The Economics of Displacement: Climate Refugees and Disposable Labour in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island

Abstract

Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island represents climate displacement as an economic process rather than a single environmental event. This paper traces a causal chain from carbon-intensive accumulation to ecological damage, livelihood loss, debt-financed migration, irregular legal status, and disposable labour. Environmental economics explains climate change as a negative externality whose benefits accrue disproportionately to wealthy producers and consumers, while vulnerable regions bear its costs. Political ecology, labour theory, the capability approach, precarity theory, and environmental justice reveal the institutions that convert those transferred costs into exploitable workers. Through the novel’s movement from the Sundarbans to Venice, Ghosh connects unstable ecosystems with an unequal mobility regime: capital crosses borders freely, whereas displaced people encounter traffickers, detention, xenophobia, and deportability. Their insecurity is economically productive because employers and intermediaries can extract labour while avoiding durable obligations. The novel, therefore, challenges the supposedly neutral category of the “climate refugee.” Displacement emerges from the interaction of climatic, colonial, political, and economic pressures. A just response must combine mitigation and loss-and-damage finance with livelihood protection, safe mobility, labour rights, regular status, and migrant political voice.