Film International 13 2 June 2015

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Introduction

When James Cameron’s Avatar was released in 2009 it shattered records to become the most profitable film of all time.1 It won numerous accolades, includ-ing three of the nine Academy Awards it was nomi-nated for. The film received generally positive reviews from film critics, who focused on its groundbreaking special effects. But observers approaching the film from a diverse range of sociopolitical perspectives advanced a number of critiques (Kapell and McVeigh 2011). Some progressives, while recognizing Avatar’s overarching themes of environmentalism and anti-imperialism, expressed concern over the film’s char-acterization of the protagonist, a defector from the colonial power, being responsible for the ultimate salvation of the native peoples (Joffe 2010; Žižek 2010; Barnhill 2010; Ketchum, Embrick and Peck 2011; Alessio and Meredith 2012; Eckstrand 2014). However, the film provoked a much broader backlash from conservative commentators, who perceived an anti-capitalistic, anti-Christian and anti-military – in a word, anti-American – agenda in Avatar. This is not to suggest there was uniform conservative oppro-brium towards the film (see Stegall 2009; Marlowe 2009; Milliner 2010; Sailer 2010). However, a repre-sentative assessment condemned ‘its mindless wor-ship of a nature-loving tribe and the tribe’s adorable pagan rituals, its hatred of the military and American institutions’ (Podhoretz 2009; see also Salam 2009; Nolte 2009). A Canadian publication even went so

‘The Merchant Is Become the Sovereign’

Corporate imperialism in James Cameron's Avatar

By Si Sheppard

Keywords Avatar, corporate imperialism, colonialism, science fiction, migration, East India Company

Articles ‘The Merchant Is Become the Sovereign’ Below Avatar (2009)

42 | film international issue 72

Articles ‘The Merchant Is Become the Sovereign’

far as to denounce the film as ‘the perfect cinematic embodiment of anti-Americanism’ (Fulford 2010). In order to defend such institutions, conservatives consistently sought to downgrade the significance of Avatar’s contribution to the sociopolitical nar-rative by deriding its supposedly lightweight intel-lectual qualities. One conservative columnist after another dismissed the film as ‘deeply stupid. Relent-lessly stupid. Occasionally mind-bogglingly stupid’ (Douthat 2009), ‘one of the stupidest major movies in recent memory’ (Suderman 2009), ‘remarkably stu-pid’ (Podhoretz 2010) and ‘so stupid it might well be called stupefying’ (Hunter 2010).

It is my contention that, far from being just another disposable, ideologically inert Hollywood action blockbuster, Avatar in fact advances a coher-ent and insightful sociopolitical critique that draws upon the historical narrative of corporate imperial-ism in order to project that narrative into the future. Over the course of this essay I will (1), provide histor-ical background to the role played by privately held corporations at the vanguard of European commer-cial and colonial imperialism during the 1600–1860 era; (2), discuss the portrayal of corporations in sci-ence fiction literature and film, with a focus on Ava-tar; and (3), investigate whether the same process of outsourcing exploration, trade and military func-tions by states to corporations, as occurred in (1), is happening again now, setting the stage for the socio-political environments depicted in (2).

The mercantile companies

There have been three great phases of human migra-tion throughout history. The first, the exodus of mod-ern man from Africa, had incorporated all of the habitable environments of the globe by the time it

arrived at its final chapter with the settlement of the most remote and isolated island chains of the Pacific Ocean. The second took place during the Columbian Exchange, which incorporated the migration (much of it forced) of populations along the networks estab-lished by the imperial projects of the European pow-ers. The third – still in its embryonic stage, but fast developing – will be defined by the foundation of human colonies off-world, initially within our Solar System, later in deep space (O’Neill 2000; Schmidt and Zubrin 1996; Krone 2006).

This third phase of migration will be differenti-ated from the previous two by a whole new order of technology. However, the pattern of settlement during the second phase (the Age of Sail) allows for the identification in advance of issues that must be taken into consideration before proceed-ing. The most significant of these is the impact of the unprecedented distances involved, from mother country to colonies, and between the colonies them-selves. This will place immense pressure not just on the technical requirements of the colony (propul-sion to destination, resource allocation at destina-tion, etc.), but at the individual and social level of the colonists themselves. Further complicating this picture, the extent to which off-world colonization will be state-directed, if at all, is an open question. Increasingly, the exploration and commercial exploi-tation of outer space is being driven by the private sector. Given the extent to which states during the Age of Sail sponsored colonization efforts in partner-ship with privately held corporations, it seems highly probable that corporate interests will take a leading role in the colonization of outer space.

The era of European imperial expansion globally commenced at a time when the states of Europe themselves were still significantly underdeveloped by modern standards. Individual identity was struc-

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tured as much by doctrinal adherence as by loyalty to a specific geographical construct; central author-ity was further compromised by the privately held wealth of the landowning aristocracy, which empow-ered them to defy the writ of royal law when it encroached upon their privileges. European polities therefore failed to manifest the singular quality Max Weber (1919) described as fundamental to a viable state, namely the capacity to enforce ‘the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory’. Critically, the military functions of the state in Renaissance Europe were outsourced. The state paid for armies, entrepreneurs raised them, and mercenaries served in them (Finer 1975; Kinsey 2006; Ortiz 2010).2

Freelance military companies, whether Catalan, Swiss, Landsknecht, Hessian or condottieri, dominated the battlefields of Europe (and, during the 1775–83 War of Independence, the Americas) for centuries. Among the more prominent military entrepreneurs of the day were Louis de Geer, an Amsterdam finan-cier who provided the government of Sweden with its entire navy (officers and crews included); Count Ernest Mansfield, who raised an army for the Elector Palatine in 1618 and then put his sword at the hand of the highest bidder; Bernard von Weimar, who raised armies first for Sweden, then for France; and, most notorious, Count Albrecht von Wallenstein, whose private military machine, ‘the biggest and best orga-nized private enterprise seen in Europe before the twentieth century,’ made him the wealthiest man of his era (Kiernan 1965: 132; see also Redlich 1964; Mann 1976; Mortimer 2010).

Nowhere was the legitimization of mercenary tactics made more explicit than in the Protestant response to the imperial ambitions of Spain and Portugal in the Orient and the New World in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Britain and the Republic of the Netherlands effectively unleashed the free market against the two Iberian powers, first on an ad hoc basis by assigning contracts to naval captains – privateers, essentially legalized pirates – to wage war ‘beyond the line’ against the Catholic empires, outside the limits set by treaty obligations in Europe; and second, on an institutional basis by granting monopolies to private corporations – mer-cantile companies – to both exploit economic oppor-tunities and promote national strategic interests (Tracy 1990; Furber 1976).

The Republic of the Netherlands sponsored two such bodies, the East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), chartered in 1602, and the West India Company (Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie, or WIC), chartered in 1621. Beginning with the Muscovy Company, chartered in 1555, and the Levant Company, chartered in 1585, the British Crown sponsored a number of such part-nerships, which played a key role in expanding the physical perimeter and commercial networks of the kingdom’s nascent maritime empire (Andrews 1984; Griffiths 1974). Significantly, English colonization of the Americas was initiated by two such private enterprises, the Virginia Company and the Plymouth Company. But the greatest of these corporate ven-tures was the East India Company, which received a charter from Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 grant-ing it a monopoly on trade with all countries east

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‘Whilst the managers at home say that trade is their only object, their military servants abroad pant after conquests.’


of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of Magellan (Lawson 1993; Keay 1994; Wild 2000). This monopoly was originally set to expire after fifteen years, but it was extended for an indefinite period in 1609 by King James I, subject to the proviso it would cease to be in force if the trade proved unprofitable for three consecutive years. This was a principal means of state finance during this period; revenue-conscious monarchs used competitive bidding for monopoly rights to raise income (Anderson and Toll-ison 1983; Ekelund and Tollison 1997).

