IN THE BURROW:
Critical Approaches to Infrastructure

This paper applies the theory of infrastructural power to examine how early Seleucid kings (Antiochus I and II) erected inscriptions concerning land transfer through their despotic power and used them to strengthen the Seleucid state power in securing support from the Greek city-states in western Asia Minor. In ca. 274 BCE, by enticing poleis such as Ilium and Scepsis to compete for the integration of the land he gave to Aristodicides, Seleucid loyalist, Antiochus I effectively turned those cities into the source of their own pro-Seleucid leaning. Then, by setting up a stone stele documenting this episode as a piece of imperial infrastructure in poleis such as Ilium, Antiochus I also fortified the empire’s ability to produce the imperiality that linked those cities’ prosperity to the empire’s good will. Afterward, in 254/3 BCE, Antiochus II also exhorted the same kind of competition among the Asiatic poleis for the land he sold to his wife Laodice and erected stelai as the imperial landscape that captured the growing self-awareness of those poleis as the dependents of the empire’s benefactory agendas. The despotic effort of these two Seleucid kings, therefore, fostered the empire’s infrastructural capacity in penetrating the civic integrity of those city-states and propagating among them a sense of subjectivity.

Throughout much of the long twentieth century, historical narratives of the succession of ancient empires in the Near East and Central Asia have adopted a decidedly declensionist orientation: treatments of both ancient Mesopotamia and neighboring Elam presumed a teleology beginning with an efflorescence of agriculture from the earliest territorial states through the conclusion of the west Eurasian Bronze Age followed by a long period overexploitation that ultimately produced the desert conditions that characterize much of modern southern Iraq and western Iran, perhaps with a brief recovery in the early centuries of the Islamic age. Recent archaeological work on Sasanian Ērānšahr, the last Iranian empire of antiquity ca. third-seventh centuries CE, offers an alternative interpretation, one characterized by extensive investment in infrastructure to facilitate maximal agrarian expansion.

This paper explores both how landholders in the late Sasanian state affected these gains in agricultural productivity and interrogates whether investment in irrigation reflects a revolutionary change in the exercise of empire or if they constitute a pragmatic attempt to perpetuate the status quo. In Ērānšahr of the sixth and early seventh centuries, rather than invest in coercive architectures, such as roads facilitating the movement of soldiers, the construction of defensive walls, and the manning of fortresses, to strengthen the ability of the state to secure its internal revenue streams, the imperial core experienced unprecedented investment in agricultural capacity. The result was an expansion of the hectarage of arable lands to a point never since equaled in history of Iraq and western Iran. Through canals and qanats, direct imperial investment in Mesopotamia and Khuzestan might have laid the groundwork for the unprecedented centralization of the state, or at the very least reflects the region’s evolving geopolitical and environmental situation at the end of antiquity.

Investigating the knowledge-production complex which supported the robust plantation economies of British Malaya, this paper traces and problematises the development of the imperial botanic garden network from the European metropole to peripheral sites in Southeast Asia as an infrastructure for agro-capital enclosure. An attempt to excavate the subterranean impulses of globalised capital which continue to structure and condition contemporary eco-social and -spatial imaginaries, the mutually constitutive relationship between botanic gardens and plantations is also explored, and their functions as economic and bureaucratic apparatuses fuelling the commercial engine of the colonial empire through the identification and mass cultivation of cash crops critically examined. Rooted in the transcontinental journeys of two key plants—rubber and oil palm, from South America and Africa respectively—which are not native to the Malay Peninsula yet became agro-economic linchpins of the British colonial empire, this paper focuses on both the role of the Singapore Botanic Garden as a locus of scientific imperialism, and its economic ramifications in forming spaces of extraction that follow the logics of what Anna Tsing posits as ‘scaleability’. Also noting attendant instances of failure and mismanagement intertwined with the application of financial(ized) logics to labour and production, I ultimately argue for the need to re-imagine the methodological possibilities of identifying and deconstructing the epistemic infrastructures of capital infrastructure as a way of breaking free from colonial techno-scientific modes, and embracing localised, granular, and messy forms of embodied knowledges and multi-species co-existence.

One of the most delicate points in the peace process between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrilla, between 2012 and 2016, revolved around the remembrance and memorialization of the so-called Colombian armed conflict. Due to pressure from the victims’ associations, the peace talks provisioned a series of monuments that should call for collective reflection over the consequences of more than six decades of undeclared civil war. The monuments were to serve as guarantees of non-repetition, and the artists who seek to produce them must undergo a selection process that is monitored by the Ministry of Culture and the National Museum of Colombia. In 2017, the third of these proposed official monuments, “Fragmentos,” was inaugurated in Bogotá by the artist Doris Salcedo, who called it a counter-monument: an empty space that is provided for art to make visible the consequences left by the war in the country.

Simulteanously with the commissioning of this official narrative, organized communities who had suffered for years from the scourge of war, through participatory processes, began to articulate pedagogical strategies and spatial interventions to carry out exercises of their own memory. There, they did not seek to reconcile their experiences with the official story, but instead sought to vindicate the way in which, through the community fabric, they faced the conflict in the midst of profound geographical and political isolation. One such regional community remembrance project is the Itinerant Museum of Memory and Identity of the Montes de María community. Through the review of “Fragmentos” and the Itinerant Museum of Memory and Identity, this work will analyze how the infrastructure of memory has become the place where the agency of the territory is disputed, where local stories are confronted with the official history, and where the use of victimization to determine the identity of those who are at its core is questioned.