Film International 13 2 June 2015

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Introduction
When James Cameron’s Avatar was released in 2009
it shattered records to become the most profitable
film of all time.1
It won numerous accolades, includ-
ing three of the nine Academy Awards it was nomi-
nated for.The film received generally positive reviews
from film critics, who focused on its groundbreaking
special effects. But observers approaching the film
from a diverse range of sociopolitical perspectives
advanced a number of critiques (Kapell and McVeigh
2011). Some progressives, while recognizing Avatar’s
overarching themes of environmentalism and anti-
imperialism, expressed concern over the film’s char-
acterization of the protagonist, a defector from the
colonial power, being responsible for the ultimate
salvation of the native peoples (Joffe 2010; Žižek
2010; Barnhill 2010; Ketchum, Embrick and Peck
2011; Alessio and Meredith 2012; Eckstrand 2014).
However, the film provoked a much broader backlash
from conservative commentators, who perceived an
anti-capitalistic, anti-Christian and anti-military – in
a word, anti-American – agenda in Avatar. This is not
to suggest there was uniform conservative oppro-
brium towards the film (see Stegall 2009; Marlowe
2009; Milliner 2010; Sailer 2010). However, a repre-
sentative assessment condemned ‘its mindless wor-
ship of a nature-loving tribe and the tribe’s adorable
pagan rituals, its hatred of the military and American
institutions’ (Podhoretz 2009; see also Salam 2009;
Nolte 2009). A Canadian publication even went so
‘The Merchant
Is Become the
Sovereign’
Corporate imperialism in James
Cameron's Avatar
By Si Sheppard
Keywords Avatar, corporate imperialism,
colonialism, science fiction, migration, East
India Company
Articles ‘The Merchant Is Become the Sovereign’ Below Avatar (2009)

42 | film international issue 72
Articles ‘The Merchant Is Become the Sovereign’
far as to denounce the film as ‘the perfect cinematic
embodiment of anti-Americanism’ (Fulford 2010).
In order to defend such institutions, conservatives
consistently sought to downgrade the significance
of Avatar’s contribution to the sociopolitical nar-
rative by deriding its supposedly lightweight intel-
lectual qualities. One conservative columnist after
another dismissed the film as ‘deeply stupid. Relent-
lessly stupid. Occasionally mind-bogglingly stupid’
(Douthat 2009),‘one of the stupidest major movies in
recent memory’ (Suderman 2009), ‘remarkably stu-
pid’ (Podhoretz 2010) and ‘so stupid it might well be
called stupefying’ (Hunter 2010).
It is my contention that, far from being just
another disposable, ideologically inert Hollywood
action blockbuster, Avatar in fact advances a coher-
ent and insightful sociopolitical critique that draws
upon the historical narrative of corporate imperial-
ism in order to project that narrative into the future.
Over the course of this essay I will (1), provide histor-
ical background to the role played by privately held
corporations at the vanguard of European commer-
cial and colonial imperialism during the 1600–1860
era; (2), discuss the portrayal of corporations in sci-
ence fiction literature and film, with a focus on Ava-
tar; and (3), investigate whether the same process
of outsourcing exploration, trade and military func-
tions by states to corporations, as occurred in (1), is
happening again now, setting the stage for the socio-
political environments depicted in (2).
The mercantile companies
There have been three great phases of human migra-
tion throughout history. The first, the exodus of mod-
ern man from Africa, had incorporated all of the
habitable environments of the globe by the time it
arrived at its final chapter with the settlement of the
most remote and isolated island chains of the Pacific
Ocean. The second took place during the Columbian
Exchange, which incorporated the migration (much
of it forced) of populations along the networks estab-
lished by the imperial projects of the European pow-
ers. The third – still in its embryonic stage, but fast
developing – will be defined by the foundation of
human colonies off-world, initially within our Solar
System, later in deep space (O’Neill 2000; Schmidt
and Zubrin 1996; Krone 2006).
This third phase of migration will be differenti-
ated from the previous two by a whole new order
of technology. However, the pattern of settlement
during the second phase (the Age of Sail) allows
for the identification in advance of issues that
must be taken into consideration before proceed-
ing. The most significant of these is the impact of
the unprecedented distances involved, from mother
country to colonies, and between the colonies them-
selves. This will place immense pressure not just on
the technical requirements of the colony (propul-
sion to destination, resource allocation at destina-
tion, etc.), but at the individual and social level of
the colonists themselves. Further complicating this
picture, the extent to which off-world colonization
will be state-directed, if at all, is an open question.
Increasingly, the exploration and commercial exploi-
tation of outer space is being driven by the private
sector. Given the extent to which states during the
Age of Sail sponsored colonization efforts in partner-
ship with privately held corporations, it seems highly
probable that corporate interests will take a leading
role in the colonization of outer space.
The era of European imperial expansion globally
commenced at a time when the states of Europe
themselves were still significantly underdeveloped
by modern standards. Individual identity was struc-
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www.filmint.nu | 43
tured as much by doctrinal adherence as by loyalty
to a specific geographical construct; central author-
ity was further compromised by the privately held
wealth of the landowning aristocracy, which empow-
ered them to defy the writ of royal law when it
encroached upon their privileges. European polities
therefore failed to manifest the singular quality Max
Weber (1919) described as fundamental to a viable
state, namely the capacity to enforce ‘the monopoly
of the legitimate use of physical force within a given
territory’. Critically, the military functions of the
state in Renaissance Europe were outsourced. The
state paid for armies, entrepreneurs raised them,
and mercenaries served in them (Finer 1975; Kinsey
2006; Ortiz 2010).2
Freelance military companies, whether Catalan,
Swiss, Landsknecht, Hessian or condottieri, dominated
the battlefields of Europe (and, during the 1775–83
War of Independence, the Americas) for centuries.
Among the more prominent military entrepreneurs
of the day were Louis de Geer, an Amsterdam finan-
cier who provided the government of Sweden with
its entire navy (officers and crews included); Count
Ernest Mansfield, who raised an army for the Elector
Palatine in 1618 and then put his sword at the hand of
the highest bidder; Bernard von Weimar, who raised
armies first for Sweden, then for France; and, most
notorious, Count Albrecht von Wallenstein, whose
private military machine, ‘the biggest and best orga-
nized private enterprise seen in Europe before the
twentieth century,’ made him the wealthiest man
of his era (Kiernan 1965: 132; see also Redlich 1964;
Mann 1976; Mortimer 2010).
Nowhere was the legitimization of mercenary
tactics made more explicit than in the Protestant
response to the imperial ambitions of Spain and
Portugal in the Orient and the New World in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Britain and the
Republic of the Netherlands effectively unleashed
the free market against the two Iberian powers, first
on an ad hoc basis by assigning contracts to naval
captains – privateers, essentially legalized pirates –
to wage war ‘beyond the line’ against the Catholic
empires, outside the limits set by treaty obligations
in Europe; and second, on an institutional basis by
granting monopolies to private corporations – mer-
cantile companies – to both exploit economic oppor-
tunities and promote national strategic interests
(Tracy 1990; Furber 1976).
The Republic of the Netherlands sponsored two
such bodies, the East India Company (Vereenigde
Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC), chartered in
1602, and the West India Company (Geoctroyeerde
Westindische Compagnie, or WIC), chartered in 1621.
Beginning with the Muscovy Company, chartered in
1555, and the Levant Company, chartered in 1585,
the British Crown sponsored a number of such part-
nerships, which played a key role in expanding the
physical perimeter and commercial networks of the
kingdom’s nascent maritime empire (Andrews 1984;
Griffiths 1974). Significantly, English colonization
of the Americas was initiated by two such private
enterprises, the Virginia Company and the Plymouth
Company. But the greatest of these corporate ven-
tures was the East India Company, which received
a charter from Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 grant-
ing it a monopoly on trade with all countries east
Below Wall-E (2008)
‘Whilst the managers at home say that trade is their only object, their
military servants abroad pant after conquests.’