Despite fierce competition from its European rivals, by playing off the various local potentates the English East India Company gradually extended its influence throughout the Indian subcontinent, trad-ing for such staples of the expanding global mar-ket as cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpetre and tea. Throughout this process, the Company evolved into something more than a commercial enterprise. Authorized to act on its own recognizance, it flew its own flag, minted its own currency, maintained its own forts, and recruited its own army and navy (Reid 2009; Sutton 2000; Miller 1980). In 1661 King Charles II issued a new Royal charter to the Com-pany empowering it to wage war, administer justice, engage in diplomacy, acquire territory, and seize and plunder ships violating its monopoly. As Stephen R. Bown (2010: 108) notes, the Company ‘had now acquired many of the powers of a state. Its mandate, however, was to deploy these new powers in the ser-vice of the shareholders rather than of the state […]

the English company was now effectively a state within a state’.

During the Seven Years War (1756–63) the Com-pany seized the opportunity to marginalize its French rival and consolidate its control over Ben-gal, the richest state in India, thereby establishing its authority as the region’s hegemonic military as well as commercial power. From this perspective, ‘State-authorized nonstate violence proved to be highly effective’, Janice E. Thomson observes (1994: 42). ‘Mercantile companies were highly successful in establishing a European economic and political pres-ence outside the European system’ (ibid).

By this time, however, the Company’s business model and operational methods were being sub-jected to increased scrutiny and criticism from a diverse range of observers. From the beginning, many had feared vesting so much power in pri-vate entities that, in the words of the great English jurist Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), ‘cannot commit treason, nor be outlawed or excommunicated, for they have no souls’ (cited in Sampson 1995: 17). In a report submitted January 1767, a Parliamentary select committee concluded that ‘the armies [the Company] maintained, the alliances they formed and the revenues they possessed procured them consideration as a sovereign and politic, as well as a commercial body’ (cited in Dirks 2006: 178). Member of Parliament Thomas Pownall put it more bluntly when he analysed Indian affairs in 1773: ‘The mer-chant is become the sovereign’ (ibid).


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Some feared the revenue stream derived by the Exchequer from India made the Company, in con-temporary parlance, too big to fail. Since the Com-pany was now one of the financial pillars of the state, the state would be obliged to intervene if the Company’s fiscal or foreign policy mismanagement threatened its hold over the subcontinent (Thom-son 1994: 43–68). This possibility occurred even to Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey in 1757 rep-resented the vital breakthrough in the Company’s territorial expansion. As he warned William Pitt the Elder in 1759, ‘so large a sovereignty may possibly be an object too expensive for a mercantile company; and it is feared that they are not of themselves able, without the nation’s assistance, to maintain so wide a dominion’ (cited in Bown 2010: 134). Others were concerned that, because its jealously maintained monopoly rights over trade in India effectively insu-lated it from competition, the Company’s business model was conservative to the point of diminish-ing returns, both to its shareholders and, by exten-sion, to the Crown. This critique was articulated in the foundational treatise on classical economics, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). Adam Smith was willing to extend a limited duration monopoly of trade to merchant company start-ups commencing operations in ‘some remote and barbarous nation’ on the grounds it represented ‘the easiest and most natural way in which the state can recompense them for haz-arding a dangerous and expensive experiment, of which the public is afterwards to reap the benefit’ (Smith 1776 [2000]). But a monopoly in perpetuity would be at the expense of all other citizens of the state, ‘first, by the high price of goods, which, in the case of a free trade, they could buy much cheaper; and, secondly, by their total exclusion from a branch of business which it might be both convenient and profitable’ for them to engage in. This monopoly served only ‘the most worthless of all purposes’, in that it served solely

to enable the company to support the negli-gence, profusion, and malversation of their own servants, whose disorderly conduct seldom allows the dividend of the com-pany to exceed the ordinary rate of profit in trades which are altogether free, and very frequently makes it fall even a good deal short of that rate. (Smith 1776 [2000])

However, the Company’s inherited privileges still applied generations later. In his Reflections, published in 1822, Member of Parliament John Nicholls noted, ‘This Empire has been acquired by a Company of Merchants; and they retained the character of exclu-sive trader, after they had assumed that of sover-eign,’ under which guise, ‘they will oppress those who are their rivals in trade […] Sovereign and trader, are characters incompatible’ (Nicholls 1822: 249–50). This indulgence was perpetuated because the risk-averse British state had in effect been captured by its own creation. In 1813, Thomas Plummer reported that ‘scarcely any part of the British community is distinct from some personal or collateral interest in the welfare of the East India Company’, which defended its monopoly privileges directly by mak-ing loans to the state and indirectly by making loans to key policy makers and opinion shapers (Plummer in Bowen 2006: 260). A series of reforms (e.g. North’s Regulating Act of 1773, Pitt’s India Act of 1784) theo-retically brought the Company under tighter admin-istrative control by the state, but in reality did little to impinge upon its day-to-day operations.

Increasing public awareness of how those opera-tions were conducted and their implications for the indigenous population stimulated yet another line of attack against Company rule. In order to reorient the Indian economy towards maximizing the sup-ply of primary goods for the benefit of the emerg-ing industrial manufacturing base of Great Britain, the Company ruthlessly suppressed local secondary producers. As a result, ‘the misery hardly finds par-allel in the history of commerce,’ Governor General William Bentinck confessed in 1834; ‘the bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India’ (cited in Robins 2006: 149). Among those appalled by the humanitarian implications of Company rule was Adam Smith (1776). By conferring the right to main-tain a private army ‘in distant and barbarous coun-tries’, he contended, the state had delegated to the merchant companies carte blanche authority over the indigenous peoples: ‘How unjustly, how capri-ciously, how cruelly they have commonly exercised it, is too well known from recent experience’ (Smith 1776 [2000]).

Reining in such abuses was a key theme of Edmund Burke in his 1788 opening speech for the prosecution at the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, who had served as the first Governor General of Bengal, and who ‘has told your lordships in his defence, that actions in Asia do not bear the same moral qualities

By the end of the 1830s the [East India] Company could simultaneously sponsor the occupation of Kabul in Central Asia and Canton in China.


as the same actions would bear in Europe. My lords, we positively deny that principle’ (Burke, cited in Keith 1922: 143). He accused the Company of having:

formed a plan of geographical morality, by which the duties of men, in public and private situations, are not to be governed by their relation to the great Governor of the Uni-verse, or by their relation to mankind, but by climates, degrees of longitude, parallels, not of life, but of latitudes: as if, when you have crossed the equinoctial, all the virtues die. (Burke, cited in Keith 1922: 143–44)

‘This geographical morality we do protest against,’ Burke continued, arguing:

the laws of morality are the same every-where, and that there is no action which would pass for an action of extortion, of peculation, of bribery, and of oppression, in England that is not an act of extortion, of peculation, of bribery and oppression, in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world over. (Burke, cited in Keith 1922: 144–45)

