Michael J. Watts is a Marxist geographer specializing in political ecology and economic geography. Born in England, Watts has published more than 200 scholarly articles, books, and essays that have appeared in leading journals in geography and anthropology. His work focuses on the politics of oil, agrarian political economy, and development. Much of that work is based on field research in Nigeria and West Africa and related work in India, Vietnam, and the United [Page 3079]States. He is the Class of 1963 Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1979. Watts's scholarly work combines his commitments to social change with his formidable intellect, yielding a wide-ranging body of work whose influence extends far beyond geography.

Watts is widely regarded ...