The transatlantic trade was undoubtedly the ‘spark’26 that triggered the industrial revolution. Its value quadrupled during the eighteenth century, coming to represent two-thirds of English trade. Similarly, Saint-Domingue made up two-thirds of French international trade at this time.27 London became the turntable of world trade, with re-export activity (85 per cent of tobacco and 95 per cent of coffee were re-exported to Europe in the 1770s) paying for the import of raw materials from northern Europe: wood, tar, potash.28 In 1810, for example, Great Britain imported the alkaline ash from wood burning needed for its soap and glass industries from the Baltic countries and North America. This ash was equivalent to 25 million cubic metres of wood per year, or far more than the annual wood production at home.29 Added to this were the invisible incomes (those not passing through British customs) from the slave trade, Brazilian gold, Mexican silver,30 and the multilateral trade assured by the British Merchant Navy. The transatlantic commercial revolution stimulated naval construction and thus the metal industry. Copper for the navy provided a key market for the Cornish mines, a crucial sector in the early days of the steam engine.31
Transatlantic trade also accelerated the development of financial institutions, the use of letters of exchange and commercial credit, facilitating the growth of the money volume; it explains the emergence of marine insurance (Lloyds was founded in 1688) and fire insurance (the first companies, Phoenix and Sun Fire, were established to cover risks associated with sugar refining in London). The colonial trade created banking communities in Bristol, Glasgow and Liverpool (the Heywood and Leyland families), central to the financing of manufacture in these industrial regions.32
Finally and above all, it ensured a demand for manufactured products that was determinant for the take-off of English industry in the late eighteenth century. This exponential demand was drawn from the demographic explosion in North America, where the white population grew from 300,000 in 1700 to 6 million in 1800. In 1784, textiles represented 57 per cent of British exports, rising to 82 per cent in 1800.33 In 1801, America absorbed 60 per cent of Lancashire’s textile production.34 This constantly expanding market explains the efforts for greater productivity and rapid mechanization of cotton from 1760 onwards (the spinning jenny, Arkwright’s water frame, Crompton’s spinning mule).
In 1745, Malachy Postlethwayt described the British Empire as ‘a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on an African foundation’.35 The centrality of transatlantic trade in the industrial revolution turned on that of the African slaves that formed the fundamental pivot of the world-system then dominated by Great Britain. Firstly, the revenue from the slave trade, which has aroused so many debates among historians, has recently been revised upward: Joseph Inikori estimates the profit rate of the more successful traders of the late eighteenth century at 50 per cent.36 These profits represented around 40 per cent of British commercial and industrial investment after 1750.37 Secondly, the sugar produced by slaves was by far the most lucrative trade. In the early nineteenth century, the British colonies produced 177,000 tonnes of sugar per year, as against 33,000 tonnes for the French colonies that remained after the loss of Saint-Domingue.38 British consumption rose in the eighteenth century from an annual one pound per person to twenty-five pounds, providing a substantial calorie input (4 per cent of the total in 1800) that increased the productivity of British workers. (Rice was a further element.) Thirdly, cotton, produced in the slave-worked South, was by far the main outlet of the British textile industry. Fourthly, until the early nineteenth century, the number of Africans who crossed the Atlantic was higher than the number of Europeans. Agricultural products from North America, and cod from Newfoundland, were imported to the monoculture Caribbean islands to feed the slave population, which kept the white colonies solvent and enabled them to buy British manufactured products. In the late eighteenth century, the slave trade and the plantation system thus formed the foundation of a very hierarchical world-system, with economic satellites entirely organized for the economic needs of the British power.
The fundamentally global nature of what is too simply called the ‘industrial revolution’ can also be grasped by way of the productive capacity of the spaces that it connected. The historian Kenneth Pomeranz, in The Great Divergence, set out to explain why England pioneered the path of industrialization, rather than the Chinese region of the Yangzi Delta.39 In 1750, the two societies presented a more or less equivalent level of economic and technological ‘development’ and were faced with similar pressures on their resources of land and wood. In Britain, the price of fire-wood rose by a factor of eight between 1500 and 1630, and by the late eighteenth century forest cover was down to between 5 and 10 per cent of the country’s total area. Complaints about the exhaustion of the soil intensified, and the use of clover (Norfolk rotation) failed to resolve the problem.
