Industrialization as a Strategy of Time-Space Appropriation

At the core of the Industrial Revolution was the substitution of human and an­imal muscle power, as well as water and wind power, with fossil energy, or—if you wish—the imperative to increase productivity per hour of human labor.

A central question, for our comparative understanding of imperial metabolism, is what Ricardo's and Marx's objections to Malthus really signified, from a global perspective. Ricardo was obviously right in maintaining that the shortage of land would not be an obstacle for England's economic growth. But the “technological de­velopment” that made it possible to transcend the country's biophysical limitations actually implied that England's pressure on the environment was displaced to areas outside its own political boundaries and to future generations. In other words, the limits to growth posited by Malthus did not disappear but were shifted beyond view. Even if we disregard the vast quantities of labor time invested in the British colonies to subsidize Britain's economic growth during the nineteenth century, we can join Kenneth Pomeranz in calculating the equally vast land areas claimed for the British economy.^[1102] By the mid-eighteenth century, the annual British import of Swedish iron represented around a million hectares of Swedish forest.^[1103] To substitute for the food energy in sugar consumed in England in 1831, the country would have needed to grow domestic food crops on an additional million hectares of farmland. To replace the cotton fiber imported in 1830 with domestic wool, England would have required an additional 9.3 million hectares of pasture and hay. To replace the annual import of Baltic and American timber in the early nineteenth century would have required almost 0.65 million hectares of British woodland, and to sub­stitute firewood for the annual consumption of coal around 1815, another six mil­lion hectares of forest. During the course of the nineteenth century (from 1815 to 1900), Pomeranz adds, England's imports of sugar increased 11-fold, its coal output 14-fold, and its cotton imports 20-fold.

The extraction and transport of these and other imports to England was to a large extent financed with revenue from textile exports. Ultimately, in other words, the point with all the investments in intensified mass production was that it granted England access to increasing volumes of resources beyond its own land surface. This reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution in terms of global transfers of re­sources has not taken into account the immense amounts of labor invested in co­lonial plantations, mines, and forests, or the vast land areas that provided all these laborers with food. In acknowledging the requisite appropriation of labor and land in the periphery, this perspective on industrialization finally leads us to recognize that “technology” may not primarily be a matter of saving time and space, but of redistributing it in global society.^[1105] Fundamental to such asymmetric transfers of embodied time and embodied space in the world-system, of course, are global discrepancies in the price of labor and land. Technological rationality, in other words, is a subset of mercantile rationality (what the economists refer to as arbi­trage), and “technological progress” contingent on global market conjunctures.

Even these cursory and incomplete calculations can contribute to a reassessment of the essence of “technological development” in a global perspective.