No One Can Live on Iron

Alittle more​ than a decade ago, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty organised a conference at the University of Chicago on the history and politics of the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty had published an article four years earlier in which he argued that the science of anthropogenic climate change undermined assumptions about agency, experience and causation that are fundamental to the writing of history. At the conference, representatives from other disciplines were invited to hold their own methodologies to account. As a doctoral student searching for a project, I watched as academics in the humanities and social sciences lined up either to concede epistemic humility in the face of problems such as planetary systems and deep time, or to express excitement about the conceptual innovations (and, who knows, maybe even research funding) they made possible. But my abiding memory is of the economists. They were alone in being intellectually unmoved by environmental catastrophe. Projecting cost-benefit analyses at timescales large enough to account for different climate futures was simply too unwieldy, they argued: there were too many variables, too many systemic factors to fit into an equation or to plot on a graph. This wasn’t a problem for economics, and so their models and methods could remain intact.

Historians can’t afford to be so sanguine. The emergence of the concept of the Anthropocene at the turn of the millennium prompted physical scientists to trawl the archives of the Earth (tree rings, ice cores, pollen records, fossils) to speculate about its origins in the ‘great acceleration’ of the mid-20th century, or in the industrial revolution, or even further back in the Neolithic turn to settled agriculture. These are debates in which historians are professionally obliged to take an interest. But the invitation to think seriously about ecological processes and on the scale of geological time also promised radically new perspectives on events that had become falsely familiar. Chakrabarty suggested as much when he argued that critical histories of empire and globalisation have very little purchase on our current predicament, because we are now ‘caught up in’ much larger Earth systems ‘that have no intrinsic connection to the logics of capitalist, nationalist or socialist identities’. If anything, the disciplinary influence has to work the other way: the science of climate change requires us to revise our moral and political fables about modernity. The rise of democracy coincided with the transition from wood to coal, and decolonisation in the 20th century precipitated the growth of fertiliser consumption, air travel, motor vehicles and industrial agriculture around the world. ‘The mansion of modern freedoms,’ Chakrabarty argued, ‘stands on an ever-expanding foundation of fossil-fuel use.’

The ‘planetary turn’ came just as global history had become an accepted and even fashionable genre. Beginning in the 1970s, academics working for the most part in formerly colonised societies developed an unorthodox Marxist account of a ‘capitalist world system’ that for centuries (or, in some interpretations, millennia) had been defined by underdevelopment and exploitation. By the 1990s and early 2000s, non-Marxist historians had adopted the panoramic scope of this literature while rejecting its central analytics of ‘core and periphery’ and imperial hegemons, emphasising instead a wider range of actors in the story of globalisation – a trend perhaps most clearly represented in the UK by Christopher Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World (2004). Chakrabarty, a founding member of the postcolonial collective Subaltern Studies in the 1980s, has developed his own influential critiques of the economic and intellectual legacies of Western imperialism. He is happy to acknowledge the role of capitalism, empire and industry in causing the climate crisis. But global history is overwhelmingly concerned with human affairs and tends to emphasise unevenness and differentiation; it’s not likely to yield the kind of unitary and multispecies politics that Chakrabarty is after. The difficult and perhaps impossible task he set out in The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (2021) is to retain ‘what is of obvious value in our postcolonial suspicion of the universal’, while also trying to imagine a universal history of more than human life. Global history is about the rise and fall of empires, the movement across oceans and continents of people, ideas and institutions; planetary history directs our attention to plate tectonics, weather systems, the evolution and extinction of species. In the Anthropocene we have to think ‘simultaneously on both registers’.