According to Pomeranz, a doubly favourable ‘contingency’ explains the English road. First of all, the availability of coal. English mines were relatively easy to exploit and close to centres of consumption, whereas in China these were more than 1,500 kilometres from Shanghai. In 1820, British coal consumption amounted to the equivalent of over 8 million hectares of rationally managed woodland, or more than ten times the country’s forest cover. Secondly, Britain’s imperial situation, which enabled it to drain resources crucial to its industrial development. In 1830, sugar from the West Indies was equivalent to 600,000 hectares of good land put to cereals, cotton from North America to more than 9.3 million hectares of sheep pasture, and wood (from North America and the Baltic) to more than 400,000 hectares of domestic woodland. In total, even leaving out coal, the total comes to more than 10 million ‘ghost hectares’ to fuel British machines and workers – the equivalent of two-thirds of the usable agricultural surface of England and Wales. On top of this were the vast areas of land and sea that made possible the capture of carbon dioxide thanks to photosynthesis, Great Britain being responsible for 80 per cent of world emissions by 1825.40
Besides, as Alf Hornberg has shown, this exchange was certainly ecologically unequal: in 1850, by exchanging £1,000 of textiles manufactured in Manchester for £1,000 of American raw cotton, Britain gained 46 per cent in terms of embodied labour (unequal exchange) and 6,000 per cent in terms of embodied hectares,41 thus releasing its own domestic space from the environmental constraint of having to produce that much fibre, which would compete with other needs of grain, wood and animal fodder. The case of the Yangzi Delta also attests to the importance of this type of asymmetry for British industrialization. In the eighteenth century, the Pearl River Delta imported immense quantities of primary goods and raw cotton from the upper Yangzi and northern China. But, as opposed to the peripheral regions of the Atlantic world-system, in this century these regions turned towards textile production, depriving the delta of outlets for its production and cheap raw materials. The Chinese economic world, more homogeneous than the Atlantic imperial space, did not permit the ecological and capitalist accumulation that ensured British industrial take-off. Without the empire, the industrial revolution would have been physically impossible. Werner Sombart saw the shortage of wood due to deforestation, and the exhaustion of European soils, as a ‘threat of an end to capitalism’ around 1800, or even to ‘European culture’ itself.42 Pomeranz, without going as far as that, writes that ‘without the dual boon of coal and colonies, Britain would have faced an ecological impasse with no apparent internal solution’.43
If the externalization of the environmental constraint relieved Great Britain, it overturned the ecologies of the periphery. The availability of immense spaces, ‘empty’ thanks to the elimination of 90 per cent of the Amerindian population between 1492 and 1700, initiated a relationship to the environment far more predatory than in Europe. Tobacco cultivation, for example, exhausted the soil so rapidly (after only three or four harvests) that in the course of the eighteenth century production had to move from Maryland and Virginia towards the Appalachians.44 T
he transformation of the Caribbean into a sugar monoculture led to deforestation, erosion and exhaustion of the soil.45 Sugar-cane plantations introduced yellow fever into the American tropics; the terra-cotta vessels needed for drying molasses meant a proliferation of stagnant water and proved excellent incubators for the yellow-fever-carrying Aedes aegypti mosquito, imported from Africa.46 As for the fabled silver mines of Mexico and Peru, these were exhausted in only a few decades, leaving intensely polluted environments. Two hundred thousand tonnes of mercury had been used here by 1900, the greater part of which evaporated into the atmosphere.47 We could also mention the virtual extinction of the beaver, the American bison and the bowhead whale by the late nineteenth century, also bound up with industrialization, as bison skin made excellent transmission belts, and whale oil an excellent lubricant for machines.48
In 1999, the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission demanded payment from the Western powers of $777 trillion to compensate Africa for the slave trade and the wealth plundered during the colonial period.49 Whatever the magnitude of this sum, it will never make up for the fact that the West is in debt to Africa, as well as to America and Asia, for its industrial rise. The latter, and thus the entry into the Anthropocene, were made possible by ecologically unequal exchange with these regions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The world-ecology of the British world-system
The second half of the nineteenth century saw the development of two closely linked phenomena: on the one hand, the infrastructures of economic globalization were established, while on the other hand, massive economic gaps appeared between Europe and North America on one side, and Asia on the other.
The world-system then centred on Great Britain was based on an unequal world-ecology: by dramatically increasing the economic metabolism of the industrial countries, coal correspondingly amplified the demand for organic materials from the tropical world. Besides, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the industrialized countries embarked on a new cycle of capital accumulation bound up with the second industrial revolution: organic chemistry, electricity, then the automobile. If they were self-sufficient in energy and in iron,50 the technologies that lay at the root of their prosperity depended on certain key products drawn from the peripheral countries: ores such as tin from Malaysia for the processed-food industry, as well as mineral oil; copper from the Andes and the Congo for electrification; gutta-percha for the telegraph network; rubber for mechanical industries (transmission belts, sealants for steam engines, etc.) and then for automobiles.51
In the same way, maintaining soil fertility in Europe and America depended on the extraction of guano from Peru, Bolivia and Chile52 (where reserves were exhausted in a few decades), as well as phosphates from Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. Before the First World War, the rich countries already imported 41 per cent of their phosphate consumption, or 2.9 million tonnes per year.53 Despite these contributions, agricultural productivity in the United Kingdom stagnated in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, and to feed its population at low cost the country was importing more than 60 per cent of its foodstuffs in 1900, as against 15 per cent in 1850.54 The ghost hectares that fed the British population were as large as the country’s agricultural surface.55
If Great Britain exported coal and industrial goods, it was an importer of mineral ore between 1850 and 1939 (the deficit being 12 million tonnes on the eve of the First World War), and above all, of biomass (the deficit rising from 5 million tonnes in 1855 to more than 30 million by the late 1930s).56 No other industrial country has had a development model so dependent on biomass from the rest of the world.
