019). As in other US regions, Amazon relies heavily on racialized labor to staff frontline warehouse work. Latinx workers comprise 75% of non-supervisory warehouse jobs in the region, half of whom are non-US born (Emmons Allison et al., 2018).
Conclusion
What can early studies on Africa’s history of colonialism and slavery tell us about the newly created and redesigned 21st-century logistics industry and world economy? We argue that Africa was reconstructed as a critical periphery for European imperial powers: a source of many desired things including enslaved labor for European colonies, the critical role of racialized migratory labor, tropical plantation crops, and a wide range of necessary mineral products. Today, the 21st-century model of capitalism exemplified by Amazon rests on a similar logic: it combines the globalization of supply chains via low-cost racialized, migratory, peripheral labor with utilizing sites of inexpensive labor for moving goods and providing fast delivery in core consuming locations. Amazon’s physical facilities and the transport systems that link them to both global production systems and consumers are connected and controlled by Amazon’s innovations in information technology, a foundational element of 21st-century platform capitalism. However, despite the novelty of some elements of platform capitalism, there are many historical continuities underlying this system, whether from Toyota’s innovative uses of data or, over a much longer time period, patterns developed by European imperialism of commodity chains dependent on enslaved labor and systems of global inequality. Hundreds of years of race-based slavery and Transatlantic movement of people in bondage are not reproduced entirely now. However, we claim that racialized hierarchies and coercive migration of poor people who become employed in hierarchically-defined worldwide supply chains (including warehouses and logistics in the United States) reveal the continuity of patterns of racial capitalism of the long-term establishment of racial discrimination and exploitation. There are undeniable ways that Amazon and other large information society corporations end up learning from and replicating these patterns. We argue that racial difference is used to disempower workers across the centuries. A clear difference between Africa centuries ago and platform capitalism now is that, in former systems of slavery and colonialism, race is very obviously at the center of the system. However, today citizenship status often obscures the fact that it is a similar process of racialization. The two systems are in effect the same because workers are being legally constructed as a second-class group that puts downward pressure on wages and working conditions. Racialized labor in Amazon warehouses and in London’s Ubers driven by South Asian men (Gebrial, 2024) are both key components of the platform economy and continuities from European efforts to enrich Europe and impoverish Africa, Latin America and Asia over the last five centuries.
Earlier supply chains in raw materials were grounded in the naturally determined locations of mineral deposits, agricultural land, and forest ecosystems. Imperial powers created peripheries designed to extract and ship these commodities to the core (Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005). In contrast, Amazon is now constructing logistics peripheries near core consumers reliant on low cost, racialized labor (often based on migrants from peripheral nations) next door to wealthy core consumers who want the instant gratification of same-day delivery (Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese, 2020).
Value added, whether through racialized enslaved labor or specialized exotic commodities like ivory and rubber or copper and other minerals, had to be mobile in Africa, while labor was tied to particular locations and controlled by colonial states, taxes, or other imperial means. Amazon as a giant firm similarly emphasizes the mobility of commodities while recruiting and controlling labor within fulfillment centers and low-cost neighborhoods (often relying on regular pools of racialized and/or immigrant workers), even if that means crossing international borders to work in their facilities. This is certainly true with Latino/a labor in Inland Empire facilities or Mexican workers crossing the border in Otay Mesa (Potiker et al., 2024) – but it also may happen elsewhere too (Guatemalans in the Amazon transport hub in Kentucky or Somali migrants in a Minneapolis warehouse). Critical studies of logistics show that the spatial fixity on the upstream end of worldwide supply chains for raw materials from these earlier eras is replicated in the 21st century in Amazon’s efforts to locate facilities close to consumers, making Amazon’s procurement and shipment exposed to chokepoints and union organization just as earlier raw materials GCCs were vulnerable (Alimahomed-Wilson and Ness, 2018; Potiker et al., 2024).
Cheap land, cheap labor, and government subsidies were critical to overcome the ‘first mile’ problem of raw materials extraction under imperial and neo-imperial models, as they are for Amazon’s ‘last mile’ problem of fast delivery to consumers. Amazon has, after its early rhetorical denigration of ‘legacy firms’, resorted to the same firm strategies of efforts to create a monopoly and vertical integration across all stages of production and transportation. The seemingly benign sociological description of ‘segmented labor markets’ for the late 20th and early 21st century that Amazon utilizes to employ workers stratified and divided by race, age, residence, and citizenship status parallels earlier labor systems of racialized slavery and the division of the working class in 19th- and 20th-century Guyana between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese that Rodney sought to analyze and overcome (Rodney, 1981). Furthermore, Amazon’s racialized labor force is illustrative of the co-constitutive relationship between racism and capital accumulation and expansion that Cedric Robinson detailed throughout his career. Pressures toward de-globalization in the 2020s could wreck Amazon’s strategies in the same way that anti-colonial revolutions and resource nationalism wrecked imperialism and neo-imperialism in the late 20th century. Trade wars, efforts to re-shore production of critical medical supplies, and broader nationalist economic policies threaten global supply chains in much the same way that rebellions against European control over the Suez Canal and oilfields ended British and French neo-imperial strategies in the Middle East.
The historical parallel between the shifting strategies of European colonial powers to exploit their African colonies and those used by Amazon may seem very distinct and different. But, actually, Amazon’s shifting strategies are striking. European colonial powers typically initially sought to utilize decentralized commercial concessions in the late 1800s and early 1900s to build infrastructure, extract forest resources, and generate revenue (for instance, see Daughton, 2021 on the Congo Ocean Railroad in French West Africa). These concessions, while sometimes quite profitable for concessionaires, often failed to meet colonial goals and brutalized African communities and workers. Colonial governments moved toward direct state control of key sectors and projects, sometimes in collaboration with large home country firms (Daughton, 2021). Amazon’s vertical integration follows this same pattern of moving away from reliance on outside partners like UPS, FedEx, and USPS to take direct control over transport, distribution, and other aspects of commodity chains. Clearly, Amazon and other modern digitally-based companies do not directly rely on enslaved labor – but they do look for highly exploitable workers who may be less likely to organize for better pay and safer working conditions due to a lack of rights associated with citizenship status or a heightened state of precarity due to their racialized status in the labor market.
Overall, European colonialism in Africa and Amazon’s corporate strategies both rely on and reinforce racial and ethnic inequalities by predominantly employing workers of color and immigrant labor forces to gather rubber, build railroads, and deliver the latest consumer trends, thus enriching themselves and impoverishing workers. As we know, these large, enslaved labor forces also worked in North American plantations to keep agricultural production efficient and low cost – or in Caribbean plantations or Latin American mines. It may seem very different, but, in fact, race remains a critical component of the capitalist world-economy in the 21st century. The parallels to what occurred during colonialism and the Transatlantic slave trade five centuries ago are striking. Why else would US politicians in 2023 insist that ‘slaves learned valuable skills during slavery’ in television news interviews (NBC News, 2023), when in fact one of the key technological innovations in iron processing that facilitated the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain was a technology developed by enslaved Africans in the Caribbean based on their ironworking skills learned in Africa (Bulstrode, 2023)? Our analysis reveals key parallels between some of the oldest and newest industries in the capitalist world-economy, from the plantation economies relying on enslaved Africans to racialized/migratory workers now working in US Amazon workers.