of the Cape of Good Hope and west of the Straits of
Magellan (Lawson 1993; Keay 1994; Wild 2000). This
monopoly was originally set to expire after fifteen
years, but it was extended for an indefinite period in
1609 by King James I, subject to the proviso it would
cease to be in force if the trade proved unprofitable
for three consecutive years. This was a principal
means of state finance during this period; revenue-
conscious monarchs used competitive bidding for
monopoly rights to raise income (Anderson and Toll-
ison 1983; Ekelund and Tollison 1997).
Despite fierce competition from its European
rivals, by playing off the various local potentates the
English East India Company gradually extended its
influence throughout the Indian subcontinent, trad-
ing for such staples of the expanding global mar-
ket as cotton, silk, indigo dye, salt, saltpetre and
tea. Throughout this process, the Company evolved
into something more than a commercial enterprise.
Authorized to act on its own recognizance, it flew
its own flag, minted its own currency, maintained
its own forts, and recruited its own army and navy
(Reid 2009; Sutton 2000; Miller 1980). In 1661 King
Charles II issued a new Royal charter to the Com-
pany empowering it to wage war, administer justice,
engage in diplomacy, acquire territory, and seize and
plunder ships violating its monopoly. As Stephen
R. Bown (2010: 108) notes, the Company ‘had now
acquired many of the powers of a state. Its mandate,
however, was to deploy these new powers in the ser-
vice of the shareholders rather than of the state […]
the English company was now effectively a state
within a state’.
During the Seven Years War (1756–63) the Com-
pany seized the opportunity to marginalize its
French rival and consolidate its control over Ben-
gal, the richest state in India, thereby establishing
its authority as the region’s hegemonic military as
well as commercial power. From this perspective,
‘State-authorized nonstate violence proved to be
highly effective’, Janice E. Thomson observes (1994:
42). ‘Mercantile companies were highly successful in
establishing a European economic and political pres-
ence outside the European system’ (ibid).
By this time, however, the Company’s business
model and operational methods were being sub-
jected to increased scrutiny and criticism from a
diverse range of observers. From the beginning,
many had feared vesting so much power in pri-
vate entities that, in the words of the great English
jurist Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), ‘cannot commit
treason, nor be outlawed or excommunicated, for
they have no souls’ (cited in Sampson 1995: 17). In
a report submitted January 1767, a Parliamentary
select committee concluded that ‘the armies [the
Company] maintained, the alliances they formed
and the revenues they possessed procured them
consideration as a sovereign and politic, as well as a
commercial body’ (cited in Dirks 2006: 178). Member
of Parliament Thomas Pownall put it more bluntly
when he analysed Indian affairs in 1773: ‘The mer-
chant is become the sovereign’ (ibid).
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www.filmint.nu | 45
Some feared the revenue stream derived by the
Exchequer from India made the Company, in con-
temporary parlance, too big to fail. Since the Com-
pany was now one of the financial pillars of the
state, the state would be obliged to intervene if the
Company’s fiscal or foreign policy mismanagement
threatened its hold over the subcontinent (Thom-
son 1994: 43–68). This possibility occurred even to
Robert Clive, whose victory at Plassey in 1757 rep-
resented the vital breakthrough in the Company’s
territorial expansion. As he warned William Pitt the
Elder in 1759, ‘so large a sovereignty may possibly be
an object too expensive for a mercantile company;
and it is feared that they are not of themselves able,
without the nation’s assistance, to maintain so wide
a dominion’ (cited in Bown 2010: 134). Others were
concerned that, because its jealously maintained
monopoly rights over trade in India effectively insu-
lated it from competition, the Company’s business
model was conservative to the point of diminish-
ing returns, both to its shareholders and, by exten-
sion, to the Crown. This critique was articulated in
the foundational treatise on classical economics,
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations (1776). Adam Smith was willing to extend
a limited duration monopoly of trade to merchant
company start-ups commencing operations in
‘some remote and barbarous nation’ on the grounds
it represented ‘the easiest and most natural way
in which the state can recompense them for haz-
arding a dangerous and expensive experiment, of
which the public is afterwards to reap the benefit’
(Smith 1776 [2000]). But a monopoly in perpetuity
would be at the expense of all other citizens of the
state, ‘first, by the high price of goods, which, in the
case of a free trade, they could buy much cheaper;
and, secondly, by their total exclusion from a branch
of business which it might be both convenient and
profitable’ for them to engage in. This monopoly
served only ‘the most worthless of all purposes’, in
that it served solely
to enable the company to support the negli-
gence, profusion, and malversation of their
own servants, whose disorderly conduct
seldom allows the dividend of the com-
pany to exceed the ordinary rate of profit
in trades which are altogether free, and
very frequently makes it fall even a good
deal short of that rate. (Smith 1776 [2000])
However, the Company’s inherited privileges still
applied generations later. In his Reflections, published
in 1822, Member of Parliament John Nicholls noted,
‘This Empire has been acquired by a Company of
Merchants; and they retained the character of exclu-
sive trader, after they had assumed that of sover-
eign,’ under which guise, ‘they will oppress those
who are their rivals in trade […] Sovereign and trader,
are characters incompatible’ (Nicholls 1822: 249–50).
This indulgence was perpetuated because the risk-
averse British state had in effect been captured by
its own creation. In 1813, Thomas Plummer reported
that ‘scarcely any part of the British community is
distinct from some personal or collateral interest
in the welfare of the East India Company’, which
defended its monopoly privileges directly by mak-
ing loans to the state and indirectly by making loans
to key policy makers and opinion shapers (Plummer
in Bowen 2006: 260). A series of reforms (e.g. North’s
Regulating Act of 1773, Pitt’s India Act of 1784) theo-
retically brought the Company under tighter admin-
istrative control by the state, but in reality did little
to impinge upon its day-to-day operations.
Increasing public awareness of how those opera-
tions were conducted and their implications for the
indigenous population stimulated yet another line
of attack against Company rule. In order to reorient
the Indian economy towards maximizing the sup-
ply of primary goods for the benefit of the emerg-
ing industrial manufacturing base of Great Britain,
the Company ruthlessly suppressed local secondary
producers. As a result, ‘the misery hardly finds par-
allel in the history of commerce,’ Governor General
William Bentinck confessed in 1834; ‘the bones of
the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India’
(cited in Robins 2006: 149). Among those appalled by
the humanitarian implications of Company rule was
Adam Smith (1776). By conferring the right to main-
tain a private army ‘in distant and barbarous coun-
tries’, he contended, the state had delegated to the
merchant companies carte blanche authority over
the indigenous peoples: ‘How unjustly, how capri-
ciously, how cruelly they have commonly exercised
it, is too well known from recent experience’ (Smith
1776 [2000]).
Reining in such abuses was a key theme of Edmund
Burke in his 1788 opening speech for the prosecution
at the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, who
had served as the first Governor General of Bengal,
and who ‘has told your lordships in his defence, that
actions in Asia do not bear the same moral qualities
By the end of the 1830s the [East India] Company could simultaneously
sponsor the occupation of Kabul in Central Asia and Canton in China.

as the same actions would bear in Europe. My lords,
we positively deny that principle’ (Burke, cited in
Keith 1922: 143). He accused the Company of having:
formed a plan of geographical morality, by
which the duties of men, in public and private
situations, are not to be governed by their
relation to the great Governor of the Uni-
verse, or by their relation to mankind, but
by climates, degrees of longitude, parallels,
not of life, but of latitudes: as if, when you
have crossed the equinoctial, all the virtues
die. (Burke, cited in Keith 1922: 143–44)
‘This geographical morality we do protest against,’
Burke continued, arguing:
the laws of morality are the same every-
where, and that there is no action which
would pass for an action of extortion, of
peculation, of bribery, and of oppression,
in England that is not an act of extortion,
of peculation, of bribery and oppression,
in Europe, Asia, Africa, and all the world
over. (Burke, cited in Keith 1922: 144–45)
But this appeal to the universal application of state
law failed. Hastings was acquitted, and the Company
remained, as William Playfair put it in 1799,‘the arbi-
ters of the East’ (cited in Bowen 2000: 48). This was
justified by the assumption that geographical moral-
ity was in fact the natural corollary of geographi-
cal distance. Communications between Company
House in London and its agents in India were at best
tenuous, even dangerous; the Company calculated it
lost 51 of the 1,038 ships that sailed for Asia between
1760 and 1796 (Bowen 2006: 155). This was signifi-
cant, for there was a consensus among the cost-con-
scious Company directors in London that expansion
for its own sake threatened the entire enterprise,
yet in practice very little could be done to control
those in India who were determined to embark upon
ambitious military campaigns. Company Chairman
Thomas Rous complained to the House of Com-
mons in April, 1767, that ‘We have never had our
orders complied with – not a quarter, nor a fifth, or
a sixth for these ten years past’ (Bowen 2002: 70). A
parliamentary inquiry later took the view that the
instructions of the directors had become ‘habitu-
ally despised’ by those in India (Bowen 2006: 207–08).
Accordingly, as Bengal ship owner Joseph Price put it
in 1777,‘Whilst the managers at home say that trade
is their only object, their military servants abroad
pant after conquests’ (cited in Bowen 2006: 205). If
the Company’s own directors had limited control
over its agents in the field, state directives were rou-
tinely ignored. A clause in Pitt’s India Act of 1784
had declared that ‘schemes of conquest and exten-
sion of dominion in India are measures repugnant to
the wish, the honour, and the policy of this nation’
(Beveridge 1862: 802). But extension of dominion was
very much on the agenda of Richard Wellesley after
he took his post as Governor General in 1798, forc-
ing the directors to demand his resignation in 1805
on the grounds he had created a ‘new species of
government and of power’ in India that had ‘widely
departed from the principles of foreign policy, and
from the subjection and obedience to the author-
ity at home enjoined by law’ (Bowen 2006: 206). He
returned to England a conquering hero, an Architect
of Empire (Torrens 1880), as the title of his biography
put it. But in the process he had more than tripled
the Company’s debts, which soared from £9 million
in 1792 to £30 million in 1809 (Torrens 1880).
As the Company’s focus evolved from commer-
cial trading towards imperial administration so its
responsibilities grew. After the battles of Plassey
(1757) and Buxar (1764) secured Bengal for the Com-
pany, it fought four wars (1769–99) to impose its
authority over Mysore, and three wars (1775–1817)
against the Maratha Confederacy. Further conflicts
extended Company hegemony over Nepal (1814–16),
Burma (1824–26) and the Sikhs (1848–52). By the end
of the 1830s the Company could simultaneously
sponsor the occupation of Kabul in Central Asia and
Canton in China. The former, during the course of
the First Afghan War (1839–42), culminated in an
unmitigated disaster (Dalrymple 2013). But the lat-
ter, the climax of the First Opium War (1839–42),
successfully forced open the world’s most populous
country to penetration by English commercial inter-
ests, which saturated the Celestial Empire with an
addictive and degenerative drug in the name of pri-
vate profit (Lovell 2011; Fay 1975; Beeching 1975).
Even with the opium windfall the Company,
burdened by its responsibilities and having been
divested of its trade monopoly by the 1833 Gov-
ernment of India Act, was struggling to meet its
obligations (Webster 2009). Improvements in com-
munications and transportation technology, such as
the steamship and the telegram, which heralded the
possibility of effective direct control of India from
London, rendered the outsourcing of administra-
tion to the Company increasingly anachronistic. The
Mutiny of 1857, which shook British control of the
subcontinent to its foundations, was the final straw
for the Company, which found itself universally
excoriated for its mismanagement in the aftermath
(Fremont-Barnes 2007). Responding to pressure for
the government to step in and assume direct control,

www.filmint.nu | 47
John Stuart Mill, petitioning Parliament on behalf of
the Company, warned that imperial administration
of India represented ‘an ominous advance in that
centralisation of all the functions of Government in
the hands of the Cabinet, so justly deprecated by the
soundest thinkers’ (Mill, cited in Robson 1990: 175).
In response, George C. Lewis, MP, speaking for the
Treasury Benches, insisted ‘no civilised government
ever existed on the face of this earth which was more
corrupt, more perfidious, and more rapacious than
the East India Company’ (cited in Robins 2006: 164).
Although the Company continued to manage the
tea trade on behalf of the British Government until
its dissolution on 1 June 1874, after a final dividend
payment and the commutation or redemption of its
stock, the era of outsourced imperial rule which had
persisted for more than two and half centuries was
effectively brought to an end on 1 November 1858.As
Karl Marx informed the readers of the New York Tri-
bune that year, the Company’s directors ‘commenced
by buying sovereignty and they have ended by sell-
ing it’ (Robins 2006: 165). However, although Marx
might have enjoyed the last laugh on this occasion,
the joke is now very much on him, as governments
internationally are returning to a model of outsourc-
ing functionality. The withering of the state, there-
fore, is taking place because power is being divested
to the corporations, not to the proletariat.
Science fiction
The era of nation-state ascendancy in the nineteenth
to twentieth centuries overlapped with the birth of
science fiction as a literary and then audio-visual
genre. A world (or solar system, or galaxy) where the
state has been eclipsed by the megacorporation is
often explored in science fiction as an equally dysto-
pian alternative to one where the state is all-power-
ful, e.g. 1984 (1948) by George Orwell and Brazil (1985)
by Terry Gilliam (Raja, Ellis and Nandi 2011; Langer
2012). Accordingly, the megacorporation is a recur-
ring trope in science fiction cinema. Such entities as
the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner (1982), the Buy
N’ Large Corporation in Wall-E (2008), the Umbrella
Corporation in Resident Evil (2002), and the Weyland-
Yutani Corporation in another James Cameron film,
Aliens (1986), play a major role in defining the politi-
cal, socio-economic and physical environment of
their respective worlds. The separatist Confederacy
of Independent Systems in the Star Wars prequel tril-
ogy (1999-2005) was financed by a number of com-
mercial interests, including the Trade Federation,
Techno Union, Banking Clan, Commerce Guild and
Corporate Alliance, each of which contributed its
own private army to the struggle against the Galac-
tic Republic during the Clone Wars.
Several science fiction video game franchises also
feature significant megacorporations. These include
the Post-Terran Mining Corporation in Descent (1994);
TriOptimum Corporation in System Shock (1994); Shinra
Electric Power Co. in Final Fantasy (1997); Morgan
Industries in Alpha Centauri (1999); Page Industries in
Deus Ex (2000); and ExoGeni Corporation in Mass Effect
(2007). According to its official backstory (EveOnline.
com), the Caldari, one of the alien races in Eve Online,
have forged a state built on corporate capitalism:
run by a few mega-corporations which divide
the state between them, controlling and rul-
ing every aspect of society. Each corporation is
made up of thousands of smaller companies,
ranging from industrial companies to law
firms. All land and real estate is owned by a
company which leases it to the citizens, and
government and policing are also handled by
independent companies. (EveOnline.com n.d.)
The megacorporation concept has been developed
to its fullest extent in science fiction literature. Sev-
eral authors have explored themes incorporating
the implosion of the state and its marginalization,
or complete supersession, by corporate entities.
Leading examples include Frederik Pohl and Cyril
M. Kornbluth, The Space Merchants (1953); Neal Ste-
phenson, Snow Crash (1992); Max Barry, Jennifer Gov-
ernment (2003); and Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake
(2003). In the Otherland novels (1996-2001) by Tad
Williams, the state still exists, but corporations are
represented in the US Congress, with the number of
seats being determined by market share.
Other authors have projected these themes from
Earth to the broader palette of interstellar space. The
frontier corporations in Andrey Livadny’s The History
of the Galaxy series (1998- ) have their own fleets,
which they use to protect their worlds from pirates
and rival corporations. Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War
series (2003-08) follows the fortunes of an interplan-
etary trading company, Vatta Enterprises, its some-
time ally, InterStellar Communications Corporation,
and guns-for-hire mercenary company, Mackensee
Military Assistance Corporation. (Such space-age
‘This is how it’s done. When people are sitting on shit that you want, you
make them your enemy. Then you’re justified in taking it.’

condottieri are a popular theme in science fiction, for
example, Jerry Pournelle’s Falkenberg’s Legion and
David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers). In C. J. Cher-
ryh’s Alliance-Union series (1976-2009), humanity’s
colonization of other worlds is driven by a private
corporation, as described in Downbelow Station (1981):
Sol Corporation, swollen beyond its original
purpose and holding more stations than Sol
itself, became what the star-stationers called
it: the Earth Company. It wielded power […]
certainly over the stations which it directed
long-distance, years removed in space; and
power on Earth too, where its increasing sup-
ply of ores, medical items, and its possession
of several patents were enormously profitable.
Slow as the system was in starting, the steady
arrival of goods and new ideas, however long
ago launched, was profit for the Company
and consequent power on Earth […] Those
were the great days for those who sold this
wealth; fortunes rose and fell; governments
did; corporations took on more and more
power, and the Earth Company in its many
guises reaped immense profits and moved
the affairs of nations. (Cherryh 1981: 12–13)
In the series, the heavy-handed centralized control
of Earth Company ultimately provokes the declara-
tion of an independent Union by the colonists, which
culminates in outright rebellion and interstellar war.
Those caught in the middle of this conflict, the crews
maintaining the trade routes linking both sides, sub-
sequently band together to form the Merchanter’s
Alliance in a bid to protect their interests and hold
the balance of power.
All of these themes reach their most comprehen-
sive examination in the Mars trilogy (1993-1996) by
Kim Stanley Robinson. The terraforming of Mars
occurs within the context of the colonists’ increas-
ingly strained relationship with Earth, made more
problematic by the ascendancy of the transna-
tional megacorps over state governments. By the
mid-twenty-first century this process had become
irreversible: ‘Money equals power; power makes
the law; and law makes government. So that the
national governments in trying to restrain the
transnats were like Lilliputians trying to tie down
Gulliver’ (Robinson 1993: 357–58). In order to escape
corporate hegemony many colonists emigrated
to Mars because, in the words of one, ‘this system
we call the transnational world order is just feu-
dalism all over again’ (Robinson 1993: 343). By the
year 2107, Mars Year 40, the transnationals had
coalesced into the metanationals, which ‘are now
the major world powers, insofar as they control the
IMF, the World Bank, the Group of Eleven, and all
their client countries’ (Robinson 1994: 328). These
clients are acquired when a metanational assumes
control over the foreign debt and internal economy
of a sovereign state, which is reduced to serving
as the enforcement agency of the metanational’s
domestic agenda. In this environment, authority
has devolved upon ‘a small metanational elite who
Below Avatar (2009)

www.filmint.nu | 49
were running the two worlds like feudal fiefdoms’
(Robinson 1994: 415).
The sociopolitical critique of James Cameron’s
Avatar was therefore far from original, and the film
is clearly influenced by a diverse range of sources in
science fiction.3
However, by making profit-driven,
privately-held corporate interests the antagonist
in the film, which is set in an immersive, brilliantly
realized alien environment, this critique was both
more explicit while achieving greater popular appeal
than any previous incarnation.
The film is set in the year 2154, a future in which
the resource-depleted Earth is described (Duncan
and Fitzpatrick 2010: 80) as ‘a war-weary, over-pop-
ulated place where cities have become corporate-
dominated megalopolises and the air is not fit to
breathe’. An early draft of the screenplay (Cameron
n.d.) goes into greater detail, describing the Earth
as ‘drowning in its own toxic waste, starvation and
poverty’, and ‘dying, covered with a gray mold of
human civilization’. Colonization of the Moon and
the planets of the Solar System has been initiated to
help relocate some of the world’s 20 billion people,
but:
Overpopulation, over-development, nuclear
terrorism, environmental warfare tactics, ra-
diation leakage from power plants and waste
dumps, toxic waste, air pollution, deforesta-
tion, pollution and overfishing of the oceans,
global warming, ozone depletion, loss of
biodiversity through extinction […] have com-
bined to make the once green and beautiful
planet a terminal cesspool. (Cameron n.d.)
The most powerful of the megacorporations that have
usurped much of the authority previously invested
in state governments is the Resources Develop-
ment Administration (RDA), which extracts a valu-
able mineral – unobtanium – from Pandora, a moon
orbiting the gas giant planet Polyphemus located in
the Alpha Centauri system. As a public relations fig-
leaf for its mining operations, the RDA also funds the
Avatar Program, which enables human operators to
manipulate artificially constructed physical analogs
to the indigenous sentient species on Pandora, the
Na’vi. The intent of the Program is to facilitate diplo-
macy and enable anthropological observation. But
Jake Sully, a paraplegic former marine, is co-opted
by the RDA’s private security force, SecOps, and uses
his analog to infiltrate a Na’vi tribe whose ancestral
home obstructs access to a substantial deposit of
unobtanium. Overwhelmed by guilt after witness-
ing SecOps brutally force the tribe into exile, Sully
defects to the side of the indigenous peoples, and
rallies the Na’vi to fight in defence of their land and
culture.
The film therefore offers a clear-cut condemnation
of imperialism. Sully’s comment on the impending
use of force against the Na’vi is instructive, in that
it cogently encapsulates the rationale behind every
cycle of invasion, war and colonization endemic to
human history since at least the Book of Joshua:
‘This is how it’s done. When people are sitting on shit
Below Avatar (2009)

that you want, you make them your enemy. Then
you’re justified in taking it.’
However, the specific context of the confrontation
between technologically advanced outsiders and
the indigenous peoples in Avatar differs from more
conventional depictions in film, such as Dances with
Wolves (1990). The ethnic cleansing of the Na’vi is not
conducted through the agencies of a state, nor is it
driven in any way by abstract principles like ethnic
nationalism, racial superiority or religious convic-
tion.The only factor under consideration in decision-
making by the RDA is the profit motive (Brophy 2014).
In that sense, the antagonist in the film is defined by
its amorality, not immorality.
The official in-universe background to the film
(Pandorapedia.com n.d.) describes the RDA as ‘The
largest single non-governmental organization in the
human universe’, with interests ranging from min-
ing, transportation and medicines to weapons and
communications. From humble beginnings as a Sil-
icon Valley garage startup in the early twenty-first
century, the RDA is now ‘the oldest and largest of the
quasi-governmental administrative entities’, mak-
ing it ‘more powerful than most governments on
Earth’ (Pandorapedia.com n.d). The corporation owes
its stature to the world-spanning rapid-transit sys-
tem it was responsible for constructing, culminat-
ing in a global network of maglev trains that require
the superconductor unobtanium for their continued
operation. This requirement made the discovery, and
subsequent exploitation, of Pandora critical to the
RDA’s continued viability.
Although mining unobtanium constitutes the crit-
ical focus for the RDA on Pandora, the corporation
is also invested in scientific inquiry, seeking to iden-
tify potentially profitable ecological niches offering
counter-virals, biofuels and cosmetics. The parallels
between the RDA and the merchant companies of
a previous era are made even more explicit by the
terms of its contract, which accords it ‘monopoly
rights to all products shipped, derived, or developed
from Pandora and any other off-Earth location’ (Pan-
dorapedia.com n.d). These rights were granted to the
RDA in perpetuity by the Interplanetary Commerce
Administration (Wilhelm and Mathison 2009: 147).
This arrangement replicates precisely the monopoly
trading rights that were accorded the English and
Dutch East India companies by their respective gov-
ernments.
The RDA’s on-site administrator of Pandora oper-
ations, Parker Selfridge, epitomizes the extent to
which the profit motive can be internalized as a val-
Selfridge is the quintessential company man; the representative of a
system motivated solely by profit, he is unable to comprehend, let alone
communicate with, a social order driven by other priorities.
Below Avatar (2009)

