The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

  But it was the very success of Bombay’s shipyards that led to their undoing. The English shipping industry complained that “the families of all the shipwrights in England are certain to be reduced to starvation” unless India-built ships were barred from accessing British ports. In 1815, the British Parliament passed a law, the Registry Act, that placed tight restrictions on Indian ships and sailors (“lascars”). It has been said of this law that it was “more devastating to the economy of Indian shipping than all the competitive technological innovations of the last 300 years put together.”

  It is worth recalling here that shipbuilding was at the leading edge of industrial innovation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; shipbuilders had to respond swiftly to technological advances of all kinds, for both commercial and military reasons. Bombay’s shipbuilders were not slow to respond to the challenges of steam technology. In 1830, master builder Naurojee Jamsetjee Wadia launched a steamer, the Hugh Lindsay, that was fitted with two engines sent out from England. But he was outdone by his relative, the engineer Ardeseer Cursetjee Wadia, who entered into apprenticeship in the Bombay Dockyard in 1822 at the age of fourteen and was eventually elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Ardeseer wrote in his memoirs: “My enthusiastic love of science now led me to construct, unassisted, a small steam engine of about 1 HP. I likewise endeavored to explain to my countrymen the nature and properties of steam; and to effect this point I had constructed at a great expense in England, a marine steam-engine, which, being sent out to Bombay, I succeeded with the assistance of a native blacksmith in fixing in a boat of my own building.”

  It will be evident from this that Indian entrepreneurs were quick to grasp the possibilities of British and American steam technology. There is no reason to suppose that they would not have been at least as good at imitating it as were their counterparts in, say, Germany or Russia, had the circumstances been different. It was the very fact that India’s ruling power was also the global pioneer of the carbon economy that ensured that it could not take hold in India, at that point in time. The appetites of the British economy needed to be fed by large quantities of raw materials, produced by solar-based methods of agriculture. Had a carbon economy developed synchronously in India and elsewhere, these materials would have been used locally instead of being exported.

  In other words, the emerging fossil-fuel economies of the West required that people elsewhere be prevented from developing coal-based energy systems of their own, by compulsion if necessary. As Timothy Mitchell observes, the coal economy thus essentially “depended on not being imitated.” Imperial rule assured that it was not.

  It was not for any lack of industriousness, then, or ingenuity or entrepreneurial interest, that this avatar of the carbon economy withered in India: the matter might have taken a completely different turn if local industrialists had enjoyed the kind of state patronage that was routinely extended to their competitors elsewhere.

  8.

  Where it concerns human beings, it is almost always true that the more anxiously we look for purity the more likely we are to come upon admixture and interbreeding. This is no less true, I think, of the genealogy of the carbon economy than it is of the human race: many different lines of descent are commingled in its present form.

  The factor that gave the carbon economy its decisive shape was not the provenance of the machines that ushered in the Industrial Revolution: these could have been used and imitated just as easily in other parts of the world as they were in continental Europe. What determined the shape of the global carbon economy was that the major European powers had already established a strong (but by no means hegemonic) military and political presence in much of Asia and Africa at the time when the technology of steam was in its nascency, that is to say, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From that point on, carbon-intensive technologies were to have the effect of continually reinforcing Western power with the result that other variants of modernity came to be suppressed, incorporated, and appropriated into what is now a single, dominant model.

  The boost that fossil fuels provided to Western power is nowhere more clearly evident than in the First Opium War, where armored steamships, led by the aptly named Nemesis, played a decisive role. In other words, carbon emissions were, from very early on, closely co-related to power in all its aspects: this continues to be a major, although unacknowledged, factor in the politics of contemporary global warming.

  The Opium War of 1839–42 was the first important conflict to be fought in the name of free trade and unfettered markets; yet, ironically, the most obvious lesson of this period is that capitalist trade and industry cannot thrive without access to military and political power. State interventions have always been critical to its advancement. In Asia, it was military dominance that created the conditions in which Western capital could prevail over indigenous commerce. British imperial officials of that period understood perfectly well the lesson contained in this: it was that the maintenance of military dominance had to be the primary imperative of empire.

  In mainland Asia, the crucial linkages between economy, political sovereignty, and military power were not restored till the paired processes of decolonization and the (temporary) retreat of the erstwhile colonial powers were set in motion by the end of the Second World War. It is surely no coincidence that the acceleration of mainland Asian economies followed within a few decades. As Dipesh Chakrabarty points out, the period of the Great Acceleration is precisely “the period of great decolonization in countries that had been dominated by European imperial powers.”