But this appeal to the universal application of state law failed. Hastings was acquitted, and the Company remained, as William Playfair put it in 1799, ‘the arbi-ters of the East’ (cited in Bowen 2000: 48). This was justified by the assumption that geographical moral-ity was in fact the natural corollary of geographi-cal distance. Communications between Company House in London and its agents in India were at best tenuous, even dangerous; the Company calculated it lost 51 of the 1,038 ships that sailed for Asia between 1760 and 1796 (Bowen 2006: 155). This was signifi-cant, for there was a consensus among the cost-con-scious Company directors in London that expansion for its own sake threatened the entire enterprise, yet in practice very little could be done to control those in India who were determined to embark upon ambitious military campaigns. Company Chairman Thomas Rous complained to the House of Com-mons in April, 1767, that ‘We have never had our orders complied with – not a quarter, nor a fifth, or a sixth for these ten years past’ (Bowen 2002: 70). A parliamentary inquiry later took the view that the instructions of the directors had become ‘habitu-ally despised’ by those in India (Bowen 2006: 207–08). Accordingly, as Bengal ship owner Joseph Price put it in 1777, ‘Whilst the managers at home say that trade is their only object, their military servants abroad pant after conquests’ (cited in Bowen 2006: 205). If the Company’s own directors had limited control

over its agents in the field, state directives were rou-tinely ignored. A clause in Pitt’s India Act of 1784 had declared that ‘schemes of conquest and exten-sion of dominion in India are measures repugnant to the wish, the honour, and the policy of this nation’ (Beveridge 1862: 802). But extension of dominion was very much on the agenda of Richard Wellesley after he took his post as Governor General in 1798, forc-ing the directors to demand his resignation in 1805 on the grounds he had created a ‘new species of government and of power’ in India that had ‘widely departed from the principles of foreign policy, and from the subjection and obedience to the author-ity at home enjoined by law’ (Bowen 2006: 206). He returned to England a conquering hero, an Architect of Empire (Torrens 1880), as the title of his biography put it. But in the process he had more than tripled the Company’s debts, which soared from £9 million in 1792 to £30 million in 1809 (Torrens 1880).

As the Company’s focus evolved from commer-cial trading towards imperial administration so its responsibilities grew. After the battles of Plassey (1757) and Buxar (1764) secured Bengal for the Com-pany, it fought four wars (1769–99) to impose its authority over Mysore, and three wars (1775–1817) against the Maratha Confederacy. Further conflicts extended Company hegemony over Nepal (1814–16), Burma (1824–26) and the Sikhs (1848–52). By the end of the 1830s the Company could simultaneously sponsor the occupation of Kabul in Central Asia and Canton in China. The former, during the course of the First Afghan War (1839–42), culminated in an unmitigated disaster (Dalrymple 2013). But the lat-ter, the climax of the First Opium War (1839–42), successfully forced open the world’s most populous country to penetration by English commercial inter-ests, which saturated the Celestial Empire with an addictive and degenerative drug in the name of pri-vate profit (Lovell 2011; Fay 1975; Beeching 1975).

Even with the opium windfall the Company, burdened by its responsibilities and having been divested of its trade monopoly by the 1833 Gov-ernment of India Act, was struggling to meet its obligations (Webster 2009). Improvements in com-munications and transportation technology, such as the steamship and the telegram, which heralded the possibility of effective direct control of India from London, rendered the outsourcing of administra-tion to the Company increasingly anachronistic. The Mutiny of 1857, which shook British control of the subcontinent to its foundations, was the final straw for the Company, which found itself universally excoriated for its mismanagement in the aftermath (Fremont-Barnes 2007). Responding to pressure for the government to step in and assume direct control,


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John Stuart Mill, petitioning Parliament on behalf of the Company, warned that imperial administration of India represented ‘an ominous advance in that centralisation of all the functions of Government in the hands of the Cabinet, so justly deprecated by the soundest thinkers’ (Mill, cited in Robson 1990: 175). In response, George C. Lewis, MP, speaking for the Treasury Benches, insisted ‘no civilised government ever existed on the face of this earth which was more corrupt, more perfidious, and more rapacious than the East India Company’ (cited in Robins 2006: 164). Although the Company continued to manage the tea trade on behalf of the British Government until its dissolution on 1 June 1874, after a final dividend payment and the commutation or redemption of its stock, the era of outsourced imperial rule which had persisted for more than two and half centuries was effectively brought to an end on 1 November 1858. As Karl Marx informed the readers of the New York Tri-bune that year, the Company’s directors ‘commenced by buying sovereignty and they have ended by sell-ing it’ (Robins 2006: 165). However, although Marx might have enjoyed the last laugh on this occasion, the joke is now very much on him, as governments internationally are returning to a model of outsourc-ing functionality. The withering of the state, there-fore, is taking place because power is being divested to the corporations, not to the proletariat.

Science fiction

The era of nation-state ascendancy in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries overlapped with the birth of science fiction as a literary and then audio-visual genre. A world (or solar system, or galaxy) where the state has been eclipsed by the megacorporation is often explored in science fiction as an equally dysto-pian alternative to one where the state is all-power-ful, e.g. 1984 (1948) by George Orwell and Brazil (1985) by Terry Gilliam (Raja, Ellis and Nandi 2011; Langer 2012). Accordingly, the megacorporation is a recur-ring trope in science fiction cinema. Such entities as the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner (1982), the Buy N’ Large Corporation in Wall-E (2008), the Umbrella Corporation in Resident Evil (2002), and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in another James Cameron film, Aliens (1986), play a major role in defining the politi-cal, socio-economic and physical environment of their respective worlds. The separatist Confederacy of Independent Systems in the Star Wars prequel tril-

ogy (1999-2005) was financed by a number of com-mercial interests, including the Trade Federation, Techno Union, Banking Clan, Commerce Guild and Corporate Alliance, each of which contributed its own private army to the struggle against the Galac-tic Republic during the Clone Wars.

Several science fiction video game franchises also feature significant megacorporations. These include the Post-Terran Mining Corporation in Descent (1994); TriOptimum Corporation in System Shock (1994); Shinra Electric Power Co. in Final Fantasy (1997); Morgan Industries in Alpha Centauri (1999); Page Industries in Deus Ex (2000); and ExoGeni Corporation in Mass Effect (2007). According to its official backstory (EveOnline.com), the Caldari, one of the alien races in Eve Online, have forged a state built on corporate capitalism:

run by a few mega-corporations which divide the state between them, controlling and rul-ing every aspect of society. Each corporation is made up of thousands of smaller companies, ranging from industrial companies to law firms. All land and real estate is owned by a company which leases it to the citizens, and government and policing are also handled by independent companies. (EveOnline.com n.d.)

The megacorporation concept has been developed to its fullest extent in science fiction literature. Sev-eral authors have explored themes incorporating the implosion of the state and its marginalization, or complete supersession, by corporate entities. Leading examples include Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (1953); Neal Ste-phenson, Snow Crash (1992); Max Barry, Jennifer Gov-ernment (2003); and Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (2003). In the Otherland novels (1996-2001) by Tad Williams, the state still exists, but corporations are represented in the US Congress, with the number of seats being determined by market share.

