In a world that continues to be mostly ocean, countryside, forest, and desert and with nearly half
the world’s population still living and laboring in such locations, we seek to decenter the city and
metropole and problematize progress narratives that render capitalist and urban formations
inevitable. Proceeding outward from any world region, we hope to tackle a number of
theoretical, historiographical, and methodological questions ranging from the origins of a
capitalist world- system in the sixteenth century, to the relationship between slavery and
capitalism, to the politics of development in the twenty-first century. These questions will touch
on the changing ways in which people relate to land, water, and other materials and the claims
they make on them; the power relationships that govern those claims; how life is imagined and
sustained, how livelihoods are made and unmade, and how belonging is constructed and
contested.