“The logistics revolution” was not a revolution at all. It was a counterrevolution. Beginning in the 1950s and 60s, multinational corporations facing a period of falling profitability began to experiment with innovations in logistics management and infrastructure that could speed products to their destinations, cut transportation costs, and aid the relocation of production to the low-waged Global South. As supply chains have sped up and snaked across the earth in the last half century, turning suburbs, coastal zones, and oceans into a network of warehouses stretched across global space, scholars have largely told the history of logistics as a history of increasing efficiency: in business literatures, as an objective technological advancement that reduced poverty by facilitating the globalization of industry; in Marxian literatures, as a history of firms’ efforts to sidestep economic crisis by expanding the mobility of global supply chains. Yet whether critical or celebratory of the logistics revolution, both approaches assume that corporations and states in the Global North are the primary drivers, excluding the agency of Third World actors and their role in these transformations. In The Logistics Counterrevolution, I ask: What does the rise of logistics look like from the vantage of anti-colonial struggle in the Global South? Drawing on archival  research in Indonesia, Singapore, and the US and UK, I provide an alternative story: global supply chains acquired their contemporary power not only because of powerful corporate actors or functionalist shifts in capital’s accumulation strategy, but also in response to the rising threat of anti-colonial nationalisms and internationalisms in the decolonizing world. Approaching the history of logistics from the standpoint of the Global South illuminates a more political reading of supply chains not simply as results of corporate ingenuity or economic structures for smoothing the fast circulation of goods, but also as forms of slow violence that produce social, political, and market access to the labor, resources, and geostrategic locations of Asia.

Charmaine Chua is acting Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on political economy, postcolonial development, and technological change, with a specific interest in how the rise of the logistics industry has reconfigured the contemporary relations between supply chain capitalism, race, and empire. They are currently writing two books, The Logistics Counterrevolution (under contract with University of Minnesota Press), and How to Beat Amazon: The Struggle of America's New Working Class (co-authored with Spencer Cox). Her work has been published in Environment and Planning D, the Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, The Review of International Studies, The Boston Review, The Nation, and Jacobin, among other venues. She also co-founded the Marxist Institute of Research, is an editor of EPD: Society and Space, and serves as the Chair of Labor Organizing at the Council of UC Faculty Associations. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including being named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar in recognition of movement leaders who participate in academia with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements.