Rita Kesselring’s Extraction, Global Commodity Trade, and Urban Development in Zambia’s Northwestern Province offers a rich ethnographic study of Solwezi, a mining town in Zambia’s Northwestern Province, and its place within wider global systems of copper extraction, commodity trade, and urban inequality. Rather than treating Solwezi as a local community merely shaped by external capitalist forces, Kesselring asks why “interdependent places linked by myriad uneven connections still appear as separate and unconnected,” and what this conceptual separation does to those excluded from the wealth generated by global extractive economies (2). Her central argument is that wealth and poverty, order and insecurity, do not emerge in separate worlds, but are “defining features of the same order,” an extractive order that binds Zambia and Switzerland through unequal but mutually constitutive relations (5).

Kesselring constructs her argument by treating the Kansanshi mine near Solwezi as the organizing axis of a wider extractive economy that links copper production to urban growth, municipal strain, enclave life, infrastructure, logistics, and commodity trading. She draws on dependency theory, world-systems analysis, and theories of articulation, but also challenges their tendency to treat the Global North as a fixed structure and the Global South as a passive site of effect, and instead uses “asymmetrical interdependence” as her main analytical lens to describe how “resource trading and service provision in global production and supply chains” are tied together through unequal relations of “people, things, ideas and capital” (11). Methodologically, this leads her to what she calls “symmetrical ethnography,” which follows extraction across spaces that are usually treated as disconnected. As she puts it, “articulation is not happening in the air; it is happening in a concrete place,” and the book therefore studies “the global as seen from Solwezi” rather than treating the town as merely a local setting onto which mining is externally imposed (16).

The book is organized into six chapters that make a synthetic argument about how extraction is reproduced across a much wider social order that binds Solwezi to distant centers of wealth through uneven but interdependent relations. The first three chapters establish that argument from within the town by showing how Solwezi’s historical formation, municipal governance, and residents’ own labor of house-building all absorb and manage the pressures of extractivism, so that, as Kesselring puts it, “In building homes, Solwezi residents simultaneously build a town and a society on which the mine functionally relies, but from which it simultaneously tries to isolate itself” (84). In the final three chapters, Kesselring widens the scale from the town to the larger systems that sustain extraction. She begins with the Golf Estate, where racialized privilege and enclave life appear separate from Solwezi but in fact remain bound to it, since “the golf estate and Solwezi town are … part of a single social system characterized by mutual yet asymmetrical interdependence” (86). She then moves outward to the infrastructures of electricity, roads, and spatial planning, showing that extractive power “finds its equivalent on larger scales, within the country and internationally” and that “at all scales, the specific order that is created by a variety of actors selectively benefits the extractive industry” over ordinary residents (112). From there, she follows copper into the trading and service networks through which value is realized elsewhere, showing how Swiss-based firms “order value chains to their benefit,” control key parts of copper’s global circulation, and capture much of its value far from the mine (19).

The book is grounded in extensive multi-sited ethnographic research in Solwezi District, Zug (Switzerland), and London, drawing on field notes, photographs, audio recordings, municipal minutes, Geographical Information System (GIS) data, archival and contemporary documents, and baseline household data. These materials allow Kesselring to describe “asymmetrical power relations ethnographically across spaces that have been artificially disconnected” (13).

The multi-sited approach is one of the book’s strongest analytical contributions because it shows that extraction cannot be understood from Solwezi alone. Kesselring presents the book as “both, a study of a town and a study of its global entanglements,” and insists that a purely local ethnography “would have only cemented the conceptual division between the Global South and the Global North” (7, 16). While Solwezi reveals the lived urban pressures of mining on municipal governance, housing, planning, and social reproduction, Zug illustrates the commercial and logistical infrastructures through which value is captured beyond the mine site. By moving across Solwezi, Zug, and, to a lesser extent, London, she demonstrates that the mine, the town, and metropolitan trading centers are not separate worlds but interconnected sites within one unequal system. This shows how actors, services, profits, and governing logics circulate across these spaces in ways that a single-site study of Solwezi alone would have obscured.

The book makes a significant contribution to the study of extractivism, urban studies, and the political economy of global commodity chains. It is important for understanding inequality in mining regions as the outcome of a wider global system. However, while Kesselring attends to gendered burdens in discussions of social reproduction and load-shedding, the book privileges the structural mapping of extraction and global value capture more, making gender remain more suggestive than fully developed as a sustained analytical framework, leaving room for a fuller exploration of how women’s labor, care work, and gendered vulnerability shape daily life in the extraction sector in Solwezi.