The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  In conclusion, there would be many heuristic and explanatory advantages in speaking of a ‘Capitalocene’ rather than an Anthropocene. This particularly means that the rich countries would neither have succeeded in industrializing nor attained the post-war affluent society without the possibility of unequal ecological exchange with the rest of the world, and that unequal ecological exchange is indeed a major explanatory factor for the combined genesis of the asymmetries of wealth characteristic of the historical dynamic of capitalism, and the rise of human impacts that caused the geological derailment of the planet in the Anthropocene. A rematerialized and ecologized history of capitalism appears as the indispensable partner of the Earth system sciences in order to understand our new epoch.100

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  1Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review, 21, 2003: 76.

  2A calculation in 1990 dollars on the basis of data from Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014, Supplementary Figures and Tables, Table S12.4, ‘Private capital in the world, 1870–2100’, piketty.pse.ens.fr, and personal communication. From a Marxist perspective it is wealth that is accounted here, rather than capital in the strict sense, which is only a part of this.

  3John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010.

  4James O’Connor, ‘Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Theoretical Introduction’, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 1:1, 1988: 11–38.

  5See Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, London: Verso, 1983, and World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004.

  6In the course of each of these, we find alongside the hegemonic power that stabilizes and governs the world economic order, drawing the greatest share of profits from this, a small group of countries in key beneficial positions (such as France and Germany during the British century, Europe and Japan in the second half of the twentieth century during the American century), semi-peripheral countries, and finally the peripheral ones that are dominated both politically and economically. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed., London: Verso, 2010.

  7Alf Hornborg and Carole L. Crumley (eds), The World System and the Earth System, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2006.

  8Alf Hornborg, ‘Ecological Economics, Marxism, and Technological Progress: Some Explorations of the Conceptual Foundations of Theories of Ecologically Unequal Exchange’, Ecological Economics 105, 2014: 11–18; John Bellamy Foster and Hannah Holleman, ‘The Theory of Unequal Ecological Exchange: A Marx-Odum Dialectic’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 41:2, 2014: 199–233.

  9We owe this term to Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, London: Verso, 2015.

  10Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, London: Penguin, 1973, 868.

  11Extending Rosa Luxemburg’s idea, David Harvey has suggested that capitalism, in order to sustain a regime of wage exploitation in the countries of the centre, has needed to repeatedly appropriate human labour and natural production previously outside capitalist relations. David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

  12Following the studies of Raúl Prebisch, Arghiri Emmanuel and Samir Amin, unequal exchange is characterized by unfavourable terms of trade for the countries on the periphery of the world-system, i.e., the fact that they have to export an increasing amount of goods (typically raw materials) to obtain the same quantity of imported goods (typically industrial goods), so that the number of hours of labour thus exchanged are increasingly unequal.

  13In the 1960s, the Swedish biologist Georg Borgström introduced the idea of ‘ghost acres’, as the terrain captured by certain countries that consumed more than their own territory’s bioproductive capacity by importing products from other regions of the world. This approach influenced the historian of the industrial revolution Kenneth Pomeranz (see below), as well as William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, who have developed the concept of ‘ecological footprint’ as a new indicator of sustainability. See William Rees and Mathis Wackernagel, Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth, Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 1998. For the method and recent results, see footprintnetwork.org.

  14Proposed by the great ecologist Howard T. Odum, ‘emergy’ estimates the work of the ecosystems embodied in a product measured in terms of the energy mobilized by the ecological processes that contributed to its formation.

  15Specialists in ‘material and energy flow analysis’ measure world trade in terms of its mass (in tonnes) or energy content. See the pioneering article by researchers from the Institut für Soziale Ökologie in Vienna: Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Helmut Haberl, ‘Tons, Joules and Money: Modes of Production and Their Sustainability Problems’, Society and Natural Resources, 10:1, 1997: 61–85.

  16According to the law of entropy, any economic undertaking transforms natural resources (of low entropy) into products and waste of a higher entropy, thus presenting an entropic cost that is always higher than that of the product alone. In the case of the Earth as an open system, part of this entropy is reduced by the living world, which reconstitutes a more ordered matter (negentropy) by using solar energy (photosynthesis). The transition to a fossil economy that dissipates the free energy of underground stocks more rapidly than this is reconstituted annually in the biosphere thus appears as an entropic marker of the Anthropocene. See Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

  17Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘Crises: The World-Economy, the Movements, and the Ideologies’, in Albert Bergesen (ed.), Crises in the World-System, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1983, 21–36; André G. Frank, ‘Entropy Generation and Displacement’, in Hornborg and Crumley, The World System and the Earth System, 303–316, especially 304.

  18Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism, Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1991.

  19Sha Zukang, foreword to Promoting Development, Saving the Planet, UN, 2009, viii, un.org. Sha Zukang was UN head of economic affairs at this time.