Sunil Amrith’s The Burning Earth is in some ways a response to this challenge. Trained as a historian of South and South-East Asia, Amrith has spent the past decade integrating the environment into his research on migration, port cities and infrastructure. In his telling, this involved overcoming a perceived separation from nature, the legacy of a childhood in Singapore and a career in the urban enclaves of transatlantic academia. His latest and by far most ambitious book is what Chakrabarty might call a global history of the planet. It tells a story about the way humanity – first gradually, in some parts of the world, and then everywhere – became a force of nature. The narrative is driven in the first instance by the processes of ‘primitive accumulation’ to which Marx attributed the origins of capitalism and which are at the heart of world-systems analysis: enclosure, New World conquest, plantation slavery, long-distance trade. But Amrith implicitly rejects the typical geography and causal logic of the Marxian account. The achievement of abundance in agriculture didn’t begin in Europe and spread elsewhere; it can be traced back to the expansion of empires throughout the Asian landmass: Mongol, Russian, Mughal, Ottoman and Qing. To identify the origins of human power and environmental control in a single event, technology or social structure would be to risk provincialising responsibility for what is a shared planetary crisis. Instead, Amrith writes from a position of empathy for the ‘all-too-human’ desire to escape from the binding constraints of nature – a project that we are only now ‘belatedly’ realising has been won at a catastrophic environmental cost.

Amrith begins his story with the Medieval Warm Period of 900 to 1300, which, in Europe, provided the conditions for widespread conversion of wasteland to cultivation and a fourfold increase in the population. Of the latter phenomenon, Marc Bloch argued that ‘few other events in the history of European civilisation, and of French civilisation in particular, have had such weighty consequences.’ Increased population density led to the revival of trade and urban self-government; ‘seigneurial anarchy’, Bloch argued, was slowly being eclipsed by the modernising forces of the centralising state and the bourgeois freedom it allowed. Economic revival in France in particular took the form of internal, intensive colonisation: town, country and market were brought closer together, while the crown consolidated its territorial power.

But the Medieval Warm Period wasn’t restricted to Europe, and elsewhere it helped to facilitate unprecedented imperial expansion. Unusually wet weather on the Mongolian steppe at the beginning of the 13th century made the grass grow faster, providing fuel for the five hundred thousand horses of Genghis Khan’s army (‘perhaps half of all the horses on Earth in the 13th century’) as it raided lands throughout Eurasia. Wet conditions also prompted the spread of Champa rice cultivation in southern China under the Song Dynasty, which by the beginning of the 13th century was home to a third of the world’s population. When Kublai Khan, Genghis Khan’s grandson, completed the Mongol conquest of China in 1279, he achieved a ‘new fusion of nomadic power and settled resources’, of desert, tundra and paddy field. This synthesis was matched at sea, as merchants and travellers exchanged medicinal plants, spices and ideas written on the new technology of paper across an increasingly connected Indian Ocean.

Benign climate conditions didn’t last. The beginning of the 14th century brought disaster to China: earthquakes caused an estimated 270,000 deaths, and snowstorms displaced nearly a million households. In 1319 ‘half of the cows in England died’ of plague. A couple of decades later, the demographic gains of the Medieval Warm Period were wiped out entirely by Yersinia pestis, a bacterium endemic to wild rodents on the Central Asian steppe, who carried plague from China to the cities of the Golden Horde and from there to Crimea and the Mediterranean. The Black Death took the lives of between 30 and 60 per cent of the population of Europe and the Middle East. It also accelerated the collapse of the Mongol Empire, closing down the overland route between Europe and Asia.

Faced with the rise of the Mamluks in Egypt and the Ottomans in Byzantium, Europeans who had developed a taste for the spices of the East had to forge new trading routes by striking out west. The Portuguese conquered Madeira and stripped its forests to plant sugar cane; they also built fortresses on the western coast of Africa, where they traded for gold and, later on, enslaved people. By the end of the 15th century, Iberian sailors had found a seaborne passage to India and Columbus had landed on the other side of the Atlantic, on an island he called Hispaniola. Historians have recently debated whether the subsequent devastation of Indigenous communities by European colonists and their diseases (smallpox, influenza, malaria, measles, diphtheria) caused planetary cooling. The initial hypothesis, proposed by the palaeoclimatogist William Ruddiman, held that the severe depopulation of the Americas – a 90 per cent collapse within a century – allowed for the growth of immense amounts of carbon-devouring vegetation. Further research into Antarctic sea ice, where air from as long ago as six million years is trapped in bubbles, has confirmed a dip in the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in the 16th century, falling to around 270 parts per million in 1610 (today it is 425 ppm).