  Such being the case, another essential question in relation to the chronology of global warming is this: What would have happened if decolonization and the dismantling of empires (including that of Japan) had occurred earlier, say, after the First World War? Would the economies of mainland Asia have accelerated earlier?

  If the answer to this were yes, then another, equally important question would arise: Could it be the case that imperialism actually delayed the onset of the climate crisis by retarding the expansion of Asian and African economies? Is it possible that if the major twentieth-century empires had been dismantled earlier, then the landmark figure of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have been crossed long before it actually was?

  It seems to me that the answer is almost certainly yes. This is indeed silently implied in the positions that India, China, and many other nations have taken in global climate negotiations: the argument about fairness in relation to per capita emissions is, in a sense, an argument about lost time.

  Here, then, is the paradoxical possibility that is implied by these positions: the fact that some of the key technologies of the carbon economy were first adopted in England, the world’s leading colonial power, may actually have retarded the onset of the climate crisis.

  To acknowledge the complexity of the history of the carbon economy is not in any way to diminish the force of the argument for global justice regarding greenhouse gas emissions. To the contrary, it places that argument within the same contexts as debates about inequality, poverty, and social justice within countries like Britain and the United States: it is to assert that the poor nations of the world are not poor because they were indolent or unwilling; their poverty is itself an effect of the inequities created by the carbon economy; it is the result of systems that were set up by brute force to ensure that poor nations remained always at a disadvantage in terms of both wealth and power.

  Inasmuch as the fruits of the carbon economy constitute wealth, and inasmuch as the poor of the global south have historically been deprived of this wealth, it is certainly true, by every available canon of distributive justice, that they are entitled to a greater share of the rewards of that economy. But even to enter into that argument is to recognize how deeply we are mired in the Great Derangement: our lives and our choices are enframed in a pattern of history that seems to leave us nowhere to turn but toward our self-annihilation.

  “Mo
ney flows toward short term gain,” writes the geologist David Archer, “and toward the over-exploitation of unregulated common resources. These tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy toward his inevitable doom.”

  This is indeed the essence of humanity’s present derangement.

  9.

  Imperialism was not, however, the only obstacle in Asia’s path to industrialization: this model of economy also met with powerful indigenous resistances of many different kinds. While it is true that industrial capitalism met with resistance on every continent, not least Europe, what is distinctive in the case of Asia is that the resistance was often articulated and championed by figures of extraordinary moral and political authority, such as Mahatma Gandhi. Among Gandhi’s best-known pronouncements on industrial capitalism are these famous lines written in 1928: “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. If an entire nation of 300 millions [sic] took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”

  This quote is striking because of the directness with which it goes to the heart of the matter: numbers. It is proof that Gandhi, like many others, understood intuitively what Asia’s history would eventually demonstrate: that the universalist premise of industrial civilization was a hoax; that a consumerist mode of existence, if adopted by a sufficient number of people, would quickly become unsustainable and would lead, literally, to the devouring of the planet.

  Of course, Gandhi was not alone in being granted this insight; many others around the world were to arrive at the same conclusion, often by completely different routes. But Gandhi occupied a position of unique social and cultural importance, and, what was more, he was willing to carry his vision to its logical conclusion by voluntarily renouncing, on behalf of his nation, the kind of power and affluence that is conferred by industrial civilization.

  This was perfectly well understood by Gandhi’s political enemies on the Hindu right, who insistently characterized him as a man who wanted to weaken India. And indeed it was for this very reason that Gandhi was assassinated by a former member of an organization that would later become the nucleus of the political formation that now rules India. This coalition came to power by promising exactly what Gandhi had renounced: endless industrial growth.

  In China, similarly, as Prasenjit Duara has shown, industrialism and consumerism faced powerful resistances from within the Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions. There too many influential thinkers understood the implications of large-scale modernization. One such was Zhang Shizhao (1881–1973) who was minister of education in Duan Qirui’s government: “While finitude characterizes all things under heaven,” he wrote, “appetites alone know no bounds. When the amount of what is of finite supply is gauged on the basis of boundless appetites, the exhaustion of the former can be expected within a matter of days. Conversely, the depletion of finite things would soon come when used to satisfy insatiable desires.”

  Duara has shown in rich detail how the resistance to capitalist modernity was overcome very slowly in both of Asia’s most populous countries, through a range of political and cultural movements that would lead, over time, to “the Protestantization of religions, secularization . . . and nation-building.”

  But the Asian countries that industrialized first did not, in fact, follow the Western model: as Sugihara and others have shown, the path that Japan and Korea took was, of necessity, much less wasteful of resources. Japan diverged from the West in another way as well: an awareness of natural constraints became a part of its official ideology, which insisted that “nature is consciousness for the Japanese people.”