www.filmint.nu | 51
ues system in and of itself. ‘This is why we’re here,’
he reminds Grace Augustine, the head of the Avatar
Program. ‘Unobtanium. Because this little grey rock
sells for $20 million a kilo. That’s the only reason.
It’s what pays for the whole party.’ Selfridge is the
quintessential company man; the representative of
a system motivated solely by profit, he is unable to
comprehend, let alone communicate with, a social
order driven by other priorities. Hence his frustration
at not being able to come to terms with the Na’vi
in the only idiom he understands, the language of
trade, profit and loss. He simply has nothing the
Na’vi want. ‘We built them a school, we teach them
English and what – after how many years relations
with the indigenous are only getting worse,’ he com-
plains to Augustine. His frustration echoes that of
the directors of the East India Company in the early
nineteenth century who could not make a diplo-
matic or economic breakthrough in China, then the
world’s largest and richest market and as indifferent
to English goods as it was to English ambassadors.
The key to unlocking this dilemma was the addic-
tive drug opium; it is interesting to speculate on how
successful the RDA might have been with a similar
strategy on Pandora, given the corrosive impact of
European alcohol and narcotics on the social struc-
ture of indigenous peoples throughout human his-
tory. Apparently, this either never occurred to the
RDA or was a moral bridge too far for them to cross
(and it is possible such temptations would have
made no impact on the Na’vi in any case because of
their alien physiology). Unable to do business with
the Na’vi, Selfridge is stymied. ‘We tried to give them
medicine, education, roads, but no – they like mud.
And that wouldn’t bother me but their damn village
happens to be sitting on top of the richest unobta-
nium deposit for two hundred clicks in any direc-
tion.’
On first inspection, therefore, Selfridge can be dis-
missed as a lightweight who serves as little more
than the physical manifestation of corporate greed.
Even his name hints at his motivation – ‘selfish’ –
although it may also be a reference to Harry Self-
ridge, founder of the British department store of the
same name, and author of the phrase, ‘the customer
is always right’ (Avatar Wiki n.d.). However, there is
some substance to his character that needs to be
discussed. His dismissive references to the Na’vi –
‘savages’ and ‘blue monkeys’ – certainly suggest a
classically colonial and dismissively racist point of
view. But the Na’vi artefacts and weapons he has
on display in his office – are those battle trophies or
manifestations of anthropological curiosity? He does
seem genuinely keen to find some kind of negotiated
solution to the impasse with the Na’vi. ‘Killing the
indigenous looks bad,’ he confides to Sully:
But there’s one thing the shareholders hate
more than bad press, and that’s a bad quar-
terly statement. I didn’t make up the rules.
Just find them a carrot and get them to move.
Otherwise, it’s going to have to be all stick.
He takes no pleasure in the use of force, clearly
regrets having to demolish Hometree, and ultimately
balks at the strategy of cultural genocide initiated
by his chief of security, Colonel Miles Quaritch. ‘This
thing is completely out of control!’ Selfridge barks
at his erstwhile right-hand man in a deleted scene
(Cameron 2010), when he discovers Quaritch’s inten-
tion to annihilate the Na’vi spiritual epicentre at the
Well of Souls. ‘Listen to me! I am not authorizing you
to turn the mine-workers local into a freakin’ mili-
tia!’ Quaritch responds that he has declared ‘threat
condition red. That puts all on-world assets under
my command’. Selfridge snaps back, ‘You think you
can pull this palace coup shit on me?! I can have
your ass with one call!’ At that point Quaritch physi-
cally restrains Selfridge, reminds him, ‘You’re a long
way from Earth,’ and has him bodily removed from
office. Selfridge at least survives the final confron-
tation with the Na’vi, although his career is clearly
left in ruins. If he had been broad-minded enough
to appreciate what Augustine was telling him about
the neural interconnectivity of Pandora, he could
have utilized this information to bring seedlings of
the moon’s fauna back to Earth, thereby enabling the
substitution of a renewable bio-organic supercon-
ductor for the mineral version.This would have ame-
liorated, or even reversed, the physical degradation
of the Earth and, ironically, would have generated
enormous profits for the RDA, his overriding impera-
tive all along. But in the final analysis, Selfridge was
too narrowly focused on the immediate, short-term
returns from maintaining existing mining opera-
tions. His inability to contemplate alternatives to
path dependency in an institutional corporate cul-
ture entirely invested in its established physical and
liquid assets, from plant and infrastructure to mar-
keting and distribution, reflects the ultimate failure
of the East India Company.
Contemporary parallels
Another key parallel between the RDA and the mer-
chant companies is their recourse to armed security.
One of the first observations made by Jake Sully upon
his arrival on Pandora is this differential between

the armed forces of a state – which he himself was
wounded in the service of – and privately retained
mercenaries loyal to no one save their employers.
‘Back on Earth, these guys were army dogs, marines
fighting for freedom,’ he comments. ‘But out here
they’re just hired guns, taking the money, working
for the company.’
The hired guns in question are employed by the
RDA’s security division, Security Operations (SecOps).
According to its background information, the rela-
tionship between SecOps and the RDA was forged
during the early years of colonizing Mars. SecOps’s
primary goals are to protect sensitive RDA facilities
on off-world colonies. The RDA originally recruited
exclusively from a pool of retired or discharged mili-
tary service men and women from across the world.
However, by 2154 the RDA had begun recruiting
employees from other private military corporations
(Avatar InitiumWiki n.d.).This fictional business model
is grounded in both the historical record and the con-
temporary emerging market for private security.
State outsourcing of its military capability was
superseded after the French Revolution of 1789 and
subsequent rallying of the people in the defense of the
republic – the famous levée en masse that carried the
day at Valmy in 1792.This would have significant long-
term political implications in addition to its immedi-
ate military repercussions. According to Alan Forrest
(2003: 41), ‘the motive power of the levée en masse
meant much more than a simple call to patriotism.
It included a direct appeal to civic virtue and public
responsibility’. This transition from subject to citizen
under the aegis of nationalism enabled the ascen-
dancy of the unitary sovereign state. As Arthur Wal-
dron (2003: 262) says,‘The change in the nature of war
between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of
which the levée en masse, real and imagined, was a cru-
cial part, left its most powerful legacy in the consolida-
tion of the European state system’. This consolidation
was a two-way process. According to Otto Hintze:
A phenomenon repeatedly encountered
in history is that fulfillment of public ob-
ligations leads in the long run to acqui-
sition of public rights. Whoever puts
himself in the service of the state must
logically and fairly be granted the regular
rights of citizenship. (Hintze 1975: 211)
Hintze admits that, ‘To be sure, universal, equal,
direct suffrage would not be an automatic conse-
quence’ of such service (Hintze 1975: 211). But it is
notable that significant social reforms were often
undertaken in the aftermath of the ever greater mil-
itary crises which wracked the western world dur-
ing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Each life-and-death struggle required ever deeper
mobilization of the populace, which was reflected
in its increased political rights afterwards. Examples
include the extension of the suffrage to women after
World War I, and the GI bill and (eventual) civil rights
legislation after World War II (Flynn 2002). Taking a
contrary position, Thomson (1994: 105) argues ‘Non-
state violence was not deligitimated by society or
domestic political actors but by European states-
men. System-level political forces were responsible’.
In any event, the principle of the citizen in arms jus-
tified mass conscription, standing armies and the
total wars of the twentieth century.
In the United States, that principle, which began
breaking down with the abolition of selective ser-
vice, collapsed completely at the end of the Cold
War (Huskey 2012; Krahmann 2012; Krahmann
2010; Chesterman and Lehnardt 2007; Verkuil 2007).
Having declared victory, the Clinton administration
immediately commenced downsizing the military.
No longer employed by the state, the laid-off veter-
ans responded by offering their skills to the emerg-
ing private market for military capability. Ironically,
many of these individuals then found themselves
again working for the US Government, this time on a
contractual basis (Avant 2005).
There are three basic business models in the pri-
vate security industry; many firms operate subdivi-
sions that offer combinations of all three, thereby
allowing for a comprehensive, integrated package
of services. The largest such integrated security
provider is G4S, which has operations in over 120
countries; its more than 620,000 employees world-
wide makes it the third-largest employer glob-
ally behind Wal-Mart and Foxconn (G4S n.d.). The
first model is to provide active security for physi-
cal assets, whether infrastructure or personnel; an
exemplar is UK firm Defense Systems Ltd (DSL),
which, in addition to providing security services
to clients such as De Beers, Texaco, Chevron, Brit-
ish Gas, British Petroleum, Bechtel, BHP Mineral
and American Airlines, has also been utilized by
at least seven UN organizations in security roles
(Drohan 2003). The second model is to work behind
the front lines, training and advising the armed
forces of their clients. US firms Vinnell Corp. and
Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) perform
this function, with the unofficial imprimatur of
the US State Department, as it serves US foreign
policy interests. Finally, there are firms such as
Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) which focus specifi-
cally on the least glamorous, but no less important,
logistical functions of an armed force – everything
from systems analysis to peeling potatoes (Brayton