Other authors have projected these themes from Earth to the broader palette of interstellar space. The frontier corporations in Andrey Livadny’s The History of the Galaxy series (1998- ) have their own fleets, which they use to protect their worlds from pirates and rival corporations. Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War series (2003-08) follows the fortunes of an interplan-etary trading company, Vatta Enterprises, its some-time ally, InterStellar Communications Corporation, and guns-for-hire mercenary company, Mackensee Military Assistance Corporation. (Such space-age

‘This is how it’s done. When people are sitting on shit that you want, you make them your enemy. Then you’re justified in taking it.’


condottieri are a popular theme in science fiction, for example, Jerry Pournelle’s Falkenberg’s Legion and David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers). In C. J. Cher-ryh’s Alliance-Union series (1976-2009), humanity’s colonization of other worlds is driven by a private corporation, as described in Downbelow Station (1981):

Sol Corporation, swollen beyond its original purpose and holding more stations than Sol itself, became what the star-stationers called it: the Earth Company. It wielded power […] certainly over the stations which it directed long-distance, years removed in space; and power on Earth too, where its increasing sup-ply of ores, medical items, and its possession of several patents were enormously profitable. Slow as the system was in starting, the steady arrival of goods and new ideas, however long ago launched, was profit for the Company and consequent power on Earth […] Those were the great days for those who sold this wealth; fortunes rose and fell; governments did; corporations took on more and more power, and the Earth Company in its many guises reaped immense profits and moved the affairs of nations. (Cherryh 1981: 12–13)

In the series, the heavy-handed centralized control of Earth Company ultimately provokes the declara-tion of an independent Union by the colonists, which culminates in outright rebellion and interstellar war. Those caught in the middle of this conflict, the crews

maintaining the trade routes linking both sides, sub-sequently band together to form the Merchanter’s Alliance in a bid to protect their interests and hold the balance of power.

All of these themes reach their most comprehen-sive examination in the Mars trilogy (1993-1996) by Kim Stanley Robinson. The terraforming of Mars occurs within the context of the colonists’ increas-ingly strained relationship with Earth, made more problematic by the ascendancy of the transna-tional megacorps over state governments. By the mid-twenty-first century this process had become irreversible: ‘Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government. So that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were like Lilliputians trying to tie down Gulliver’ (Robinson 1993: 357–58). In order to escape corporate hegemony many colonists emigrated to Mars because, in the words of one, ‘this system we call the transnational world order is just feu-dalism all over again’ (Robinson 1993: 343). By the year 2107, Mars Year 40, the transnationals had coalesced into the metanationals, which ‘are now the major world powers, insofar as they control the IMF, the World Bank, the Group of Eleven, and all their client countries’ (Robinson 1994: 328). These clients are acquired when a metanational assumes control over the foreign debt and internal economy of a sovereign state, which is reduced to serving as the enforcement agency of the metanational’s domestic agenda. In this environment, authority has devolved upon ‘a small metanational elite who


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were running the two worlds like feudal fiefdoms’ (Robinson 1994: 415).

The sociopolitical critique of James Cameron’s Avatar was therefore far from original, and the film is clearly influenced by a diverse range of sources in science fiction.3 However, by making profit-driven, privately-held corporate interests the antagonist in the film, which is set in an immersive, brilliantly realized alien environment, this critique was both more explicit while achieving greater popular appeal than any previous incarnation.

The film is set in the year 2154, a future in which the resource-depleted Earth is described (Duncan and Fitzpatrick 2010: 80) as ‘a war-weary, over-pop-ulated place where cities have become corporate-dominated megalopolises and the air is not fit to breathe’. An early draft of the screenplay (Cameron n.d.) goes into greater detail, describing the Earth as ‘drowning in its own toxic waste, starvation and poverty’, and ‘dying, covered with a gray mold of human civilization’. Colonization of the Moon and the planets of the Solar System has been initiated to help relocate some of the world’s 20 billion people, but:

Overpopulation, over-development, nuclear terrorism, environmental warfare tactics, ra-diation leakage from power plants and waste dumps, toxic waste, air pollution, deforesta-tion, pollution and overfishing of the oceans, global warming, ozone depletion, loss of biodiversity through extinction […] have com-

bined to make the once green and beautiful planet a terminal cesspool. (Cameron n.d.)

The most powerful of the megacorporations that have usurped much of the authority previously invested in state governments is the Resources Develop-ment Administration (RDA), which extracts a valu-able mineral – unobtanium – from Pandora, a moon orbiting the gas giant planet Polyphemus located in the Alpha Centauri system. As a public relations fig-leaf for its mining operations, the RDA also funds the Avatar Program, which enables human operators to manipulate artificially constructed physical analogs to the indigenous sentient species on Pandora, the Na’vi. The intent of the Program is to facilitate diplo-macy and enable anthropological observation. But Jake Sully, a paraplegic former marine, is co-opted by the RDA’s private security force, SecOps, and uses his analog to infiltrate a Na’vi tribe whose ancestral home obstructs access to a substantial deposit of unobtanium. Overwhelmed by guilt after witness-ing SecOps brutally force the tribe into exile, Sully defects to the side of the indigenous peoples, and rallies the Na’vi to fight in defence of their land and culture.

The film therefore offers a clear-cut condemnation of imperialism. Sully’s comment on the impending use of force against the Na’vi is instructive, in that it cogently encapsulates the rationale behind every cycle of invasion, war and colonization endemic to human history since at least the Book of Joshua: ‘This is how it’s done. When people are sitting on shit

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that you want, you make them your enemy. Then you’re justified in taking it.’

However, the specific context of the confrontation between technologically advanced outsiders and the indigenous peoples in Avatar differs from more conventional depictions in film, such as Dances with Wolves (1990). The ethnic cleansing of the Na’vi is not conducted through the agencies of a state, nor is it driven in any way by abstract principles like ethnic nationalism, racial superiority or religious convic-tion. The only factor under consideration in decision-making by the RDA is the profit motive (Brophy 2014). In that sense, the antagonist in the film is defined by its amorality, not immorality.

The official in-universe background to the film (Pandorapedia.com n.d.) describes the RDA as ‘The largest single non-governmental organization in the human universe’, with interests ranging from min-ing, transportation and medicines to weapons and communications. From humble beginnings as a Sil-icon Valley garage startup in the early twenty-first century, the RDA is now ‘the oldest and largest of the quasi-governmental administrative entities’, mak-ing it ‘more powerful than most governments on Earth’ (Pandorapedia.com n.d). The corporation owes its stature to the world-spanning rapid-transit sys-


tem it was responsible for constructing, culminat-ing in a global network of maglev trains that require the superconductor unobtanium for their continued operation. This requirement made the discovery, and subsequent exploitation, of Pandora critical to the RDA’s continued viability.

Although mining unobtanium constitutes the crit-ical focus for the RDA on Pandora, the corporation is also invested in scientific inquiry, seeking to iden-tify potentially profitable ecological niches offering counter-virals, biofuels and cosmetics. The parallels between the RDA and the merchant companies of a previous era are made even more explicit by the terms of its contract, which accords it ‘monopoly rights to all products shipped, derived, or developed from Pandora and any other off-Earth location’ (Pan-dorapedia.com n.d). These rights were granted to the RDA in perpetuity by the Interplanetary Commerce Administration (Wilhelm and Mathison 2009: 147). This arrangement replicates precisely the monopoly trading rights that were accorded the English and Dutch East India companies by their respective gov-ernments.

The RDA’s on-site administrator of Pandora oper-ations, Parker Selfridge, epitomizes the extent to which the profit motive can be internalized as a val-

Selfridge is the quintessential company man; the representative of a system motivated solely by profit, he is unable to comprehend, let alone communicate with, a social order driven by other priorities.

