16According to James Hutton, for example, the fact that coal is found of different qualities, corresponding to the intermediary stages of its formation, supported the gradualist thesis and indicated that the process was still under way. See James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, from Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1788, 33.
17Carnot, Réflexions, 1.
18Jean-Baptiste Say, Cours complet d’économie politique pratique (1828), vol. 1, Paris: Guillaumin, 1840, 262.
19William Buckland, Geology and Mineralogy Considered with Reference to Natural Theology, vol. 1, Philadelphia: Carey, 1837, 403.
20Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 18–28.
21Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, London: Charles Knight, 1832, 17.
22Jean-Baptiste Dumas and Jean-Baptiste Boussingault, ‘Recherches sur la véritable constitution de l’air atmosphérique’, Annales de chimie et de physique, 3:3, 1841: 257–304.
23L’ami des sciences, 1, 1855, 174.
24See Alexis Zimmer, Brouillards mortels. Une histoire de la production de météores industriels, 19e/20e siècles. Le cas de la vallée de la Meuse, PhD thesis, University of Strasbourg, 2013.
25Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Boston: Beacon Press, 2001, 44.
26This should be contrasted with the economic vulgarization of Ricardo’s more ambiguous positions, as he expressly justified the complaints of artisans made unemployed by machines. See Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980, 43–111.
27Quoted by Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?: England 1783–1846, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 326.
28Quoted by Berg, The Machinery Question, 163.
29The statutes of medieval guilds often laid down production quotas in order to avoid excessive competition, maintain the quality of products as well as the reputation of a town’s artisans. Thus the hatters of Marseille and Paris were not allowed to produce more than three hats per day. See Michael Sonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth-Century France, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
30Erwin Ackerknecht, ‘Anticontagionism between 1821 and 1867’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 22:5, 1948, 562–93.
31Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
32Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
33Daniel Breslau, ‘Economics Invents the Economy: Mathematics, Statistics, and Models in the Work of Irving Fisher and Wesley Mitchell’, Theory and Society, 32:3, 2003: 379–411.
34Philip Mirowski, More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
35Antonin Pottier, L’Économie dans l’impasse climatique. Développement matériel, théorie immatérielle et utopie auto-stabilisatrice, thesis, EHESS, 2014, 112–22; Guido Erreygers, ‘Hotelling, Rawls, Solow: How Exhaustible Resources Came to Be Integrated into the Neoclassical Growth Model’, History of Political Economy, 41, 2009: 263–85.
36Alex Preda, ‘Socio-Technical Agency in Financial Markets: The Case of the Stock Ticker’, Social Studies of Science, 36:5, 2006: 753–82.
37Robert Solow, ‘The Economics of Resources or the Resources of Economics’, American Economic Review, 64:2, 1974: 1–14, 11.
38Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, ‘Energy and Economic Myths’, Southern Economic Journal, 41:3, 1975: 347–81; Joan Martínez Alier and Klaus Schlüpmann, Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
39Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London: Verso, 2011, 123–4.
40Timothy Mitchell, ‘Fixing the Economy’, Cultural Studies, 12:1, 1998: 82–101.
41Adam Tooze, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 8.
42See Milton Gilbert et al., ‘The Measurement of National Wealth: Discussion’, supplement, Econometrica, 17, 1949: 255–72.
43Martínez Alier and Schlüpmann, Ecological Economics, 275.
44See the calculations of a ‘genuine progress indicator’ for the United States by Mark Anielski and Jonathan Rowe, The Genuine Progress Indicator – 1998 Update, San Francisco: Redefining Progress, 1999, which takes account among other things of the costs of pollution, road accidents and the loss of wetlands.
45Carmel Finley, All the Fish in the Sea: Maximum Sustainable Yield and the Failure of Fisheries Management, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011.
46Dennis L. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth, New York: Universe Books, 1972.
47Élodie Vieille Blanchard, Les Limites à la croissance dans un modèle global – Modèles mathématiques, prospectives, réfutations, doctoral thesis, EHESS, 2011.