www.filmint.nu | 53
2002; Mandel 2002; Smith 2002–03). Private provi-
sion of these services conforms to current budget-
ary and operational doctrine. ‘Only those functions
that must be performed by the Defense Depart-
ment should be kept by the Defense Department,’
an internal Defense Department study concluded
shortly after September 11, 2001; ‘Any function
that can be provided by the private sector is not
a core government function’ (Schwartz 2003). In a
practical application of this doctrine, the Obama
administration has moved aggressively to compen-
sate for the drawdown of its military presence in
Iraq by handing off security to private military free-
lancers, tens of thousands of whom now operate
in the country. Firms like DynCorp, Triple Canopy
and Global Strategies Group have secured multi-
hundred-million-dollar contracts from the federal
government while being subjected to effectively
no oversight; as the Congressional Commission on
Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan con-
cluded, ‘At least $31 billion, and possibly as much
as $60 billion, has been lost to contract waste and
fraud in America’s contingency operations in Iraq
and Afghanistan’ (Ackerman 2011a; Ackerman
2011b; Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq
and Afghanistan 2011).
The trend away from the state monopoly of vio-
lence therefore represents not a departure from a
state-centred norm but a return to a previous pat-
tern. Peter W. Singer (2003: 39) goes so far as to sug-
gest,‘From a broad view, the state’s monopoly of both
domestic and international force was a historical
anomaly’. Sean McFate (2014: 6), too, describes the
Westphalian state-centric system as ‘anomalous’
and predicts a future for international relations that
is ‘polycentric, with authority diluted and shared
among state and nonstate actors alike… character-
ized by overlapping authorities and allegiances.’ In
addition to being a Eurocentric and never a univer-
sally applied principle, ‘The state’s attainment of
a near monopoly of legitimate force is not perma-
nent,’ Anthony Pereira (2003: 388) confirms:
[i]nstead, it is temporary and reversible.
The end of the Cold War, economic glo-
balization, and the spread of cheap, light
weapons are making the state’s monopoly
on legitimate violence increasingly tenu-
ous, most dramatically in the Middle East,
Central Asia, and Africa. (Pereira 2003: 388)
Martin van Creveld also anticipates:
the state will lose its monopoly over those
forms of organized violence which still
remain viable in the nuclear age, becom-
ing one actor among many. Spreading from
the bottom up, the conduct of that vio-
lence may revert to what it was as late as
the first half of the seventeenth century:
namely a capitalist enterprise little dif-
ferent from, and intimately linked with,
so many others. (van Creveld 1999: 407)
Below Avatar (2009)

As power devolves away from the state and into the
hands of a mélange of public, semi-public and pri-
vate entities, sovereignty will be inescapably compro-
mised. In this return to the more fluid pre-Westphalia
political environment, policy will be arrived at via
negotiations between these actors. ‘Occasionally, no
doubt, they will also make use either of their own
forces or, which appears more and more likely, those
of contractors in order to direct violence against each
other’ (van Creveld 1999: 418–19). Again, if history is
any guide, these hired guns may ultimately turn on
their employers and seize the very assets they were
charged with defending for themselves. The RDA
should not have been surprised at being dispossessed
in this manner by SecOps on Pandora. The warning
was there all along in SecOps’s Latin motto, ‘O Prae-
clarum Custodem Ovium Lupum’, which is from
Cicero: ‘Oh excellent guardian of sheep, the wolf!’
Space: The free market frontier
Outer space may not be the final, but it is certainly
the furthest, frontier for private enterprise. Commer-
cial spaceflight, led by firms such as XCOR and Sir
Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, is forecast to be a
billion-dollar business over the next decade (Klotz
2012). The industry already has its own trade associ-
ation, the Commercial Spaceflight Federation (http://
www.commercialspaceflight.org/). Other investors
are sponsoring initiatives targeting the cornucopia
of mineral deposits contained within space bodies,
from platinum to the isotope Helium-3, which, while
practically nonexistent on Earth, is ideally suited as
the fuel source for clean fusion power. The mechan-
ics and social dynamics of space-mining have been
explored by science fiction, notably in the movie Out-
land (1980); some entrepreneurs (e.g. Golden Spike,
http://goldenspikecompany.com/our-business/busi-
ness-objectives/) now see the Moon as a potential
site for the extraction of these assets (Quick 2011),
whereas others have targeted asteroids in near
Earth orbit (Keck Institute for Space Studies 2012).
A pacesetter in this field is Planetary Resources,
founded by Google billionaires Larry Page and Eric
Schmidt, which has a mission statement of ‘bring-
ing the natural resources of space within humanity’s
economic sphere of influence’ (Planetary Resources
n.d.[a]). The company met its fundraising goals in
the summer of 2013 and is scheduled to commence
operations (Achenbach 2012; Boyle 2012; Efreti 2012;
Plait 2012). Sir Richard Branson recently commit-
Below Avatar (2009)
Again, if history is any guide, these hired guns may ultimately turn
on their employers and seize the very assets they were charged with
defending for themselves.