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ues system in and of itself. ‘This is why we’re here,’ he reminds Grace Augustine, the head of the Avatar Program. ‘Unobtanium. Because this little grey rock sells for $20 million a kilo. That’s the only reason. It’s what pays for the whole party.’ Selfridge is the quintessential company man; the representative of a system motivated solely by profit, he is unable to comprehend, let alone communicate with, a social order driven by other priorities. Hence his frustration at not being able to come to terms with the Na’vi in the only idiom he understands, the language of trade, profit and loss. He simply has nothing the Na’vi want. ‘We built them a school, we teach them English and what – after how many years relations with the indigenous are only getting worse,’ he com-plains to Augustine. His frustration echoes that of the directors of the East India Company in the early nineteenth century who could not make a diplo-matic or economic breakthrough in China, then the world’s largest and richest market and as indifferent to English goods as it was to English ambassadors. The key to unlocking this dilemma was the addic-tive drug opium; it is interesting to speculate on how successful the RDA might have been with a similar strategy on Pandora, given the corrosive impact of European alcohol and narcotics on the social struc-ture of indigenous peoples throughout human his-tory. Apparently, this either never occurred to the RDA or was a moral bridge too far for them to cross (and it is possible such temptations would have made no impact on the Na’vi in any case because of their alien physiology). Unable to do business with the Na’vi, Selfridge is stymied. ‘We tried to give them medicine, education, roads, but no – they like mud. And that wouldn’t bother me but their damn village happens to be sitting on top of the richest unobta-nium deposit for two hundred clicks in any direc-tion.’

On first inspection, therefore, Selfridge can be dis-missed as a lightweight who serves as little more than the physical manifestation of corporate greed. Even his name hints at his motivation – ‘selfish’ – although it may also be a reference to Harry Self-ridge, founder of the British department store of the same name, and author of the phrase, ‘the customer is always right’ (Avatar Wiki n.d.). However, there is some substance to his character that needs to be discussed. His dismissive references to the Na’vi – ‘savages’ and ‘blue monkeys’ – certainly suggest a classically colonial and dismissively racist point of view. But the Na’vi artefacts and weapons he has on display in his office – are those battle trophies or manifestations of anthropological curiosity? He does seem genuinely keen to find some kind of negotiated

solution to the impasse with the Na’vi. ‘Killing the indigenous looks bad,’ he confides to Sully:

But there’s one thing the shareholders hate more than bad press, and that’s a bad quar-terly statement. I didn’t make up the rules. Just find them a carrot and get them to move. Otherwise, it’s going to have to be all stick.

He takes no pleasure in the use of force, clearly regrets having to demolish Hometree, and ultimately balks at the strategy of cultural genocide initiated by his chief of security, Colonel Miles Quaritch. ‘This thing is completely out of control!’ Selfridge barks at his erstwhile right-hand man in a deleted scene (Cameron 2010), when he discovers Quaritch’s inten-tion to annihilate the Na’vi spiritual epicentre at the Well of Souls. ‘Listen to me! I am not authorizing you to turn the mine-workers local into a freakin’ mili-tia!’ Quaritch responds that he has declared ‘threat condition red. That puts all on-world assets under my command’. Selfridge snaps back, ‘You think you can pull this palace coup shit on me?! I can have your ass with one call!’ At that point Quaritch physi-cally restrains Selfridge, reminds him, ‘You’re a long way from Earth,’ and has him bodily removed from office. Selfridge at least survives the final confron-tation with the Na’vi, although his career is clearly left in ruins. If he had been broad-minded enough to appreciate what Augustine was telling him about the neural interconnectivity of Pandora, he could have utilized this information to bring seedlings of the moon’s fauna back to Earth, thereby enabling the substitution of a renewable bio-organic supercon-ductor for the mineral version. This would have ame-liorated, or even reversed, the physical degradation of the Earth and, ironically, would have generated enormous profits for the RDA, his overriding impera-tive all along. But in the final analysis, Selfridge was too narrowly focused on the immediate, short-term returns from maintaining existing mining opera-tions. His inability to contemplate alternatives to path dependency in an institutional corporate cul-ture entirely invested in its established physical and liquid assets, from plant and infrastructure to mar-keting and distribution, reflects the ultimate failure of the East India Company.

Contemporary parallels

Another key parallel between the RDA and the mer-chant companies is their recourse to armed security. One of the first observations made by Jake Sully upon his arrival on Pandora is this differential between



the armed forces of a state – which he himself was wounded in the service of – and privately retained mercenaries loyal to no one save their employers. ‘Back on Earth, these guys were army dogs, marines fighting for freedom,’ he comments. ‘But out here they’re just hired guns, taking the money, working for the company.’

The hired guns in question are employed by the RDA’s security division, Security Operations (SecOps). According to its background information, the rela-tionship between SecOps and the RDA was forged during the early years of colonizing Mars. SecOps’s primary goals are to protect sensitive RDA facilities on off-world colonies. The RDA originally recruited exclusively from a pool of retired or discharged mili-tary service men and women from across the world. However, by 2154 the RDA had begun recruiting employees from other private military corporations (Avatar Initium Wiki n.d.). This fictional business model is grounded in both the historical record and the con-temporary emerging market for private security.

State outsourcing of its military capability was superseded after the French Revolution of 1789 and subsequent rallying of the people in the defense of the republic – the famous levée en masse that carried the day at Valmy in 1792. This would have significant long-term political implications in addition to its immedi-ate military repercussions. According to Alan Forrest (2003: 41), ‘the motive power of the levée en masse meant much more than a simple call to patriotism. It included a direct appeal to civic virtue and public responsibility’. This transition from subject to citizen under the aegis of nationalism enabled the ascen-dancy of the unitary sovereign state. As Arthur Wal-dron (2003: 262) says, ‘The change in the nature of war between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of which the levée en masse, real and imagined, was a cru-cial part, left its most powerful legacy in the consolida-tion of the European state system’. This consolidation was a two-way process. According to Otto Hintze:

A phenomenon repeatedly encountered in history is that fulfillment of public ob-ligations leads in the long run to acqui-sition of public rights. Whoever puts himself in the service of the state must logically and fairly be granted the regular rights of citizenship. (Hintze 1975: 211)

Hintze admits that, ‘To be sure, universal, equal, direct suffrage would not be an automatic conse-quence’ of such service (Hintze 1975: 211). But it is notable that significant social reforms were often undertaken in the aftermath of the ever greater mil-itary crises which wracked the western world dur-

ing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each life-and-death struggle required ever deeper mobilization of the populace, which was reflected in its increased political rights afterwards. Examples include the extension of the suffrage to women after World War I, and the GI bill and (eventual) civil rights legislation after World War II (Flynn 2002). Taking a contrary position, Thomson (1994: 105) argues ‘Non-state violence was not deligitimated by society or domestic political actors but by European states-men. System-level political forces were responsible’. In any event, the principle of the citizen in arms jus-tified mass conscription, standing armies and the total wars of the twentieth century.

In the United States, that principle, which began breaking down with the abolition of selective ser-vice, collapsed completely at the end of the Cold War (Huskey 2012; Krahmann 2012; Krahmann 2010; Chesterman and Lehnardt 2007; Verkuil 2007). Having declared victory, the Clinton administration immediately commenced downsizing the military. No longer employed by the state, the laid-off veter-ans responded by offering their skills to the emerg-ing private market for military capability. Ironically, many of these individuals then found themselves again working for the US Government, this time on a contractual basis (Avant 2005).