48Herman Kahn, William Brown and Leon Martel, The Next 200 Years: A Scenario for America and the World, New York: Morrow, 1976; Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, New York: Bantam Books, 1980.
49Nik Heynen et al., (eds), Neoliberal Environments: False Promises and Unnatural Consequences, London: Routledge, 2007; Yannick Mahrane and Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Gouverner la biosphere. De l’environnement de la guerre froide à l’environnement neolibéral’, in Dominique Pestre (ed.), Le Gouvernement des technosciences, Paris: La Découverte, 2014, 133–69; Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Tell Me Where You Come from, I Will Tell You What You Are: A Genealogy of Biodiversity Offsetting Mechanisms in Historical Context’, Conservation Biology, 2015, 10.1016/j.biocon.2015.09.022. See also the special issue of the journal Conservation and Society on ‘neoliberal conservation’: Conservation and Society 5:4.
50Stefan Aykut and Amy Dahan, Gouverner le climat? 20 ans de négociations internationales, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2014, 399–401.
51Benjamin Stephan and Richard Lane (eds), The Politics of Carbon Markets, London: Routledge, 2015.
52As recently proposed by the economists Graciela Chichilnisky and Geoffrey Heal, ‘Securitizing the Biosphere’, in Graciela Chichilnisky and Geoffrey Heal (eds), Environmental Markets: Equity and Efficiency, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, 169–79.
53Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Une nature liquide? Les discours de la biodiversité dans le nouvel esprit du capitalisme’, in Frédéric Thomas (ed.), Le pouvoir de la biodiversité. Néolibéralisation de la nature dans les pays émergents, Paris: Éditions de l’IRD-Quae, 2015, 193–213.
54advancedconservation.org, accessed 15 March 2013. (The page containing the quote has since been suppressed.)
55Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘L’arrêt de monde’, in Émilie Hache (ed.), De l’univers clos au monde infini, Paris: Dehors, 2014, 221–339; Frédéric Neyrat, Enquête sur la part inconstructible de la Terre. Critique du géo-constructivisme, Paris: Seuil, 2016.
56Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘Payer pour polluer. L’industrie chimique et la compensation des dommages environnementaux, 1800–1850’, Histoire et mesure, 28:1, 2013: 145–86.
CHAPTER 10
Capitalocene: A Combined
History of Earth System
and World-Systems
If, as Fredric Jameson put it, ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism’,1 this is because capitalism has become coextensive with the Earth. The last three centuries have been characterized by an extraordinary accumulation of capital: despite destructive wars, this grew by a factor of 134 between 1700 and 2008.2 The dynamic of capital accumulation gave rise to a ‘second nature’ made up of roads, plantations, railways, mines, pipelines, wells, power stations, futures markets and container ships, financial positions and banks that structure flows of matter, energy, goods and capital on
a world scale. It is this profit-oriented technostructure that swung the Earth system into the Anthropocene. The change in geological regime is the act of the ‘age of capital’ (Eric Hobsbawm), rather than simply the ‘age of man’ as the dominant narratives claim.
Marx saw capitalism as a mechanism for the self-production of money (the formula M–C–M’), resulting from a mode of production that aimed no longer at the manufacture of useful objects but rather that of commodities sold to increase capital. This became an ‘automaton subject’, to the detriment of human freedom and the integrity of the Earth, hence Marx’s metaphor of the Moloch that demands that the whole world be sacrificed to it. Following him, Marxist writers have analysed ecological degradation as a metabolic rift specific to the intrinsic logic of capitalism.3 They have described the inability of capitalism to reproduce not only the worker, but also the environment, as its ‘second contradiction’.4 But the mobilization of the world by capitalism has taken extremely diverse forms according to place and time, from the agrarian and rent-seeking capitalism that still prevailed in the British countryside in the nineteenth century, based on the differential fertility of soils (and thus on their relative maintenance), through to the fossil, mining and oil capitalism that drilled its wells across the world as resources were exhausted – from the slave trade to nanosecond trading. Thus, instead of the great universals of ‘capital’ or the ‘human species’, this chapter sets out to analyse the historical metabolisms of the capitalist ‘world-systems’ of the last quarter millennium and their effects on the Earth system in a way that illuminates both the history of capitalism and the genesis of the Anthropocene.