There’s a restless quality to Amrith’s treatment of early modernity. Armies sweep through continents. Empires expand across oceans. People, money and diseases are on the move. ‘The pulse of human life on Earth quickened.’ This is the way global history has typically been written in the last few decades, with an emphasis on mobility, connection and large-scale comparisons. Amrith is a skilled exponent of this genre, capable of traversing continents and centuries in short, lucid chapters that attend to a range of human and non-human actors. In twenty pages he covers the Atlantic slave trade, the Caribbean plantation complex, urbanisation and the rise of consumer society in Europe, Dutch hydrology, the drainage of the fens and the settlement and dispossession of Indigenous land in North America. This is the kind of Olympian perspective demanded by the planetary crisis and, it seems, by current historiographical tastes: The Burning Earth has received prizes from, among others, the Toynbee Foundation and the British Academy.

It’s easy to get caught up in the narrative, to be awed by its scope, without stopping to ask why any of this is happening. Amrith doesn’t have a compelling answer. He claims that ‘the transformation of the world began with desire’ – the desire of elites for status and luxury, and the desire of everyone else for subsistence. In other words, it was rooted in something like the human condition. We aren’t told why ‘symbols of rank and distinction’ took the form of cash crops and precious metals – ‘pearls and pepper, gold and silver and sugar’ – or why people could only be fed through settled agriculture. Instead, what needs to be explained is naturalised and historical transformations are presented in near metaphysical terms. After the East India Company took power in Bengal, ‘the spiral of conquest took on a life of its own.’ In America after 1763, ‘it was as if the westward movement of settlers were itself a force of nature.’ Chakrabarty may have been right that it’s impossible to write a history of the planet without giving up long-held views about causation, the sequence of events or the specificity of time and place – the bread and butter of most historical research. Then again, those economists at the Chicago conference also had a point. Some disciplinary models are worth holding onto, even if they can’t answer some of the biggest questions.

In​ The Birth of the Modern World, Bayly stressed the importance of the ‘archaic globalisation’ of the early modern period in facilitating the later spread of nationalism, industry and democracy. Nineteenth-century technologies such as the steamship and the telegraph worked through and even amplified older processes of connection based on the expansive logics of cosmic kingship (monarchs’ divinely ordained pursuit of universal rule), religious missions and pilgrimages, and shared biomedical theories that encouraged the transcontinental exchange of plants and precious stones thought to have health-giving properties. Amrith similarly insists on the enduring influence of the archaic on modernity, but replaces Bayly’s focus on cultural factors of integration with a sustained attention to changes in the land. Between 1500 and 1800 the great empires of Eurasia extended the frontiers of settlement and cultivation. Russia grew fivefold, with Stroganov merchants and their Cossack armies setting fire to the forests and grasslands of Siberia and replacing them with ‘unending fields of rye’. The Qing empire advanced into Taiwan, Tibet and Mongolia. Mughal rule spread downstream to the Ganges Delta.

In each case ‘the outcome was the same’: nomadic herders and hunters were replaced by agrarian settlements that grew crops and paid taxes. In the 18th century, the Qianlong emperor waged ‘a war of extermination’ against Dzungaria, an alliance of tribal groups in modern-day Kyrgyzstan. By some estimates, roughly 80 per cent of the Dzungar population (which at the time amounted to around six hundred thousand) was killed in war or by disease; the rest fled to Russia. They were replaced by Han cultivators, Hui Muslims and Manchu bannermen, whose migration was sponsored by the Qing state. This was, somewhat paradoxically, the objective of all the frantic mobility of archaic globalisation: to fix people to the land so that they could be governed more easily and more profitably. The Russian peasants who conquered Siberia were rewarded with two centuries of serfdom.

