Imperialism, White Settler Colonialism, and the Ecological Rift

This chapter addresses the question of what caused the Dust Bowl by looking at the social and economic developments driving the changing relations of humans to one another and to the land globally in the period immediately preceding it. A distinguishing feature of the new imperialism was the marked increase in the rate of territorial acquisition by Europe, the United States, and Britain. The racially justified expropriation of the land and people enriched and increased the capacities of Global North nations and their economic elites—who financed, carried out, and benefited from this expropriation—to reinforce their rule. As David Naguib Pellow writes, “natural resources are used and abused to support racial hegemony and domination and have been at the core of this process for a half-millennium.” Thus, expropriation, exploitation, and domination paved the way directly to the Dust Bowl and the global crisis of soil erosion by the 1930s.