The notion of world-system was developed by the work of Fernand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein5 as a way of grasping historically the globalization of the economy and the perpetuation of economic inequalities between regions of the world.6 In 400 years of accumulation since the fifteenth century, four successive world-systems can be distinguished, centred on four successive hegemonic powers: the Italian cities (which financed the American expansion), Holland, Great Britain (from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century) and the United States.
The notion of world-system has the double advantage of being not only historical and dynamic, but also systemic and global, making it possible to open a constructive dialogue with the sciences of the Earth system that are likewise systemic and global.7 Vis-à-vis a transformed Earth system we no longer have an undifferentiated ‘anthropos’, but rather historical systems of domination that each organize in a distinct fashion flows of matter, energy, commodities and capitals on a global scale. As Wallerstein emphasizes, these systems are structurally inegalitarian: the hegemonic nations accumulate capital, guaranteeing the middle classes a certain standard of living and thus maintaining the domestic social order and financing infrastructure, education, health, mobility and innovation. These states, and above all the businesses that they protect, have the economic power and the military strength to extract raw material at low cost in the peripheral countries, to exploit there if necessary a low-paid labour force, to export outdated goods and to pollute their environments.
The notion of world-system is currently being revisited from the perspective of flows of matter and energy, thermodynamics and ecological footprint.8 These studies have revealed the existence of successive world-ecologies9 co-generated by each phase in the history of the world-economy. These equally show that the prosperity of the rich countries is constructed by way of a monopolization of the benefits of the Earth and an externalization of environmental damages by the phenomena of dispossession and ‘unequal exchange’.
In Capital, Marx already noted that the economically subjugated position of Ireland meant that ‘for a century and a half, England has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland’.10 This asymmetry is produced not only in predation (the concept of ‘appropriation by dispossession’ proposed by David Harvey)11 and unequal exchange in terms of embodied labour,12 but also through the ecological or energy content of the goods exchanged. Exchange is said to be ecologically unequal when the territories of the periphery export products of high ecological use-value against products that have a lesser ecological use-value. This ecological value can be measured in terms of the acreage needed for the production of different ecosystemic services, of ‘ecological footprint’,13 of embodied energy or ‘emergy’ in international exchange,14 of matter,15 entropy,16 or of the waste and damage generated.
For example, on the basis of Georgescu-Roegen’s thermodynamic analysis of the economy, André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein have envisaged the world system as a dissipative structure. In each of its phases, the systems of production and exchange export entropy into the Earth system and distribute this entropy unequally across the planet.17 This new accounting in terms of the hectares, energy, greenhouse gas, entropy or matter (water, biomass, mineral ores, etc.) embodied in world economic exchange has triggered a mushrooming of new statistical methods and series that provide a new and rematerialized understanding of the history of societies by illuminating their metabolism, and the successive world-ecologies that they produce and of which they form part.
