Unconventional times call for unconventional history, so here we are. This week’s readings featured an ever-fascinating combination of environmental histories, discussions on the Capitalocene, and much volcano talk. As someone who loves intertwined histories and new perspectives, I was intrigued by how these authors integrated and (often toyed with) concepts of ‘nature,’ ‘humans,’ ‘capitalism,’ and ‘power.’ Taking an environmental or nature-considerate approach, in a sense, feels like adding a missing puzzle piece to the larger picture. As products and inhabitants of Earth, it seems long overdue to analyze our relation to and effect on it over time.
Starting with Malm and Moore, I deeply enjoyed their discussions on the historian’s role in environmental and climate change histories. Malm’s Who Lit This Fire? analyzes the history of the damaging fossil economy, providing examples of the British Empire and its exploitation of colonial spaces and their natural resources and tracing its roots to capitalist motivations, i.e. ‘fossil capital.’ In doing so, Malm calls for historians to investigate the ‘archives of the fossil economy’ to better understand climate changes and environmental responsibility brought upon by fossil capital within the Capitalocene. Similarly, Moore’s two-part article on the Capitalocene presents the intertwinement of capital, power, and nature. Here he argues against an Anthropocene categorization, as it overlooks capitalist environmental exploitation before the Industrial Revolution, and discusses how a radical politics of sustainability must reform the capitalist model. Apparent in both works are urgent calls to action for historians to fully integrate climate concerns and environmentalism into the field rather than focusing solely on social or human-related histories.
Regarding the ‘Laki’ chapter, I found this the most interesting yet most challenging reading. I enjoyed reading about the transnational aspects of climate events, like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Novel to me were the passages on how Icelandic volcanic debris or ash affected populations as far as Egypt or impacted publications in mainland Europe. Still, I found it difficult to alternate between some sections without the proper background or context. I don’t believe, as the end of the chapter suggests, this attempt was a failure as it presents unique and thought-provoking analyses on transnational climate events and their global effects. With that in mind, I look forward to seeing it develop further into its final published form!
Having written about environmental histories of colonial empires in my short essay, I can only agree with you that integrating the environment into our historical analyses adds a ‘missing part of the puzzle’ and enlights in new ways long-established topics of research.
This makes me think that, during my research, I came across Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the third world (London, 2002). The argument of the book is that the famines allegedly provoked by severe El Nino events throughout the British empire in the late nineteenth century were not climatic disasters but genocides resulting from the weakening of traditional subsistence systems by the integration of colonies into the world economy and from new imperialist policies by the British authorities deliberately withdrawing food supplies from starving areas.
What I found really fascinating is the way Davis shows how deeply intertwined were the ‘natural’ (El Nino) and ‘the human’ (capitalist world economy and New Imperialism) in colonial power structures and struggles. From this study emerges new appreciations of the processes that built the British Empire. One the one hand, taking environmental lenses enables Davis to unearth these tragic and forgotten episodes in the history of the empire. On the other hand, reading the natural disaster through human/political lenses casts new light on the dark side of this age of liberal capitalism traditionally associated with progress and greater freedom.