www.filmint.nu | 55
ted to being a core investor in Planetary Resources:
‘The only way to truly explore our Solar System is
to develop the technology and means to sustain our
presence in space without depleting resources of
Earth’ (Planetary Resources 2013). In addition, the
vacuum of space, its extremes in temperature and
its negligible gravity also provide an ideal environ-
ment for the material processing necessary in many
manufacturing industries, including metallurgy,
pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, genetic engineer-
ing and molecular electronics, enabling substantial
scientific advances in medicine and pharmacology,
and industrial advances in electronics, glass and
metallurgy (Meyer 2010: 244). The two key factors
responsible for the discoveries of the Age of Sail – the
‘push’ of market capacity and the ‘pull’ of technolog-
ical capability – are coming into play again. We are
accordingly on the threshold of a new era of explo-
ration, colonization and exploitation, and if history
is any guide, the current trajectory will culminate
in privately held corporations defining the param-
eters of economic policy and security in the Solar
System and beyond, assuming the practice of inter-
stellar trade becomes viable.4
Just as in the previous
era, therefore, having created the context for, and
funded the first steps into space, states will increas-
ingly make way for private enterprise to exploit the
available opportunities they have opened up (see
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s comments in Gonzalez 2011,
starting at 14:47).
From its Cold War-driven inception in 1958, NASA
monopolized the US manned space programme. In
2004 President Bush announced NASA would phase
out the Space Shuttle programme by the end of the
decade in favour of the $100 billion Constellation
programme of next-generation rockets and space
capsules. The end of this state-centred era of space
explorations came in February 2010, when Presi-
dent Obama announced the end of the Constella-
tion programme (Moseman 2010). To stimulate the
nascent private-space-industry alternative, Obama
requested that $6 billion of NASA’s budget over the
next five years be directed to space tech develop-
ment (Malik 2010).The intention is to create a diverse
industry of taxi fleets that will transport cargo and
crew to low Earth orbit, both for NASA and for com-
mercial enterprises such as satellite companies or
space tourism (Space.com Staff 2012). ‘At NASA we
need to focus our resources and priorities on con-
quering the hardest challenges in space – moving on
to the moon, Mars, and the rest of the solar system,’
says Alan Lindenmoyer, Commercial Crew and Cargo
programme manager at the Johnson Space Center in
Houston. ‘This is a great opportunity to count on the
skills of American ingenuity to take on the task of
routine access’ (Kushner 2010).
President Obama made a similar point in a
speech at the Kennedy Space Center in April 2010
(NASA 2010). ‘Now, I recognize that some have said
it is unfeasible or unwise to work with the private
sector in this way,’ he said. ‘I disagree. The truth
is, NASA has always relied on private industry to
help design and build the vehicles that carry astro-
nauts to space.’ In 1966 NASA directly employed
Below Avatar (2009)

36,000 people, and close to half a million others via
roughly 500 main contractors and around 20,000
sub-contractors. Most of this funding went to the
major aerospace companies. Stage one of the Sat-
urn rocket system was built by Boeing; stage two by
North American Rockwell; stage three by McDon-
nell Douglas; and the rocket motors by Rocketdyne.
The prime contractor for the Apollo Command and
Service modules was North American Rockwell, the
Lunar Module was built by Grumman, and the Lunar
Roving Vehicle by Boeing (Parker 2009: 85). However,
the nature of that relationship is fundamentally
changing. In the past NASA was calling the shots:
overseeing the design of a system, then owning and
operating it once all the parts were complete. Now
the roles have changed, with NASA assuming the
position of a vested buyer (Kushner 2010). NASA
Deputy Administrator Lori Garver recognizes that
the process of outsourcing lift and delivery functions
represents ‘the natural progression of the industry
taking more and more of this capability on itself’
(Lee 2013: 21). Some within NASA have misgivings
about this approach. ‘It is a risk to hand that off to
a commercial entity and to give up control,’ Jay Pit-
tmann, NASA’s range commander at Wallops Island
launch facility, concedes. ‘In the end, we’re taking
our lifeline and we’re handing it to these commer-
cial companies’ (Bowdler and Danzico 2012). How-
ever, given NASA’s budget limitations and current
lack of a delivery vehicle, outsourcing this function
to the private sector is considered a superior option
to the alternative, ‘relying on the Russians and other
nations to get equipment and material to the Inter-
national Space Station,’ Pittmann explains; ‘Quite
honestly, that’s not as comfortable a position as we’d
like to be in as a nation’ (Bowdler and Danzico 2012).
Some advocates for the private sector’s penetration
of space are actively hostile towards NASA, which
they perceive as lacking in vision and unresponsive
to market signals; see Hudgins 2002; Klerkx 2004;
Handberg 2006; Solomon 2008.5
This orientation towards the private sector sim-
ply reflects best business practice based on rational
cost–benefit analysis. The plain fact is private enter-
prises can deliver the same results in a more cost-
effective manner (Gonzalez 2011). Key thresholds
in the transition from state to private service provi-
sion are already being met. In May 2012, the Space
Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) Dragon capsule
became the first commercial spacecraft in history to
be captured and berthed to the International Space
Station (ISS), and the first US spacecraft to visit the
ISS since the Space Shuttle Atlantis in July 2011
(Gonzalez 2012). In November 2012, the Dragon com-
pleted the first-ever commercial cargo delivery to
the ISS, the first stage of its twelve-mission, $1.6 bil-
lion cargo delivery contract. SpaceX will face compe-
tition; in September 2013, Orbital’s Cygnus capsule
successfully delivered its payload of commercial
cargo to the ISS, the first instalment on its own eight-
mission, $1.9 billion resupply contract (Bergin 2013).
In August of 2012 NASA committed an additional
$1.1 billion to three firms – Boeing, Sierra Nevada
and SpaceX – to develop its Commercial Crew Inte-
grated Capability, or CCiCap programme, which calls
for these three companies to take their design and
testing programme through a series of milestones by
May 2014 (Boyle 2012). NASA wants to have at least
one commercial space taxi carrying astronauts to
and from the International Space Station by 2017
(Coppinger 2013).
As an agency of the state shackled to a bitterly
contested budget process during an era of austerity,
NASA has been forced to circumscribe its ambitions
in addition to outsourcing its functionality (Wall
2013). On 19 June 2013, during the NASA Authori-
zation Act of 2013 House Subcommittee on Space
Hearing, witness Thomas Young, former executive
VP of Lockheed Martin and former chair of NASA’s
space station advisory committee, was asked how
long it would take the Agency to put a human on
Mars with its current budget. His response was
unambiguous: ‘Never.’ He expanded on this blunt
assessment in a prepared statement: ‘There is much
discussion about going to the Moon, an asteroid,
Phobos, Deimos and Mars; however, there is no cred-
ible plan or budget’ (Gonzalez 2013). Where the state
is in full retreat, the private sector is stepping up to
fill the void. SpaceX founder Elon Musk has plans to
initiate a Martian colonization project. On Mars, ‘you
can start a self-sustaining civilization and grow it
into something really big’, he told an audience at the
Royal Aeronautical Society in London on 16 Novem-
ber 2012 (Coppinger 2012; Anders 2012). Sir Richard
We are accordingly on the threshold of a new era of exploration,
colonization and exploitation, and if history is any guide, the current
trajectory will culminate in privately held corporations defining the
parameters of economic policy and security in the Solar System and
beyond…