There are three basic business models in the pri-vate security industry; many firms operate subdivi-sions that offer combinations of all three, thereby allowing for a comprehensive, integrated package of services. The largest such integrated security provider is G4S, which has operations in over 120 countries; its more than 620,000 employees world-wide makes it the third-largest employer glob-ally behind Wal-Mart and Foxconn (G4S n.d.). The first model is to provide active security for physi-cal assets, whether infrastructure or personnel; an exemplar is UK firm Defense Systems Ltd (DSL), which, in addition to providing security services to clients such as De Beers, Texaco, Chevron, Brit-ish Gas, British Petroleum, Bechtel, BHP Mineral and American Airlines, has also been utilized by at least seven UN organizations in security roles (Drohan 2003). The second model is to work behind the front lines, training and advising the armed forces of their clients. US firms Vinnell Corp. and Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) perform this function, with the unofficial imprimatur of the US State Department, as it serves US foreign policy interests. Finally, there are firms such as Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) which focus specifi-cally on the least glamorous, but no less important, logistical functions of an armed force – everything from systems analysis to peeling potatoes (Brayton

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2002; Mandel 2002; Smith 2002–03). Private provi-sion of these services conforms to current budget-ary and operational doctrine. ‘Only those functions that must be performed by the Defense Depart-ment should be kept by the Defense Department,’ an internal Defense Department study concluded shortly after September 11, 2001; ‘Any function that can be provided by the private sector is not a core government function’ (Schwartz 2003). In a practical application of this doctrine, the Obama administration has moved aggressively to compen-sate for the drawdown of its military presence in Iraq by handing off security to private military free-lancers, tens of thousands of whom now operate in the country. Firms like DynCorp, Triple Canopy and Global Strategies Group have secured multi-hundred-million-dollar contracts from the federal government while being subjected to effectively no oversight; as the Congressional Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan con-cluded, ‘At least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion, has been lost to contract waste and fraud in America’s contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan’ (Ackerman 2011a; Ackerman 2011b; Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan 2011).

The trend away from the state monopoly of vio-lence therefore represents not a departure from a state-centred norm but a return to a previous pat-tern. Peter W. Singer (2003: 39) goes so far as to sug-gest, ‘From a broad view, the state’s monopoly of both domestic and international force was a historical

anomaly’. Sean McFate (2014: 6), too, describes the Westphalian state-centric system as ‘anomalous’ and predicts a future for international relations that is ‘polycentric, with authority diluted and shared among state and nonstate actors alike… character-ized by overlapping authorities and allegiances.’ In addition to being a Eurocentric and never a univer-sally applied principle, ‘The state’s attainment of a near monopoly of legitimate force is not perma-nent,’ Anthony Pereira (2003: 388) confirms:

[i]nstead, it is temporary and reversible. The end of the Cold War, economic glo-balization, and the spread of cheap, light weapons are making the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence increasingly tenu-ous, most dramatically in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. (Pereira 2003: 388)

Martin van Creveld also anticipates:

the state will lose its monopoly over those forms of organized violence which still remain viable in the nuclear age, becom-ing one actor among many. Spreading from the bottom up, the conduct of that vio-lence may revert to what it was as late as the first half of the seventeenth century: namely a capitalist enterprise little dif-ferent from, and intimately linked with, so many others. (van Creveld 1999: 407)

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As power devolves away from the state and into the hands of a mélange of public, semi-public and pri-vate entities, sovereignty will be inescapably compro-mised. In this return to the more fluid pre-Westphalia political environment, policy will be arrived at via negotiations between these actors. ‘Occasionally, no doubt, they will also make use either of their own forces or, which appears more and more likely, those of contractors in order to direct violence against each other’ (van Creveld 1999: 418–19). Again, if history is any guide, these hired guns may ultimately turn on their employers and seize the very assets they were charged with defending for themselves. The RDA should not have been surprised at being dispossessed in this manner by SecOps on Pandora. The warning was there all along in SecOps’s Latin motto, ‘O Prae-clarum Custodem Ovium Lupum’, which is from Cicero: ‘Oh excellent guardian of sheep, the wolf!’

Space: The free market frontier

Outer space may not be the final, but it is certainly the furthest, frontier for private enterprise. Commer-cial spaceflight, led by firms such as XCOR and Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, is forecast to be a

billion-dollar business over the next decade (Klotz 2012). The industry already has its own trade associ-ation, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (http://www.commercialspaceflight.org/). Other investors are sponsoring initiatives targeting the cornucopia of mineral deposits contained within space bodies, from platinum to the isotope Helium-3, which, while practically nonexistent on Earth, is ideally suited as the fuel source for clean fusion power. The mechan-ics and social dynamics of space-mining have been explored by science fiction, notably in the movie Out-land (1980); some entrepreneurs (e.g. Golden Spike, http://goldenspikecompany.com/our-business/busi-ness-objectives/) now see the Moon as a potential site for the extraction of these assets (Quick 2011), whereas others have targeted asteroids in near Earth orbit (Keck Institute for Space Studies 2012). A pacesetter in this field is Planetary Resources, founded by Google billionaires Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, which has a mission statement of ‘bring-ing the natural resources of space within humanity’s economic sphere of influence’ (Planetary Resources n.d.[a]). The company met its fundraising goals in the summer of 2013 and is scheduled to commence operations (Achenbach 2012; Boyle 2012; Efreti 2012; Plait 2012). Sir Richard Branson recently commit-

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Again, if history is any guide, these hired guns may ultimately turn on their employers and seize the very assets they were charged with defending for themselves.

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ted to being a core investor in Planetary Resources: ‘The only way to truly explore our Solar System is to develop the technology and means to sustain our presence in space without depleting resources of Earth’ (Planetary Resources 2013). In addition, the vacuum of space, its extremes in temperature and its negligible gravity also provide an ideal environ-ment for the material processing necessary in many manufacturing industries, including metallurgy, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, genetic engineer-ing and molecular electronics, enabling substantial scientific advances in medicine and pharmacology, and industrial advances in electronics, glass and metallurgy (Meyer 2010: 244). The two key factors responsible for the discoveries of the Age of Sail – the ‘push’ of market capacity and the ‘pull’ of technolog-ical capability – are coming into play again. We are accordingly on the threshold of a new era of explo-ration, colonization and exploitation, and if history is any guide, the current trajectory will culminate in privately held corporations defining the param-eters of economic policy and security in the Solar System and beyond, assuming the practice of inter-stellar trade becomes viable.4 Just as in the previous era, therefore, having created the context for, and funded the first steps into space, states will increas-ingly make way for private enterprise to exploit the available opportunities they have opened up (see Neil deGrasse Tyson’s comments in Gonzalez 2011, starting at 14:47).

From its Cold War-driven inception in 1958, NASA monopolized the US manned space programme. In

2004 President Bush announced NASA would phase out the Space Shuttle programme by the end of the decade in favour of the $100 billion Constellation programme of next-generation rockets and space capsules. The end of this state-centred era of space explorations came in February 2010, when Presi-dent Obama announced the end of the Constella-tion programme (Moseman 2010). To stimulate the nascent private-space-industry alternative, Obama requested that $6 billion of NASA’s budget over the next five years be directed to space tech develop-ment (Malik 2010). The intention is to create a diverse industry of taxi fleets that will transport cargo and crew to low Earth orbit, both for NASA and for com-mercial enterprises such as satellite companies or space tourism (Space.com Staff 2012). ‘At NASA we need to focus our resources and priorities on con-quering the hardest challenges in space – moving on to the moon, Mars, and the rest of the solar system,’ says Alan Lindenmoyer, Commercial Crew and Cargo programme manager at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. ‘This is a great opportunity to count on the skills of American ingenuity to take on the task of routine access’ (Kushner 2010).