  20Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Quelques failles dans la pensée du changement climatique’, in Émilie Hache (ed.), De l’univers clos au monde infini, Paris: Dehors, 2014, 107–146, 123–4.

  21Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35:2, 2009: 197–222.

  22Chakrabarty, ‘Quelques failles’, 124.

  23François Bourguignon and Christian Morrisson, ‘Inequality Among World Citizens: 1820–1992’, American Economic Review, 92:4, September 2002: 727–44.

  24We came across this neologism while preparing the English edition of this book, as it was proposed by Jason Moore and other eco-Marxist writers. See in particular Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life.

  25P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas. I: The Old Colonial System, 1688–1850’, Economic History Review, 39:4, 1986: 501–25, and John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 112.

  26Eric Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire: An Economic History of Britain since 1750, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968, 48.

  27C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1963, ix.

  28Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, British Economic Growth 1688–1959: Trends and Structure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967, 87.

  29Our thanks to Paul Warde for this point.

  30According to François Crouzet, Brazilian gold represented as large a sum as official British foreign trade. See ‘Angleterre-Brésil, 1697–1850. Un siècle et demi d’échanges commerciaux’, Histoire, economie et société, 9:2, 1990: 288–317.

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sp; 31Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 265–314.

  32Ibid., 315–61.

  33François Crouzet, ‘Toward an Export Economy: British Exports during the Industrial Revolution’, Explorations in Economic History, 17:1, 1980: 48–93.

  34Nicholas Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, 143.

  35Quoted in Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944, 52.

  36Kenneth Morgan, Slavery, Atlantic Trade and the British Economy, 1660–1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 36–60.

  37Barbara Solow, ‘Caribbean Slavery and British Growth: The Eric Williams Hypothesis’, Journal of Development Economics, 17, 1985: 99–115.

  38John Richards, The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, 455.

  39Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

  40Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming, London: Verso, 2015.

  41Alf Hornborg, Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World, London: Routledge, 2013, 85–91.

  42Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, vol. 3, Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1928, 1,137–55, quotations from 1,137 and 1,153.

  43Pomeranz, The Great Divergence, 218.

  44Carolyn Merchant, The Columbia Guide to American Environmental History, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 49.

  45Richards, The Unending Frontier, 459; William Beinart and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 36–9.

  46John R. McNeill, ‘Ecology, Epidemics and Empires: Environmental Change and the Geopolitics of Tropical America, 1600–1825’, Environment and History, 5:2, 1999: 175–84.

  47Jerome O. Nriagu, ‘Mercury Pollution from the Past Mining of Gold and Silver in the Americas’, Science of the Total Environment, 149, 1994: 167–81.

  48Richards, The Unending Frontier, 612; John R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, New York: Norton, 2001, 238.

  49‘Trillions Demanded in Slavery Reparations’, BBC News, 20 August 1999, bbc.com.

  50Paul Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes de l’histoire économique, Paris: La Découverte, 1999.

  51John Tully, ‘A Victorian Ecological Disaster: Imperialism, the Telegraph, and Gutta-Percha’, Journal of World History, 20:4, 2009: 559–79.

  52John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, ‘Ecological Imperialism and the Global Metabolic Rift: Unequal Exchange and the Guano/Nitrates Trade’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 50, 2009: 311–34.

  53Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes, 99.

  54Heinz Schandl and Fridolin Krausmann, ‘The Great Transformation: A Socio-Metabolic Reading of the Industrialization of the United Kingdom’, in Marina Fischer-Kowalski and Helmut Haberl, Socioecological Transitions and Global Change: Trajectories of Social Metabolism and Land Use, London: Edward Elgar, 2007, 83–115, especially 110.

  55Ibid., 91 and 110–11.

  56Heinz Schandl and Niels Schulz, ‘Changes in the United Kingdom’s Natural Relations in Terms of Society’s Metabolism and Land-Use from 1850 to the Present Day’, Ecological Economics, 41:2, 2002: 203–21.

  57Timothy W. Guinnane et al., ‘Pouvoir et propriété dans l’entreprise. Pour une histoire internationale des sociétés à responsabilité limitée’, Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales, 63:1, 2008: 73–110.

  58Suzanne Berger, Notre première mondialisation. Leçons d’un échec oublié, Paris: Le Seuil, 2003, 26.

  59A. K. Cairncross, Home and Foreign Investment 1870–1913, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953, 104.

  60Only 6 per cent of this investment was made in Europe, with 45 per cent in the English-speaking world, 20 per cent in Latin America, 16 per cent in Asia and 13 per cent in Africa.

  61Darwin, The Empire Project, 112–20.

  62Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London: Penguin, 2003, 245.

  63Even if the age of the ‘gold standard’ was also based on the exploitation of the subsoil: the ‘gold rushes’ in California and South Africa enabled the central banks of the great powers to restock their reserves.

