Conclusions: Ecological Imperialism Today and Tomorrow
In considering the prospects for a comparative study of imperial metabolism, we have suggested that the appropriation of (human) time and (natural) space, in the form of embodied labor and embodied land, might serve as quantifiable parameters that transcend specific production systems and energy regimes.
Labor and land, always intertwined, are indeed universal sources of energy for capital accumulation. To understand current trends in ecological imperialism, we need to begin by rethinking the rationale of the Industrial Revolution.Prior to the Industrial Revolution, requirements for energy and land converged in the production of food for human labor and fodder for draft animals, but for two centuries now, fossil fuels have made it possible for some sectors of the worldsystem to separate their energy and land requirements. This material condition was the foundation of the industrial worldview that emerged in early nineteenthcentury Britain, the “image of unlimited good”[1116] that pervades mainstream economic thought to this day. Faced with twenty-first-century prospects of peak oil production and climate change, this worldview is now being challenged more seriously than ever. We need to ask if some of the fundamental tenets of modern economics are inextricably connected to the use of fossil fuel energy. A return to biofuels would reintroduce some of the constraints and rationalities of preindustrial imperialism, including the ancient competition over land for energy versus food production, and the logic of calculating transport costs in terms of the requisite ecological space.
Although sharing much continuity, nineteenth-century British and twentiethcentury American imperialism are in some respects diametrical opposites. Britain's imperial strategy was largely propelled by its great need of additional land, while it was more than self-sufficient in fossil fuels.
The contemporary United States has been prepared to go to war to secure its imports of fossil fuels, but is more than self-sufficient in agricultural land. If, prompted by peak oil or global warming, oil consumption in the United States were to be replaced with (best-practice) Brazilian ethanol, it would require hundreds of millions of hectares of sugarcane plantations, which is several times the area within the United States currently devoted to agricultural exports and vastly more than the area in Brazil currently devoted to sugarcane ethanol. Without a doubt, the future of ecological imperialism and our understandings of ecologically unequal exchange will to a large extent hinge on the geopolitics of energy.Contrary to many theorists contemplating the expansion of “the West,” acknowledging the significance of energy in the world history of empire should not lead us to adopt a simplistic, Darwinian perspective that represents high-energy, high-tech imperialism as natural and inevitable.[1117] Such evolutionary determinism is pervasive in the work of cultural ecologists like Leslie White[1118] and recurs, for example, in the influential narrative of the biogeographer Jared Diamond. References to the relative amount of energy harnessed or controlled per capita, however, do not suffice to explain the world history of imperialism. Access to powerful technologies may certainly be useful to empires, best illustrated by British and American imperialism in recent centuries, but the complex vicissitudes of imperial fortunes are equally dependent, for instance, on the cultural vagaries of global markets, political intrigues, epidemiology, harvests, and weather (recall the fate of the Spanish Armada). Empires rise and fall, and in many historical instances low-energy and low-tech polities have proven more resilient than their more powerful neighbors or predecessors.
Bibliography
Adas, M. 1989. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance.
Ithaca, NY.Adas, M. 2006. Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and Americas Civilizing Mission. Cambridge, MA.
Altman, I. 2011. “The Spanish Atlantic, 1650-1780.” In N. Canny and P. Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World 1450-1850, 183-200. Oxford.
Baudrillard, J. [1972] 1981. For a Critique ofthe Political Economy ofthe Sign. St. Louis, MO. Blaut, J. M. 1993. The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History. New York.
Blaut, J. M. 2000. Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York.
Bogadottir, R. 2012. “Fleece: Imperial Metabolism in the Pre-Columbian Andes.” In A. Hornborg, B. Clark, and K. Hermele, eds., Ecology and Power: Struggles over Land and Material Resources in the Past, Present and Future, 83-96. London.
Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique ofthe Judgement of Taste. London.
Braudel, F. [1979] 1992. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th- 18th Centuries, 3 vols. Berkeley, CA. Bunker, S. G. 1985. Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State. Chicago.
Burbank, J., and F. Cooper. 2010. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ.
Chaplin, J. E. 2011. “The British Atlantic.” In N. Canny and P. Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook ofthe Atlantic World 1450-1850, 219-234. Oxford.
Crosby, A. W. 1972. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport, CT.
Crosby, A. W 1986. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900. Cambridge.
Crosby, A. W 2006. Children of the Sun: A History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy. New York.
D'Altroy, T. N. 2001. “Politics, Resources, and Blood in the Inka Empire.” In S. E. Alcock, T. N. D'Altroy, K. D. Morrison, and C. M. Sinopoli, eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, 201-226. Cambridge.