President Obama made a similar point in a speech at the Kennedy Space Center in April 2010 (NASA 2010). ‘Now, I recognize that some have said it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private sector in this way,’ he said. ‘I disagree. The truth is, NASA has always relied on private industry to help design and build the vehicles that carry astro-nauts to space.’ In 1966 NASA directly employed

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36,000 people, and close to half a million others via roughly 500 main contractors and around 20,000 sub-contractors. Most of this funding went to the major aerospace companies. Stage one of the Sat-urn rocket system was built by Boeing; stage two by North American Rockwell; stage three by McDon-nell Douglas; and the rocket motors by Rocketdyne. The prime contractor for the Apollo Command and Service modules was North American Rockwell, the Lunar Module was built by Grumman, and the Lunar Roving Vehicle by Boeing (Parker 2009: 85). However, the nature of that relationship is fundamentally changing. In the past NASA was calling the shots: overseeing the design of a system, then owning and operating it once all the parts were complete. Now the roles have changed, with NASA assuming the position of a vested buyer (Kushner 2010). NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver recognizes that the process of outsourcing lift and delivery functions represents ‘the natural progression of the industry taking more and more of this capability on itself’ (Lee 2013: 21). Some within NASA have misgivings about this approach. ‘It is a risk to hand that off to a commercial entity and to give up control,’ Jay Pit-tmann, NASA’s range commander at Wallops Island launch facility, concedes. ‘In the end, we’re taking our lifeline and we’re handing it to these commer-cial companies’ (Bowdler and Danzico 2012). How-ever, given NASA’s budget limitations and current lack of a delivery vehicle, outsourcing this function to the private sector is considered a superior option to the alternative, ‘relying on the Russians and other nations to get equipment and material to the Inter-national Space Station,’ Pittmann explains; ‘Quite honestly, that’s not as comfortable a position as we’d like to be in as a nation’ (Bowdler and Danzico 2012). Some advocates for the private sector’s penetration of space are actively hostile towards NASA, which they perceive as lacking in vision and unresponsive to market signals; see Hudgins 2002; Klerkx 2004; Handberg 2006; Solomon 2008.5

This orientation towards the private sector sim-ply reflects best business practice based on rational cost–benefit analysis. The plain fact is private enter-prises can deliver the same results in a more cost-effective manner (Gonzalez 2011). Key thresholds in the transition from state to private service provi-

sion are already being met. In May 2012, the Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Dragon capsule became the first commercial spacecraft in history to be captured and berthed to the International Space Station (ISS), and the first US spacecraft to visit the ISS since the Space Shuttle Atlantis in July 2011 (Gonzalez 2012). In November 2012, the Dragon com-pleted the first-ever commercial cargo delivery to the ISS, the first stage of its twelve-mission, $1.6 bil-lion cargo delivery contract. SpaceX will face compe-tition; in September 2013, Orbital’s Cygnus capsule successfully delivered its payload of commercial cargo to the ISS, the first instalment on its own eight-mission, $1.9 billion resupply contract (Bergin 2013). In August of 2012 NASA committed an additional $1.1 billion to three firms – Boeing, Sierra Nevada and SpaceX – to develop its Commercial Crew Inte-grated Capability, or CCiCap programme, which calls for these three companies to take their design and testing programme through a series of milestones by May 2014 (Boyle 2012). NASA wants to have at least one commercial space taxi carrying astronauts to and from the International Space Station by 2017 (Coppinger 2013).

As an agency of the state shackled to a bitterly contested budget process during an era of austerity, NASA has been forced to circumscribe its ambitions in addition to outsourcing its functionality (Wall 2013). On 19 June 2013, during the NASA Authori-zation Act of 2013 House Subcommittee on Space Hearing, witness Thomas Young, former executive VP of Lockheed Martin and former chair of NASA’s space station advisory committee, was asked how long it would take the Agency to put a human on Mars with its current budget. His response was unambiguous: ‘Never.’ He expanded on this blunt assessment in a prepared statement: ‘There is much discussion about going to the Moon, an asteroid, Phobos, Deimos and Mars; however, there is no cred-ible plan or budget’ (Gonzalez 2013). Where the state is in full retreat, the private sector is stepping up to fill the void. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has plans to initiate a Martian colonization project. On Mars, ‘you can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it into something really big’, he told an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London on 16 Novem-ber 2012 (Coppinger 2012; Anders 2012). Sir Richard

We are accordingly on the threshold of a new era of exploration, colonization and exploitation, and if history is any guide, the current trajectory will culminate in privately held corporations defining the parameters of economic policy and security in the Solar System and beyond…

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Branson shares a similar vision: ‘In my lifetime, I’m determined to being a part of starting a popula-tion on Mars’ (CBS News 2012). Judging by the public response – for example, the more than two hundred thousand people who have applied for membership in the colonization programme initiated by the Mars One Foundation (http://www.mars-one.com/) – there is a significant market opportunity opening up for those investors prepared to offer consumers their own corner of outer space (Barber 2013; Mars One n.d.). Despite not yet opening up its application pro-cess, the Inspiration Mars Foundation (http://www.inspirationmars.org/) has also been besieged by indi-viduals hoping to participate in its projected January 2018 flyby mission to Mars (Pappas 2013).

One potential hurdle is the issue of jurisdiction. The extent of private property rights in outer space remains an open question (Reinstein 1999; Con-tanta and Logsdonb 2004; Parker 2009; Coffey 2009; Hearsey 2010; Meyer 2010). For example, there is an emerging debate over the legal right of private cor-porations like Planetary Resources to strip assets in space for profit (Newswise 2012; Marks 2012; Wol-chover 2012; Fox News 2012). Passage of the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepre-neurship (SPACE) Act by the U.S. House of Repre-sentatives in May 2015 was intended to resolve this ambiguity, asserting ‘Any asteroid resources obtained in outer space are the property of the entity that obtained such resources, which shall be entitled to all property rights thereto’ (Fung 2015). The Act was wholeheartedly endorsed by industry lobby groups

such as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation because it rejected a statist regulatory approach (for example, by prohibiting the FAA from proposing any passenger safety regulations until the end of 2025) in favor of fostering ‘the development of industry-wide voluntary consensus standards’ (Messier 2015; Com-mercial Spaceflight Federation 2015).

The only extant regulatory framework in effect is the United Nations Outer Space Treaty (1967), which mandates that ‘outer space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means’ (UNOOSA 1966). Accordingly, it is to ‘be free for exploration and use by all States without discrimination of any kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with international law, and there shall be free access to all areas of celestial bodies’, which shall be utilized ‘for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all man-kind’ (UNOOSA 1966). The Treaty also maintains ‘States shall be responsible for national space activi-ties whether carried out by governmental or non-governmental entities’ (UNOOSA 1966).