At a time when millions of poor people are affected by climate disturbance and come to swell the tide of migrants, this ecological reading of the history of world-systems also has a resonance in terms of the major issues of geopolitics and environmental justice. Shortly before the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, while the Climate Convention was being negotiated, two Indian ecologists put forward the idea of a historic debt of the rich countries in ecological terms.18 They proposed to attribute to each inhabitant of the planet an emission right that took account of the past emissions of their fellow-citizens. A senior Chinese leader asserted in 2009 that
the climate crisis is the result of the very uneven pattern of economic development that evolved over the past two centuries, which allowed today’s rich countries to attain their current levels of income, in part through not having to account for the environmental damage now threatening the lives and livelihoods of others.19
It is in response to this kind of instrumentalization of the notion of a ‘common but differentiated responsibility’ that certain historians, such as Dipesh Chakrabarty, have sought to disconnect the history of capitalism from that of the Anthropocene. For him, ‘it is thanks to the poor (that is, thanks to the fact that development is unequal and unjust) that we do not emit still higher amounts of greenhouse gases into the biosphere’. He continues, ‘Those who link climate change exclusively to historical origins, or to the formation of inequalities of wealth in the modern world, raise questions about historical inequalities’ that are not pertinent to cast light on the historical genesis of the new state of the Earth that the Anthropocene is.20 It is remarkable that after having proclaimed the encounter between human history and that of the Earth as characteristic of the Anthropocene,21 Chakrabarty now postulates a separation, a mutual ‘indifference’, between the history of dominations and inequalities among humans and that of the ecological and geological disturbances inflicted on the Earth. This paradox enables him to conclude that ‘from a logical point of view, the climate crisis is not in itself the result of economic inequalities’.22
If the argument seems ‘logical’ from a static point of view (the poorest do indeed have a lighter ecological footprint), in historical terms it is highly questionable. For two centuries, the development of industrial countries has generated a great divergence of incomes between their populations and those of the poor countries: in 1820, the poorest 20 per cent on the planet obtained 4.7 per cent of world income, falling to only 2.2 per cent in 1992.23 As we shall see in this chapter, the industrial development model and its metabolism in terms of matter and energy, which altered the geological trajectory of our Earth, is inseparable from the history of capitalist world-systems, of unequal ecological exchange, of colonialism and imperialism, of exploitation and underdevelopment.
The rise of industrial capitalism and the swing int
o the Anthropocene: a global reading
The standard account of the Anthropocene offers a very Eurocentric history, in which global disruption is supposedly a secondary effect of a European wave of innovations leading the world towards growth. Thinking the Anthropocene as a ‘Capitalocene’ forces us to reconsider the pertinence of this starting-point and propose a more global reading. It was indeed in the early nineteenth century, with the start of the industrial age, that the entire Earth system was affected and humanity became a geological rather than simply a biological force, yet to begin the Anthropocene around 1800 obscures the essential fact that industrial capitalism was intensely prepared for by the ‘mercantile capitalism’ that begun in the sixteenth century, not least in its destructive relationship to nature. To speak of a ‘Capitalocene’24 signals that the Anthropocene did not arise fully armed from the brain of James Watt, the steam engine and coal, but rather from a long historical process of economic exploitation of human beings and the world, going back to the sixteenth century and making industrialization possible.
The industrial revolution took place in a world that was already capitalist and globalized. Until well into the nineteenth century, British capitalism was far more mercantile, globalized and extraverted than a history focused on production might lead us to believe. Finance, the management of public debt and international trade generated fortunes far larger than those from mining or the textile industry. British imperialism, and the economic globalization of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was fashioned by an assembly of aristocrats, bankers and merchants.
This class of ‘gentleman capitalists’ acquired a politically preeminent power from its financing of the wars against France. For Britain, the main object of the War of Austrian Succession, the Seven Years War and the American wars was the domination of the Atlantic trading space and the conquest of global hegemony. The financing of the war and the public debt (which for England in 1815 was twice the GDP of the time) rested on the income from global trade, hence the key role for the British state of the East India Company, which channelled tribute from India, of the Navigation Acts that promoted London’s import-export activity, and the ‘invisible’ revenue from shipping and insurance. The importance of mercantile and financial capitalism for the British state can be read from the major political orientations of the nineteenth century: free trade above all, which made London the global entrepôt, then the reduction of public expenditure, which, at the price of increasing poverty, strengthened the pound (which returned to the gold standard in 1819) and thus aided the ‘gentleman capitalists’ to export their capital across the world.25
The Shock of the Anthropocene Page 25