From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance-farmland-nexus

This largely programmatic paper offers a new way of thinking through the incorporation of farmland into financial markets. Building on the notion of “operations of capital”, it sketches analytical entry points for scrutinizing the inner workings of agri-finance capital formation. The concept of operations can make two useful contributions to the existing discussion. First, it helps provide a more nuanced historicization of the entanglement between finance and farmland. Finance has a long history of penetrating agriculture and the new quality of the contemporary coupling of finance and farmland only becomes fully visible when adopting a more nuanced historical perspective. Rather than imagining the history of capitalism as one where industrial capitalism gives way to financialized capitalism, the concept of operations sensitizes us for the situated modes, processes and practices of financial economization that have reworked economy, society and nature at specific historical conjunctures.Second, it allows us to move beyond simply treating “financialization” as explanans. Shifting attention to the situated practical activities of global finance, it eventually helps us explore central categories of financial economization (“capital”, “resources”, “property” and “value”) as practical accomplishments rather than taking them for granted. Only then can we come to terms with how finance works through farmland in different geographical settings. Empirical material from an ongoing research project will support my arguments.