Other historians have explained the territorial expansion of empires in the early modern period as a consequence of institutional changes, principally the rise of the ‘developmentalist state’. Agrarian settlement meant taxes, which meant investment in armies and infrastructure, which further entrenched the power of elites. The state, and politics more generally, barely feature in The Burning Earth. Amrith instead directs attention down the social scale, to the serfs and slaves who worked the land, and out to the geographical margins of empires, their frontiers of settlement, where agrarian production was most intense. It is in colonial landscapes that perhaps the most enduring legacies of archaic globalisation can be found. The dodo became extinct in Dutch-occupied Mauritius in the late 17th century; 18th-century Russian fur trappers in the Pacific wiped out the entire population of the Steller’s sea cow in just three decades. According to the historians John L. Brooke and Chris Otter, ‘since 1600, at least 484 animals and 654 plants have become extinct. The “natural” rate of extinction is one species … every 700 years.’ They also point out that carbon dioxide emissions from land use (deforestation and the intensification of agriculture) began to rise sharply after 1700, and were not matched by industrial emissions until the First World War. Even in that conflict the colonial land grabs of earlier centuries proved decisive. Citing Avner Offer’s ‘agrarian interpretation’ of the war, Amrith notes the Allies’ almost total reliance on North America for wheat and ammunition and Australia for wool. More than a million soldiers were mobilised from Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

These territories were incorporated into the Anglosphere in the age of sail, not steam. Fossil fuels may have been a ‘necessary condition’ of the global ecology of total war, but Amrith insists that the technologies of modern industry led to the ‘amplification of human impact on the Earth’: this is a history of continuity, not rupture. As the Victorian nature writer Richard Jefferies put it, ‘no one can live on iron, or coal, or cotton – the object is really sacks of wheat.’ The most immediate environmental impact of the railway and the steamship was to extend the acreage of land dedicated to staple crops. Vast stretches of Ukraine, North America, Argentina and Australia were turned over to wheat; rice paddies colonised the river deltas of the Irrawaddy in Burma, the Chao Phraya in Thailand and the Mekong in Vietnam. The world grain trade grew nearly tenfold in the second half of the 19th century, and in the process the gap widened between affluent consumers in the West and those elsewhere who laboured to feed them. The peasantries of China, India and Africa became increasingly commercialised – condemned to take on debt to squeeze surplus from their smallholdings for the global market, which left them vulnerable to a series of late-century droughts and famines caused by El Niño. Some victims contributed to the ‘great unmooring’ of the 19th century, leaving their land for work in mines or on railroads and plantations. But not everyone had access to the infrastructure that made migration possible. Amrith points out that as late as the 1970s, almost three-quarters of all journeys in rural India were made on foot.

The old world endured even in the oil fields of the early 20th century. In 1901 half of the world’s petroleum came from Baku, on the Caspian Sea. Zoroastrian, Hindu and Sikh pilgrims had for centuries worshipped at the Ateshgah, a temple where a fire burned constantly from a spring of natural gas. Gradually, the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union found more practical uses for the gas field and for the oil that oozed from the soils of the Volga delta. In the 1870s the city’s barons developed a way to use oil as fuel for transportation. Baku became a boom town, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Nobels – a Swedish family of arms manufacturers and dynamite inventors whose role in the destruction of the planet has perhaps gone underappreciated. Having ventured down the Volga in search of ammunition supplies for his brother’s factory, Robert Nobel arrived in Baku just in time for the oil rush. Within decades their new company, Branobel, had opened five hundred wells. Their twelve thousand employees lived in a workers’ colony called Villa Petrolea. The Nobels were responsible for building the world’s first oil pipeline and first ocean-going oil tanker. They called the ship Zoroaster, and its successors Buddha and Brahma – cosmic kings for the age of oil. Beyond magnates like the Nobels, the Rothschilds and Royal Dutch Shell, Baku attracted labourers and political agitators from around Europe and the Middle East: Young Turks, Muslim social democrats and Russian communists. One of the leaders of a 1904 strike by the oil workers was a young Josef Stalin.

