The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

  PART II

  88 half a million people: “7 Places Forever Changed by Eco-Disasters,” http://www.mnn.com. See also George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 21.

  88 90 percent were women: Varsha Joshi, “Climate Change in South Asia: Gender and Health Concerns,” in Climate Change: An Asian Perspective, ed. Surjit Singh et al. (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2012), 209–26, 213.

  88 all along the coastline: Anwar Ali, “Impacts of Climate Change on Tropical Cyclones and Storm Surges in Bangladesh,” in Proceedings of the SAARC Seminar on Climate Variability in the South Asian Region and Its Impacts (Dhaka: SAARC Meteorological Research Centre, 2003), 130–36, 133. See also M. J .B. Alam and F. Ahmed, “Modeling Climate Change: Perspective and Applications in the Context of Bangladesh,” in Indian Ocean Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change, ed. Yassine Charabi (London: Springer, 2010), 15–23.

  88 the oceans are rising: Cf. “World’s River Deltas Sinking Due to Human Activity, Says New Study,” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090920204459.htm. See also “Land Subsidence at Aquaculture Facilities in the Yellow River Delta, China,” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com. In parts of India, land has subsided by more than thirty feet. Cf. Karen Piper, The Price of Thirst, loc. 581.

  88 groundwater and oil: “Retreating Coastlines,” http://www.straitstimes.com.

  89 being especially imperiled: Cf. “South Asia’s Sinking Deltas,” http://poleshift.ning.com. See also “InSAR Measurements of Compaction and Subsidence in the Ganges-Brahmaputra Delta, Bangladesh,” http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com, and “The Quiet Sinking of the World’s Deltas,” http://www.futureearth.org.

  89 acres of agricultural land: Andrew T. Guzman, Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 156.

  89 chain, may disappear: P. S. Roy, “Human Dimensions of Climate Change: Geospatial Perspective,” in Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Food Security in the South Asian Region, ed. Neelima Jerath et al. (New Delhi: Macmillan, 2010), 18–40, 32.

  89 75 million in Bangladesh: Pradosh Kishan Nath, “Impact of Climate Change on Indian Economy: A Critical Review,” in Climate Change: An Asian Perspective, ed. Surjit Singh et al., 78–105, 91. For more on environmental refugees, see also Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twentieth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), Kindle edition, chap. 4.

  89 will be displaced: Carlyle A. Thayer, “Vietnam,” in Climate Change and National Security: A Country-Level Analysis, ed. Daniel Moran (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2011) 29–41, 30.

  89 turning into desert: Lester R. Brown, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), 40.

  89 supply by a quarter: Gwynne Dyer, Climate Wars, loc. 987.

  89 “only meager crops”: Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry, loc. 356.

  89 losses of $65 billion: Joanna I. Lewis, “China,” in Climate Change and National Security: A Country Level Analysis, ed. Daniel Moran (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press), 9–26, 13–14. See also Kenneth Pomeranz, Water, Energy, and Politics: Chinese Industrial Revolutions in Global Environmental Perspective (New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming), 5.

  90 “human race come together”: Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages, Mega-Projects, and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia,” Revue d’histoire modern et contemporaine 62, no. 1 (January–March, 2015): 1, 6–47. I am grateful to the author for letting me have an English-language version of this article, published in shorter form in New Left Review 58 (2009) and elsewhere.

  90 disappear by 2050: Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Himalayan Watershed,” 32.

  90 Indus floods of 2010: Varsha Joshi, “Climate Change in South Asia: Gender and Health Concerns,” 209–26, 215, and Pradosh Kishan Nath, “Impact of Climate Change on Indian Economy: A Critical Review,” 78–105, 88, both in Climate Change: An Asian Perspective, ed. Surjit Singh et al. See also Dewan Abdul Quadir et al., “Climate Change and Its Impacts on Bangladesh Floods over the Past Decades,” and Anwar Ali, “Climate Change Impacts and Adaption Assessment in Bangladesh,” 165–77, 169, both in Proceedings of the SAARC Seminar on Climate Variability in the South Asian Region and its Impacts (Dhaka: SAARC Meteorological Research Centre, 2003). And Wen Stephenson, What We’re Fighting for “Now” Is Each Other: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Climate Justice (Boston: Beacon Press, 2015), Kindle edition, loc. 391.

  90 of them are in Asia: Cf. Johan Rockström et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009): 32.

  90 disproportionately by women: Surjit Singh, “Mainstreaming Gender in Climate Change Discourse,” in Climate Change: An Asian Perspective, ed. Surjit Singh et al., 180–208, 184.

  90 214 million people: Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Himalayan Watershed,” 6–47, 7.

  91 late in the twentieth century: Thus, as of 2015, the per capita carbon dioxide emissions of the United States and Germany, measured in metric tons, was 17.6 and 9.1, respectively, while the same figures for China and India were 6.2 and 1.7, respectively. See “World Bank: CO2 Emissions (Metric Tons Per Capita),” http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC.