These elements substantially qualify the thesis of Paul Bairoch, according to whom the industrialized countries scarcely needed products from the peripheral countries before 1940. This unequal world-ecology was bound up with a very outward-turned capitalism. The economy was financialized and globalized in the context of a stable international monetary system based on the pound sterling (and thus on the gold standard). Limited liability (the Companies Act of 1862, the reform of sociétés anonymes in France in 1867, the German law of 1892 establishing GmbH) made shareholding less risky,57 particularly for firms operating outside the national territory. The generalization of stock-exchange quotation further oiled the cogs of finance capitalism. This legal stabilization of capital led to a massive shift from the state to private companies. In 1860s, British Treasury bills made up half of London capitalization, but the figure fell to less than 5 per cent by 1914.
European finance capital turned massively towards overseas investment. In 1913, equities made up 40 per cent of French national wealth, with nearly half of this total invested abroad.58 Between 1870 and 1913, Great Britain invested 4.5 per cent of its GDP abroad each year. In 1913, these stocks (£3.8 billion) represented 40 per cent of the nation’s wealth,59 and half of all direct investment abroad. Capital of this kind played a key role in the Anthropocene: Great Britain projected fossil capitalism onto the whole world.60 In 1913, railways represented 40 per cent of British foreign direct investment, followed by mines (more than a thousand mining companies were quoted on the London Stock Exchange in 1898), gas lighting, water supply and tropical plantations.61 These foreign investments were both highly profitable and self-generating: between 1870 and 1914 the revenue they yielded (5.3 per cent of GDP) was greater than the value of capital exported (4.5 per cent of GDP).62 In this way, Great Britain could compensate for a balance of trade that was heavily in the red, attract the raw materials it needed and maintain the pound sterling as the pillar of the international monetary system.63
This financial capitalism was embodied in technologies that were high emitters of CO2, reorganizing flows of matter, energy and goods on a world scale. Trans-continental canals, railways, steam ships, docks, grain silos and telegraph lines constructed a second nature of planetary dimensions, penetrating to the interior of the peripheral countries and mooring them to the world-economy. These networks reduced the cost of coordination and strengthened the power of the giant firms that managed them.
Whereas in the eighteenth century it had taken six months to travel from London to Calcutta, it took only two weeks by the end of the nineteenth century. The cost of sea transport fell steeply. The world merchant fleet rose from 9 to 35 million tonnes between 1850 and 1900, 60 per cent of it being under the British flag. This hegemony was favoured by the massive export of coal (25 per cent of British production): British ships were then alone in being able to carry full cargos on both legs of their voyage.
The world telegraph network was likewise established in the main by British firms. It facilitated the governing of empires and improved the speed and reliability of commercial information, which in turn made the trade in bulky cargo more profitable, as a marginal difference in price here could play a major role. In the 1860s, the practice of ‘tramping’ was established: cargos were dispatched without an advance destination and travelled from one port to another as a function of commodity prices.64 Correlative with this, the last third of the nineteenth century saw the creation of a world market. Prices converged: in 1870 wheat was sold 57 per cent higher in Liverpool than in Chicago, but the difference fell to 15 per cent by 1914.65 This was due to a general process of marketization and the integration of local economies into world trade.
The world railway network, which grew from 100,000 to 1 million kilometres between 1860 and 1920,66 was chiefly financed by private capital, very often British. In 1860, for example, the engineering firm Peto, Brassey and Betts employed 100,000 workers on five continents, building lines in Russia and South America, Algeria and Canada.67 By the late nineteenth century, foreign direct investment was galvanized by mineral and agricultural resources. In Africa, South America and Asia, railways were systematically associated with mineral extraction or the transport of agricultural cargos for the international market: the draining of copper and guano from Peru and Chile, of cotton from India, coffee from Brazil, meat from
Argentina, bananas from Central American monoculture, peanuts from Senegal, etc. The countries of the periphery provided not only raw materials but also cheap labour: workers ‘engaged’ by mines and plantations in a state of semi-slavery, in particular Chinese coolies fleeing the civil wars caused by the Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion, were exploited on railway construction across the whole world.68
This infrastructure placed the countries of the Third World in a situation of outward orientation, specialization and economic dependence. Whole countries could now be strangled by the cutting of credit, preparing their economic or political subjugation. As Tim Mitchell has shown for the case of oil, the hierarchy of the world-system depends on a carefully chosen distribution of technological mechanisms: for example, drilling wells without building storage and refining facilities ensures the dependence of the producing countries. Capitalism’s second nature precipitated the integration of the peripheral regions into the world-system, as well as the disintegration of pre-capitalist economies now transformed into a de-industrialized periphery. The post-colonial states of the twentieth century inherited this infrastructure, making a more harmonious development of their economies a difficult task.
The Shock of the Anthropocene Page 26