  It is a striking fact also that many leading figures from Asia voiced concerns even at a time when environmentalism was largely a countercultural issue in the West. One of them was the Burmese statesman U Thant, who served as the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1962 to 1971 and was instrumental in establishing the United Nations Environment Programme. In 1971, he issued a warning that seems strangely prescient today: “As we watch the sun go down, evening after evening, through the smog across the poisoned waters of our native earth, we must ask ourselves seriously whether we really wish some future universal historian on another planet to say about us: ‘With all their genius and with all their skill, they ran out of foresight and air and food and water and ideas,’ or, ‘They went on playing politics until their world collapsed around them.’”

  In China, an awareness of the importance of numbers would lead eventually to the recently ended One-Child Policy, a measure that, at the cost of inflicting great suffering, has had the effect of stabilizing the country’s population at a level far below what it might otherwise have been. Draconian and repressive as this policy undoubtedly was, from the reversed perspective of the Anthropocene it may one day be claimed as a mitigatory measure of great significance. For if it is indeed the case that the onset of the climate crisis has been accelerated by the industrialization of mainland Asia, then we may be sure that with several hundred million more consumers included in the equation the landmark figure of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would have been passed very much earlier.

  In any reckoning of climate justice, this history too needs to be taken into account: that in both India and China, the two nations that are now often blamed for precipitating the climate crisis, there were significant numbers of people who understood, long before climate scientists brought in the data, that industrial civilization was subject to limitations of scale and would collapse if adopted by the majority of the earth’s people. Although they may finally have failed to lead their compatriots in a different direction, they did succeed in retarding the wholesale adoption of a consumerist, industrial model of economy in their countries. In a world where the rewards of a carbon-intensive economy are regarded as wealth, this must be reckoned as a very significant material sacrifice, for which they can, quite legitimately, demand recognition.

  The demand for “climate reparations” is therefore founded on unshakeable grounds, historically and ethically. Yet the complexity of the carbon economy’s genealogy holds a lesson also for those in the global south who would draw a wide and clear line between “us” and “them” in relation to global warming. While there can be no doubt that the climate crisis was brought on by the way in which the carbon economy evolved in the West, it is also true that the matter might have taken many different turns. The climate crisis cannot therefore be thought of as a problem created by an utterly distant “Other.”

  The phrase “common but differentiated responsibilities,” frequently heard during the Paris climate change negotiations of 2015, is thus a rare example of bureaucratese that is both apt and accurate. Anthropogenic climate change, as Chakrabarty and others have pointed out, is the unintended consequence of the very existence of human beings as a species. Although different groups of people have contributed to it in vastly different measure, global warming is ultimately the product of the totality of human actions over time. Every human being who has ever lived has played a part in making us the dominant species on this planet, and in this sense every human being, past and present, has contributed to the present cycle of climate change.

  The events of today’s changing climate, in that they represent the totality of human actions over time, represent also the terminus of history. For if the entirety of our past is contained within the present, then temporality itself is drained of significance. Or, in the words of the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsuro: “Rather than trace historical development . . . all one need do is to distinguish the various formal transformations of the present.”

  The climate events of this era, then, are distillations of all of human history: they express the entirety of our being over time.

  Part III

  Politics

  1.

  Climate change poses a powerful challenge to what is perhaps the single most important political conception of the modern era
: the idea of freedom, which is central not only to contemporary politics but also to the humanities, the arts, and literature.

  Since the Enlightenment, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out, philosophers of freedom were “mainly, and understandably, concerned with how humans would escape the injustice, oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or human-made systems.” Nonhuman forces and systems had no place in this calculus of liberty: indeed being independent of Nature was considered one of the defining characteristics of freedom itself. Only those peoples who had thrown off the shackles of their environment were thought to be endowed with historical agency; they alone were believed to merit the attention of historians—other peoples might have had a past but they were thought to lack history, which realizes itself through human agency.

  Now that the stirrings of the earth have forced us to recognize that we have never been free of nonhuman constraints how are we to rethink those conceptions of history and agency? The same question could be posed with equal force in relation to art and literature, particularly in regard to the twentieth century, when there was a radical turn away from the nonhuman to the human, from the figurative toward the abstract.

  These developments were not, of course, generated by purely aesthetic considerations. They were influenced also by politics, especially the politics of the Cold War—as, for example, when American intelligence agencies intervened to promote abstract expressionism against the social realism favored by the USSR.