  91 back to the 1930s: Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 1–2.

  91 Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii: Charles D. Keeling, “Rewards and Penalties of Monitoring the Earth,” Annual Review of Energy and the Environment 23 (1998): 25–82, 39–42.

  92 in the late 1980s: Cf. “The History of Carbon Dioxide Emissions,” http://www.wri.org. The Four Tigers were South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore (John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History, 536). They were soon to be followed by the Southeast Asian economies.

  92 asphyxiate in the process: Paul G. Harris notes, “If everyone were to live like Americans, the world would require ten times the energy it is using today.” See Paul G. Harris, What’s Wrong with Climate Politics and How to Fix It (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 109.

  93 to much of the world: Thus, for example, vulcanologist Bill McGuire cites 1769 CE as a key date in the history of the Anthropocene because that was the year when Richard Arkwright invented the spinning jenny, a machine that would serve as a critical link in the transition to carbon-intensive forms of production: “Arkwright’s legacy,” writes McGuire, “is nothing less than the industrialization of the world.” See Bill McGuire, Waking the Giant, Kindle edition, loc. 363. For Timothy Morton, on the other hand, the key moment is April 1784, a date about which, he asserts, “we can be uncannily precise” because that was when James Watt “patented the steam engine.” See Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects, loc. 210.

  93 “particularly in the U.S.”: Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, Global Warming in an Unequal World: A Case of Environmental Colonialism (New Delhi: Centre for Science and Environment, 1991), 1.

  94 removed from each other: These connections and processes are explored at length by Jack Goody in The Eurasian Miracle (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010).

  94 and the Indian subcontinent: Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009) 437–52.

  94 by the Islamic expansion: Ibid., 489–94.

  94 across the Eurasian landmass: Cf. John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History, 413, 418.

  94 parts of the planet: Cf. Geoffery Parker, Global Crisis, loc. 17565: “The return of a warmer climate [in the eighteenth century] had broken the ‘fatal synergy’”; and particularly John L. Brooke, Climate Change and the Course of Global History, 413–67.

  94 Middle East, and India: Cf. Richard M. Eaton and Philip S. Wagoner, “Warfare on the Deccan Plateau, 1450–1600: A Military Revolution in Early Modern India?” Journal of
World History 25, no. 1 (March 2014): 5–50.

  94 savants from elsewhere: Cf. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, Press, 2011), 191, and Richard Grove, “The Transfer of Botanical Knowledge between Europe and Asia, 1498–1800,” Journal of the Japan-Netherlands Institute 3 (1991): 160–76.

  94 “250 years” . . . by Jesuits: George Gheverghese Joseph, The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 439.

  95 “stored up in the East”: Jonardon Ganeri, Indian Logic: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2001), 7.

  95 “ten years after his death”: Jonardon Ganeri, “Philosophical Modernities: Polycentricity and Early Modernity in India,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 74 (2014): 75–94, 87.

  95 “to Europe and back”: Jonardon Ganeri, “Philosophical Modernities,” 86.

  95 rest of the world: Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Hearing Voices: Vignettes of Early Modernity in South Asia, 1400–1750,” Daedalus 127, no. 3 (1998): 75–104.

  95 its own uniqueness: For more on this, see Jack Goody, The Theft of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres, 2006).

  96 “medieval economic revolution”: This episode may itself have had a complex relationship with climatic variations. Cf. Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004) 6, 56.

  96 Yellow, and Yangtze Rivers: Ibid., 23.

  97 off to visit it: Quoted in ibid., 20–21.

  97 easily accessible locations: Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 46.

  98 no cause for astonishment: Quoted by Mark Elvin, The Retreat of the Elephants, 68–69.

  98 “vigor and virtuosity”: Ibid., 69.

  100 upon its surface: Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2000), 130–31.

  100 a millennium or more: Marilyn V. Longmuir, Oil in Burma: The Extraction of “Earth-Oil” to 1914 (Banglamung, Thailand: White Lotus Press, 2001). I am grateful to Dr. Rupert Arrowsmith for bringing Longmuir’s book to my notice. See also Khin Maung Gyi, Memoirs of the Oil Industry in Burma, 905 A.D.–1980 A.D. (1989).

  100 “largest in the world”: Marilyn V. Longmuir, Oil in Burma, 8.

  101 “along the bank”: Quoted in ibid., 9–10.

  101 by the Burmese: Ibid., 24.

  101 forty-six thousand barrels: Ibid., 46.

  102 120 oil wells: Thant Myint-U, The Making of Modern Burma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 181.

  102 France and England: Ibid., 112–15.

  102 1850s onward: Ibid., 149.

  103 “Titusville, Pennsylvania”: Marilyn V. Longmuir, Oil in Burma, 7.

  103 Hudson River in 1807: Cf. Blair B. Kling, Partner in Empire: Dwarkanath Tagore and the Age of Enterprise in Eastern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 65. According to Kling, the first steam engine to reach India was sent from Birmingham to Calcutta in 1817 or 1818; it was bought by the governing authority.