  64Daniel Headrick, The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988, 18–45.

  65Berger, Notre première mondialisation, 18.

  66Darwin, The Empire Project, 115.

  67Marc Linder, Projecting Capitalism: A History of the Internationalization of the Construction Industry, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994, 35–42.

  68Ibid., and Arnold J. Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America 1847–1874, Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2008.

  69Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, London: Verso, 2002.

  70Brian Mitchell, International historical statistics 1750–2005: Europe, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, Table C17.

  71John Tully, ‘A Victorian Ecological Disaster’.

  72Richard Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

  73N. R. Faria et al., ‘The Hidden History of HIV-1: Establishment and Early Spread of the AIDS Pandemic’, Science, 346, 2014: 56–61.

  74Paul Bairoch, ‘The Main Trends in National Economic Disparities since the Industrial Revolution’, in Paul Bairoch and Maurice Levy-Leboyer (eds), Disparities in Economic Development since the Industrial Revolution, London: Macmillan, 1985, 7–14.

  75Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century, 54.

  76Ibid., 271; Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 324–6.

  77For GDP and population, see the Maddison Project, ggdc.net/maddison; for consumption of materials and energy, see the Institut für Soziale Ökologie, ‘Growth in Global Materials Use, GDP and Population during the 20th Century: Online Global Materials Extraction 1900–2009 (Update 2011)’, uni-klu.ac.at/socec.

  78Marina Fischer-Kowalski, Fridolin Krausmann and Irene Pallua, ‘A Sociometabolic Reading of the Anthropocene: Modes of Subsistence, Population Size and Human Impact on Earth’, Anthropocene Review, 1:1, 2014: 8–33.

  79Christopher Chase-Dunn et al., ‘The Trajectory of the United States in the World-System: A Quantitative Reflection’, Sociological Perspectives, 48:2, 2005: 233–54.

  80Björn-Ola Linnér, The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-war Population–Resource Crises, Isle of Harris: White Horse Press, 2003.

  81David Painter, ‘Oil and the Marshall Plan’, Business History Review, 58:3, 1984: 359–83, especially 362–3.

  82Gilles Allaire and Benoit Daviron, ‘Agriculture et industrialisme’, in Transformations et transitions dans l’agriculture et l’agro-alimentaire, Versailles: Quae, forthcoming.

  83This indicator is based on an estimate of the area of land or sea needed to produce the resources consumed by a given population and absorb its waste (particularly including greenhouse gases). This area is measured in ‘bioproductive hectares’, calculated by taking account of the functioning of different environments across the globe. See footprintnetwork.org.

  84Global Footprint Network, ‘National Ecological Footprint and Biocapacity for 2007: Results from the National Footprint Accounts 2010 Edition’, footprintnetwork.org.

  85Anke Schaffartzik et al., ‘The Global Metabolic Transition: Regional Patterns and Trends of Global Material Flows, 1950–2010’, Global Environmental Change, 26, 2014: 87–97.

  86Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes, 97 and 102–3.

  87Schaffartzik et al., ‘The global metabolic transition’.

 
88Quoted by Linnér, The Return of Malthus, 29.

  89Thomas Robertson, ‘“This Is the American Earth”: American Empire, the Cold War, and American Environmentalism’, Diplomatic History, 32:4, 2008: 561–84; Yannick Mahrane and Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Gouverner la biosphere. De l’environnement de la guerre froide à l’environnement néoliberal’, in Dominique Pestre (ed.), Le Gouvernement des technosciences. Gouverner le progrès et ses dégâts depuis 1945, Paris: La Découverte, 2014, 133–69.

  90Linder, Projecting Capitalism, 126.

  91Geoffrey Jones, ‘Multinationals from the 1930s to the 1980s’, in Alfred D. Chandler Jr. and Bruce Mazlich, Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 81–103, especially 88.

  92Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes, 161.

  93Gaël Giraud and Zeynep Kahraman, ‘How Dependent Is Growth from Primary Energy? Output Energy Elasticity in 50 Countries (1970–2011)’, parisschoolofeconomics.eu.

  94The statistical series for different countries’ footprints are taken from Global Footprint Network, National Footprint Accounts 1961–2010 (2012 edition), available online at footprintnetwork.org. (It should be noted that the revised data from the Global Footprint Network differ slightly from those from another source: storymaps.esri.com/globalfootprint.)

  95This map represents an ecological balance in bioproductive hectares, but it is also possible to estimate this unequal ecological exchange in dollars. This has not yet been done for 1973, but a map of this kind can be found for the year 2000, a kind of balance of unsettled ecological payments. Paul C. Sutton et al., ‘The Real Wealth of Nations: Mapping and Monetizing the Human Ecological Footprint’, Ecological Indicators, 16, 2012: 11–22.