Amrith argues​ that total war ‘forced together’ two 19th-century developments in humanity’s relationship to nature, both of which hinged on nitrogen. In 1910 Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch figured out how to make ammonia, enabling the production of synthetic nitrogen fertilisers; a few years later, they developed a way to use that synthetic ammonia to produce nitric acid, an essential ingredient for the kinds of explosive once made by the Nobels and now being used at scale across Europe. (Both Haber and Bosch later received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.) The capacity to ‘preserve, protect and extend life’ was growing, but not quite as fast as the capacity to destroy it. Increasingly, the latter was regarded as instrumental to the former. In 1915, Germany implemented a state-sponsored programme to kill nine million pigs to preserve land for grain and to supply meat to a hungry home front. Around eight million horses died during the First World War. Of the ten million combatant deaths, ninety thousand died from chemical agents.

The Nazi regime turned the logic of environmental control to genocidal ends. Hitler described the Eastern Front as ‘a battle for food, a battle for the basis of life, for the raw materials the Earth offers, the natural resources that lie under the soil and the fruits that it offers to the one who cultivates it’. Anxiety about grain motivated the annexation of Poland and the implementation of the Hunger Plan in the Soviet Union. Zyklon B, the substance used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, had been invented as a pesticide in the 1920s, thanks to Haber’s research.

Some of the technologies that brought destruction to Europe also brought liberation to its colonies. ‘Never had so many people been promised so many freedoms as in the twenty years after the Second World War,’ Amrith writes, and many of those promises were kept. After independence, postcolonial nations had access to medicines and chemicals that fundamentally altered the conditions of life: ‘how long one could expect to live, whether one’s children would die in infancy, whether a mother would survive childbirth’. Only after affluence had spread to the Global South did intellectuals in the West begin to fret about its ecological costs. Some factions of the environmentalist movement, such as the neo-Malthusians of the Club of Rome, were explicitly nativist in their concern about the rapid growth of the world population after 1945. But as Amrith points out, more sophisticated thinkers also failed to incorporate the Third World into their critiques of the great acceleration. Rachel Carson denounced the use of DDT for destroying America’s rural ecosystems, but the same chemical eradicated malaria in India: in 1947, 75 million cases and eight hundred thousand deaths were recorded there; fourteen years later, there were fifty thousand cases and no deaths. Hannah Arendt worried that humanity’s technological domination of nature – space travel, splitting the atom – suggested a wilful alienation from an Earth that, ‘for all we know, may be unique in the universe in providing human beings with a habitat in which they can move and breathe without effort and without artifice’. She did not stop to ask, Amrith writes, whether life without artifice had always been so easy for the ‘dispossessed and colonised’.

Chakrabarty has argued that any reckoning with the great acceleration must acknowledge the postcolonial ‘desire to be modern’. The Burning Earth does this principally through its deep agrarian perspective – its attention to the precarity of peasant life, prolonged and exacerbated by colonialism. After centuries of underdevelopment, who wouldn’t entertain ‘dreams of fossil-fuelled escape’? But it’s also clear that some people have benefited more than others from the way the world has been developed in the last seventy years. In 1962, years after oil executives had been warned about the catastrophic effects of global warming, Humble Oil ran an advertisement boasting that each day the company ‘supplies enough energy to melt seven tons of glacier’. Most of the carbon in the atmosphere because of human activity has been emitted since 1990. In the last decade, Amrith points out, nearly two thousand environmental activists around the world have been murdered. Committed to the centuries-long, cosmopolitan perspective of planetary history, he insists that ‘as we move beyond the obvious culprits, moral certainties blur and responsibility for harm grows more dispersed.’ Maybe the obvious culprits deserve more scrutiny.