  104 after the Netherlands: Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, 229.

  104 “flotilla in service”: Henry T. Bernstein, Steamboats on the Ganges (Calcutta: Orient Longmans, 1960), quoted in Saroj Ghose, “Technology: What Is It?,” in Science, Technology, Imperialism, and War, ed. Jyoti Bhusan Das Gupta (New Delhi: Pearson, 2007), 197–260, 233.

  104 forty-three thousand pounds sterling: Arnold van Beverhoudt, These Are the Voyages: A History of Ships, Aircraft, and Spacecraft Named Enterprise (self-published, 1990), 52.

  104 nature of the journey: Ibid.

  105 soot and cinders: Amitav Ghosh, Flood of Fire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

  105 commercial infrastructure: Blair B. Kling, Partner in Empire, 61.

  106 coal in Bengal: Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, 231.

  106 and the United States: Ibid., 233.

  106 accessing British ports: R. A. Wadia, The Bombay Dockyard and the Wadia Master Builders (Bombay, 1955), 126–27, quoted in Saroj Ghose, “Technology: What Is It?,” 225.

  106 ships and sailors (“lascars”): See Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, 211.

  106 “years put together”: Satpal Sangwan, “The Sinking Ships: Colonial Policy and the Decline of Indian Shipping, 1735–1835,” in Technology and the Raj: Western Technology and Technical Transfers to India, 1700–1947, ed. Rory MacLeod and Deepak Kumar (New Delhi, 1995), 137–52, quoted by Saroj Ghose, “Technology: What Is It?,” 225.

  107 “my own building”: Quoted by Anne Bulley in The Bombay Country Ships, 1790–1833 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000), 246.

  107 “not being imitated”: Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, loc. 404.

  108 competitors elsewhere: See Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, 225 and 244: “The absence of state support for industrial development in India stands in stark contrast to the policies found in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.”

  109 critical to its advancement: Cf. ibid., 258–63.

  109 “European imperial powers”: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories,” Critical Inquiry 41 (Autumn 2014): 15.

  111 “inevitable doom”: David Archer, The Long Thaw: How Humans Are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 172.

  111 “bare like locusts”: Young India, December 20, 1928, 422.

  112 “insatiable desires”: I owe this reference to Liang Yongjia, Prasenjit Duara, and Tansen Sen; my thanks to all of them for their help.

  113 “and nation-building”: Prasenjit Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 236.

  113 wasteful of resources: Cf. Kaoru Sugihara, “East Asian Path,” Economic and Political Weekly 39, no. 34 (2004): 3855–58.

  113 “the Japanese people”: Julia Adeney Thomas, “The Japanese Critique of History’s Suppression of Nature,” Historical Consciousness, Historiography and Modern Japanese Values, International Symposium in North America, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan, 2002, 234; my italics.

  113 “collapsed around them”: Cf. A. Walter Dorn, “U Thant: Buddhism in Action,” in The UN Secretary-General and Moral Authority: Ethics and Religion in International Leadership, ed. Kent J. Kille (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2007), 143–86. This article is also available as a pdf at http://walterdorn.net.

  115 beings as a species: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Human Condition in the Anthropocene,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Yale University, 2015.

  115 “of the present”: Watsuji Tetsuro, A Climate: A Philosophical Study, tr. Geoffrey Bownas (Ministry of Education, Printing Bureau, Japanese Government, 1961), 30. I am grateful to Giorgio Agamben for bringing this work to my attention.

  PART III

  119 “or human-made systems”: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 208.

  119 through human agency: Cf. Julia Adeney Thomas, “The Present Climate of Economics and History,” in Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on Asia and Africa, ed. Gareth Austin (London: Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming), 4.

  120 favored by the USSR: Cf. Frances Stonor Saunders, “Modern Art Was CIA ‘Weapon,’” The Independent, October 21, 1995. See also Joel Whitney, FINKS: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, (London: OR Books, 2016), chap. 2.

  120 “and the artist”: Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York: Vintage, 1968), 326.

  120 passion for dams: Cf. Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Himalayan Watershed: Water Shortages
, Mega-Projects, and Environmental Politics in China, India, and Southeast Asia,” 19 (published in French as “Les eaux de l’Himalaya: Barrages géants et risques environnementaux en Asia contemporaine,” in Revue d’histoire modern et contemporaine 62, no. 1 [January–March 2015]: 6–47); for Mao’s “War against Nature,” see Judith Shapiro, Mao’s War against Nature: Politics and the Environment in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  120 “world [they] depict”: Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois, 89.

  121 “the official order”: Arran E. Gare, Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis (London: Routledge, 1995), 16.

  121 perspective of the Anthropocene: As Stephanie LeMenager points out, even Upton Sinclair, a committed socialist and “one of the most ideologically driven American novelists,” ends up romanticizing the gasoline-powered culture of cars. See Stephanie LeMenager, Living Oil, 69.