www.filmint.nu | 57
Branson shares a similar vision: ‘In my lifetime, I’m
determined to being a part of starting a popula-
tion on Mars’ (CBS News 2012). Judging by the public
response – for example, the more than two hundred
thousand people who have applied for membership
in the colonization programme initiated by the Mars
One Foundation (http://www.mars-one.com/) – there
is a significant market opportunity opening up for
those investors prepared to offer consumers their
own corner of outer space (Barber 2013; Mars One
n.d.). Despite not yet opening up its application pro-
cess, the Inspiration Mars Foundation (http://www.
inspirationmars.org/) has also been besieged by indi-
viduals hoping to participate in its projected January
2018 flyby mission to Mars (Pappas 2013).
One potential hurdle is the issue of jurisdiction.
The extent of private property rights in outer space
remains an open question (Reinstein 1999; Con-
tanta and Logsdonb 2004; Parker 2009; Coffey 2009;
Hearsey 2010; Meyer 2010). For example, there is an
emerging debate over the legal right of private cor-
porations like Planetary Resources to strip assets in
space for profit (Newswise 2012; Marks 2012; Wol-
chover 2012; Fox News 2012). Passage of the Spurring
Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepre-
neurship (SPACE) Act by the U.S. House of Repre-
sentatives in May 2015 was intended to resolve this
ambiguity, asserting‘Any asteroid resources obtained
in outer space are the property of the entity that
obtained such resources, which shall be entitled to
all property rights thereto’ (Fung 2015). The Act was
wholeheartedly endorsed by industry lobby groups
such as the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
because it rejected a statist regulatory approach (for
example, by prohibiting the FAA from proposing any
passenger safety regulations until the end of 2025) in
favor of fostering ‘the development of industry-wide
voluntary consensus standards’ (Messier 2015; Com-
mercial Spaceflight Federation 2015).
The only extant regulatory framework in effect is
the United Nations Outer Space Treaty (1967), which
mandates that ‘outer space is not subject to national
appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of
use or occupation, or by any other means’ (UNOOSA
1966). Accordingly, it is to ‘be free for exploration
and use by all States without discrimination of any
kind, on a basis of equality and in accordance with
international law, and there shall be free access to
all areas of celestial bodies’, which shall be utilized
‘for the benefit and in the interests of all countries,
irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific
development, and shall be the province of all man-
kind’ (UNOOSA 1966). The Treaty also maintains
‘States shall be responsible for national space activi-
ties whether carried out by governmental or non-
governmental entities’ (UNOOSA 1966).
Much of this is deliberately ambiguous and to
observers like Ezra J. Reinstein (1999: 72) represents
nothing more than ‘a legal void, a wasteland of inde-
terminacy and instability’. For example, the term
‘use’ could be interpreted to mean that a public or
private entity may own resources extracted from the
territory as long as it does not claim sovereignty over
the territory itself. Such an interpretation is sup-
Below Avatar (2009)

ported by the fact that the Treaty explicitly defines
activities that are forbidden (such as using space for
military purposes) and such activities as mining or
owning natural resources are not referenced (Coffey
2009: 125–26).
Two additional UN initiatives have imposed a
modest threshold of obligation on those parties
intending to pursue objectives in outer space. The
Liability Convention (1972) specifically holds states
‘absolutely liable’ for damage caused by their space
objects and mandates claims regarding damage
be presented through direct or indirect ‘diplomatic
channels’ (UNOOSA 1971) within one year of the
claimant’s actual knowledge of the damage. Simi-
larly, the Registration Convention (1976) requires
that a state register any object it launches into space
and report to the UN Secretary General certain basic
information regarding the object’s launch, function-
ality and orbit.
The most that can be said for the Treaty and Con-
ventions is that under their mandate states remain
the gatekeepers of space penetration. However, the
capacity of the UN to regulate, let alone police, such a
mandate is extremely limited. A private–public part-
nership involving a corporation and a member state
of the UN Permanent Security Council would have
effective veto power over any attempt to limit such a
partnership’s freedom of action. Even if those states
with existing space programmes revert to a national-
ized operational model, the private alternatives will
regroup elsewhere in search of new partners. Eric
Schmidt of Planetary Resources, for example, has
recently boosted Kenya as Africa’s emerging tech
hub (Sotunde 2013). The country’s location near the
equator on the continent’s east coast would make it
the ideal site for a space launch facility.
Conclusion: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
Avatar broke all box office records because it works
on so many levels visually and emotionally. But
it would not have struck such a chord with audi-
ences had they not been at least subliminally aware
of the profound social critique that structured the
action and adventure. James Cameron is a Cana-
dian, a nation that was largely brought into being by
the activities of the Hudson’s Bay Company after it
received a charter from the English Crown in 1670
(Newman 2000). His understanding of history cou-
pled with his awareness of contemporary trends in
the relationship between the private sector and the
state combined to inform a film of great thematic
depth and significance.
There is already correspondence between the
functionality of the merchant companies during the
Age of Sail and contemporary state–private partner-
ships in emerging markets globally (The Economist
2011; Carlos and Nicholas 1988). This will become
more explicit over time, as the world depicted in
Avatar becomes more and more a reality. This mat-
ters, because to allow the projection of a business
model centred on corporate imperialism into outer
space will endow those corporations with the status
of being, literally, above the law. History exposes the
implications of profit-driven exploitation of land and
cultures based on the assumption of what Edmund
Burke labelled a ‘geographical morality’. Stephen R.
Bown summarizes the application of this business
model by the Dutch East India Company:
In the process of securing enormous prof-
its, the VOC impoverished entire societ-
ies. By deciding where and in what quan-
tity spices could be grown, by relocating
peoples, by reordering whole societies and
ancient cultural practices to ensure the
highest possible return for distant share-
holders, the VOC evolved from being just
a company to becoming a quasi-colonial
entity that intruded into the lives of [the
indigenous peoples] and determined all
aspects of their lives – their commercial pat-
terns, relationships, religious practices, food,
clothing and freedoms. (Bown 2010: 52)
Such practices were not exclusive to the East Indies.
Having taken a Native American prisoner over the
course of a 1643 punitive expedition, the Dutch West
India Company’s governor, Willem Kieft, ordered the
man detained at Fort Amsterdam, where his captors
‘threw him down, and stuck his private parts, which
they had cut off, into his mouth while he was still
alive, and after that placed him on a mill-stone and
beat his head off’ (Bown 2010: 77–78). Bar the prov-
idential intervention of Jake Sully, this would have
been the fate of the Na’vi – forced acculturation,
ethnic cleansing or outright extermination. Burke
accused the East India Company of propagating a
mindset by which, ‘when you have crossed the equi-
noctial, all the virtues die’. If ‘actions in Asia do not
bear the same moral qualities as the same actions
would bear in Europe’ (Burke, cited in Keith 1922:
143-44), how much less would such morality apply
on Pandora compared to Earth? In such an instance,
man’s inhumanity to man would simply have been
superseded by man’s inhumanity to another sen-
tient species.

www.filmint.nu | 59
In his legal case against its Governor General,
Burke (cited in Keith 1922: 125, 128) famously
described the East India Company as ‘a state in the
disguise of a merchant’, which ‘does not exist as a
nation’, but is rather ‘a republic, a commonwealth,
without a people’. As he continued:
in all other countries, a political body that
acts as a commonwealth is first settled, and
trade follows as a necessary consequence of
the protection obtained by political power. But
here the affair was reversed: the constitution
of the Company began in commerce and end-
ed in empire. (Burke, cited in Keith 1922: 124)
That was precisely the trajectory of the RDA in Ava-
tar. We are seeing this already here on Earth where
corporations are now creating states instead of the
other way around (LeVine 2012). If this trend is pro-
jected into the future, Avatar will come to be rec-
ognized for what it is: a visionary film, not just in
terms of its special effects, but in its warning about
a future, informed by the lessons of the past, which
could come to be (Adams 2009). Ironically, the strug-
gle for that future may involve James Cameron him-
self. His role as an adviser to Planetary Resources
puts him directly at odds with one of the company’s
key investors, Eric Schmidt, whose involvement is
inspired by his own understanding of the past. ‘The
pursuit of resources drove the discovery of America
and opened the west,’ he explains. ‘The same driv-
ers still hold true for opening the space frontier’
(Planetary Resources n.d.[b]). His synopsis of his-
tory is accurate but incomplete; absent is the per-
spective of the indigenous peoples whose lands were
being ‘opened’ by the pursuit of resources, the very
peoples whose stories were adapted and brought to
life in Avatar. Unless these two historical narratives
can be somehow harmonized, the same drivers will
have the same implications for the indigenous peo-
ples mankind may encounter some day on what will
truly be a New World.
Contributor’s details
Si Sheppard is an Associate Professor at the
Department of Political Science, Long Island
University, Brooklyn.
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