Much of this is deliberately ambiguous and to observers like Ezra J. Reinstein (1999: 72) represents nothing more than ‘a legal void, a wasteland of inde-terminacy and instability’. For example, the term ‘use’ could be interpreted to mean that a public or private entity may own resources extracted from the territory as long as it does not claim sovereignty over the territory itself. Such an interpretation is sup-

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ported by the fact that the Treaty explicitly defines activities that are forbidden (such as using space for military purposes) and such activities as mining or owning natural resources are not referenced (Coffey 2009: 125–26).

Two additional UN initiatives have imposed a modest threshold of obligation on those parties intending to pursue objectives in outer space. The Liability Convention (1972) specifically holds states ‘absolutely liable’ for damage caused by their space objects and mandates claims regarding damage be presented through direct or indirect ‘diplomatic channels’ (UNOOSA 1971) within one year of the claimant’s actual knowledge of the damage. Simi-larly, the Registration Convention (1976) requires that a state register any object it launches into space and report to the UN Secretary General certain basic information regarding the object’s launch, function-ality and orbit.

The most that can be said for the Treaty and Con-ventions is that under their mandate states remain the gatekeepers of space penetration. However, the capacity of the UN to regulate, let alone police, such a mandate is extremely limited. A private–public part-nership involving a corporation and a member state of the UN Permanent Security Council would have effective veto power over any attempt to limit such a partnership’s freedom of action. Even if those states with existing space programmes revert to a national-ized operational model, the private alternatives will regroup elsewhere in search of new partners. Eric Schmidt of Planetary Resources, for example, has recently boosted Kenya as Africa’s emerging tech hub (Sotunde 2013). The country’s location near the equator on the continent’s east coast would make it the ideal site for a space launch facility.

Conclusion: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Avatar broke all box office records because it works on so many levels visually and emotionally. But it would not have struck such a chord with audi-ences had they not been at least subliminally aware of the profound social critique that structured the action and adventure. James Cameron is a Cana-dian, a nation that was largely brought into being by the activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company after it received a charter from the English Crown in 1670 (Newman 2000). His understanding of history cou-pled with his awareness of contemporary trends in the relationship between the private sector and the state combined to inform a film of great thematic depth and significance.

There is already correspondence between the functionality of the merchant companies during the Age of Sail and contemporary state–private partner-ships in emerging markets globally (The Economist 2011; Carlos and Nicholas 1988). This will become more explicit over time, as the world depicted in Avatar becomes more and more a reality. This mat-ters, because to allow the projection of a business model centred on corporate imperialism into outer space will endow those corporations with the status of being, literally, above the law. History exposes the implications of profit-driven exploitation of land and cultures based on the assumption of what Edmund Burke labelled a ‘geographical morality’. Stephen R. Bown summarizes the application of this business model by the Dutch East India Company:

In the process of securing enormous prof-its, the VOC impoverished entire societ-ies. By deciding where and in what quan-tity spices could be grown, by relocating peoples, by reordering whole societies and ancient cultural practices to ensure the highest possible return for distant share-holders, the VOC evolved from being just a company to becoming a quasi-colonial entity that intruded into the lives of [the indigenous peoples] and determined all aspects of their lives – their commercial pat-terns, relationships, religious practices, food, clothing and freedoms. (Bown 2010: 52)

Such practices were not exclusive to the East Indies. Having taken a Native American prisoner over the course of a 1643 punitive expedition, the Dutch West India Company’s governor, Willem Kieft, ordered the man detained at Fort Amsterdam, where his captors ‘threw him down, and stuck his private parts, which they had cut off, into his mouth while he was still alive, and after that placed him on a mill-stone and beat his head off’ (Bown 2010: 77–78). Bar the prov-idential intervention of Jake Sully, this would have been the fate of the Na’vi – forced acculturation, ethnic cleansing or outright extermination. Burke accused the East India Company of propagating a mindset by which, ‘when you have crossed the equi-noctial, all the virtues die’. If ‘actions in Asia do not bear the same moral qualities as the same actions would bear in Europe’ (Burke, cited in Keith 1922: 143-44), how much less would such morality apply on Pandora compared to Earth? In such an instance, man’s inhumanity to man would simply have been superseded by man’s inhumanity to another sen-tient species.

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In his legal case against its Governor General, Burke (cited in Keith 1922: 125, 128) famously described the East India Company as ‘a state in the disguise of a merchant’, which ‘does not exist as a nation’, but is rather ‘a republic, a commonwealth, without a people’. As he continued:

in all other countries, a political body that acts as a commonwealth is first settled, and trade follows as a necessary consequence of the protection obtained by political power. But here the affair was reversed: the constitution of the Company began in commerce and end-ed in empire. (Burke, cited in Keith 1922: 124)

That was precisely the trajectory of the RDA in Ava-tar. We are seeing this already here on Earth where corporations are now creating states instead of the other way around (LeVine 2012). If this trend is pro-jected into the future, Avatar will come to be rec-ognized for what it is: a visionary film, not just in terms of its special effects, but in its warning about a future, informed by the lessons of the past, which could come to be (Adams 2009). Ironically, the strug-gle for that future may involve James Cameron him-self. His role as an adviser to Planetary Resources puts him directly at odds with one of the company’s key investors, Eric Schmidt, whose involvement is inspired by his own understanding of the past. ‘The pursuit of resources drove the discovery of America and opened the west,’ he explains. ‘The same driv-ers still hold true for opening the space frontier’ (Planetary Resources n.d.[b]). His synopsis of his-tory is accurate but incomplete; absent is the per-spective of the indigenous peoples whose lands were being ‘opened’ by the pursuit of resources, the very peoples whose stories were adapted and brought to life in Avatar. Unless these two historical narratives can be somehow harmonized, the same drivers will have the same implications for the indigenous peo-ples mankind may encounter some day on what will truly be a New World.

Contributor’s details

Si Sheppard is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science, Long Island University, Brooklyn.

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Endnotes

1. According to BoxOfficeMojo.com, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/.

2. See esp. Chapter 2, ‘An Historical Overview of Private Violence’ in Kinsey 2006: 34–57; and Chapter 2, ‘Private Forces in Historical Perspective’ in Ortiz 2010: 12-41.

3. There has been much speculation on James Cameron’s influences as he constructed the universe of Avatar, e.g. (Abrams n.d.). Publications most often cited in having contributed to the evolution of the film include Call Me Joe (1957), by Poul Anderson (Davis 2009); The Word for World is Forest (1976), by Ursula Le Guin (Westfahl 2009); Judgment on Janus (1963), by Andre Norton (Rowland 2010); and Firekind (1993), by John Smith and Paul Marshall (Lazer 2010).

4. Economist Paul Krugman (2010) doesn’t think so: ‘Because interstellar trade will take so long, any decision to launch a cargo will necessarily be a very long-term investment project and would hardly be conceivable unless there are very extensive futures markets.’ Viable interstellar trade, therefore, would be predicated upon the impossible; that investors, ‘human or otherwise, are able to make perfect forecasts of prices over indefinite periods’. This perspective, however, is itself predicated upon the currently understood limitations on interstellar transport and communications, which would be rendered irrelevant

by advancements in technology to the level achieved in Avatar and then, ideally, those of the galaxy-spanning polities in the Dune (1965- ), Star Trek (1966- ) and Star Wars (1977- ) franchises.

5. A representative expression of this agenda is the manifesto of the Space Settlement Institute (http://www.space-settlement-institute.org/index.html), which insists ‘private industry, not government, must assume the lead in space settlement efforts’.

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