D'Altroy, T. N. 2002. The Incas. Oxford.
Debeir, J.-C., J.- P.
Deleage, and D. Hemery. 1991. In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization through the Ages. London.Diamond, J. 1997. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York.
Emmanuel, A. 1972. Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. New York.
Foster, G. 1965. “Peasant Society and the Image of Limited Good.” American Anthropologist 67, no. 2: 293-315.
Foster, J. B. 2008. “Peak Oil and Energy Imperialism.” Monthly Review 60, no. 3: 12-33.
Foster, J. B., and B. Clark. 2004. “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism.” Socialist Register 40:186-201.
Frank, A. G. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley, CA.
Garnsey, P. 1988. Famine and Food Supply in the Graeco-Roman World: Responses to Risk and Crisis. Cambridge.
Godelier, M. 1986. The Mental and the Material. London.
Graeber, D. 2011. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY.
Headrick, D. R. 2010. Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present. Princeton, NJ.
Horden, P., and N. Purcell. 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History. Oxford.
Hornborg, A. 1992. “Machine Fetishism, Value, and the Image of Unlimited Good: Toward a Thermodynamics of Imperialism.” Man (N.S.) 27: 1-18.
Hornborg, A. 1998. “Towards an Ecological Theory of Unequal Exchange: Articulating World System Theory and Ecological Economics.” Ecological Economics 25, no. 1: 127-136.
Hornborg, A. 2006. “Footprints in the Cotton Fields: The Industrial Revolution as Time-Space Appropriation and Environmental Load Displacement.” Ecological Economics 59, no. 1: 74-81.
Hornborg, A. 2013. Global Ecology and Unequal Exchange: Fetishism in a Zero-Sum World. Revised paperback edition. London.
Hornborg, A. 2019. Nature, Society, and Justice in the Anthropocene: Unraveling the MoneyEnergy-Technology Complex. Cambridge.
Inikori, J. E. 1989. “Slavery and the Revolution in Cotton Textile Production in England.” Social Science History 13, no.
4: 343-379.Lonergan, S. C. 1988. “Theory and Measurement of Unequal Exchange: A Comparison between a Marxist Approach and an Energy Theory of Value.” Ecological Modelling 41:127-145.
Marsden, B., and C. Smith. 2005. Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth- Century Britain. Houndmills, UK.
McNeill, J. R. 2011. “The Ecological Atlantic.” In N. Canny and P. Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World 1450-1850, 289-304. Oxford.
Mintz, S. W 1985. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York.
Morris, I. 2010. Why the West Rules for Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal about the Future. London.
Myrdal, J. 2012. “Empire: The Comparative Study of Imperialism.” In A. Hornborg, B. Clark, and K. Hermele, eds., Ecology and Power: Struggles over Land and Material Resources in the Past, Present and Future, 37-51. London.
Odum, H.T. 1996. Environmental Accounting: Energy and Environmental Decision Making. New York.
Pomeranz, K. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, NJ.
Roberts, J. T., and B. C. Parks. 2007. A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Change. Cambridge, MA.
Sahlins, M. D. 1976. Culture and Practical Reason. Chicago.
Scheidel, W., ed. 2009. Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires. Oxford.
Schwartz, S. B. 2011. “The Iberian Atlantic to 1650.” In N. Canny and P. Morgan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World 1450-1850, 147-164. Oxford.
Sieferle, R. P. [1982] 2001. The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge.
Smil, V. 1994. Energy in World History. Boulder, CO.
Smith, M. E. 2001. “The Aztec Empire and the Mesoamerican World System.” In S. E. Alcock, T. N. D'Altroy, K. D. Morrison, and C. M. Sinopoli, eds., Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History, 128-154. Cambridge.
Wallerstein, I.
1974. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York.Warlenius, R. 2011. Iron for Tea: The Trade of the Swedish East India Company as a CrossContinental Case Study of Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the Eighteenth Century. Master's thesis, Department of Economic History, Stockholm University.
White, L. A. 1959. The Evolution of Culture: The Development of Civilization to the Fall of Rome. New York.
Widgren, M. 2007. “Precolonial Landesque Capital: A Global Perspective.” In A. Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and J. Martinez-Alier, eds., Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change, 61-77. Lanham, MD.
Williams, M. 2003. Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis. Chicago.
Williams, M. 2007. “The Role of Deforestation in Earth and World-S ystem Integration.” In A. Hornborg, J. R. McNeill, and J. Martinez-Alier, eds., Rethinking Environmental History: World-System History and Global Environmental Change, 101-122. Lanham, MD.
Woolf, G. 2012. Rome: An Empire’s Story. Oxford.