The Great Acceleration, 1750s

Fossil fuels—first coal, then oil—ended the biological Old World. By utilizing stored energy in coal and oil, respectively, steam engines and later internal com­bustion engines powered global social, economic, demographic, and ecological change.

Industrialization encouraged urbanization and changed consumption patterns. It generated new modes of social organization and heightened exploitation of environments and peoples. Improvements to world food supply and distribution, among other factors, increased world population from an estimated 770 million in 1750 to 1.6 billion by 1900.^[1209] The populations of industrialized areas commonly underwent a demographic transition, from larger to smaller families. Never before were people, commodities, capital, and organisms able to move with such freedom or rapidity,^[1210] thanks to modern transportation technology such as the train, the clipper ship, and the steamboat.^[1211] New banking developments also permitted in­vestment in resource commodification, activities supported by bureaucracies, legal systems, and military might.^[1212]

Imperialism opened up new resources to Europeans and other groups. Between 1812 and 1914, some seven million Britons migrated to Canada, Australasia, and South Africa.^[1213] In a little over 100 years, British-controlled Hong Kong provided a gateway to 6.3 million Chinese,^[1214] many of whom, as miners, merchants, and laborers, exploited new resources in empire and beyond.^[1215] Millions of free and indentured laborers also moved around the British Empire to newly opening re­source frontiers.^[1216]

Technological improvements accelerated environmental exploitation and re­source commodification globally, as local ecologies responded to global demand.

Empire was a vital driver of the nineteenth-century's Great Acceleration, none more so than Britain's. As Corey Ross notes: “Reordering environmental relationships and altering ecosystems was an integral part of modern imperi- alism.”^[1221] Advantaged by cheap and readily available supplies of coal, Britain's em­pire gave it an edge over rivals by providing raw materials and foodstuffs, and a ready-made market for its manufactured goods.^[1222] Its ability “to draw raw materials from ecosystems abroad, subjecting them to monoculture, simplification, and dete­rioration... was part of the reason for the tenacity with which the UK defended and extended its empire in the nineteenth century.”^[1223] It and other empires exploited the biological old world to fuel Europe's industrialization. By the end of World War I, Britain ruled over more than a quarter of the earth's landmass and more than 458 million people.^[1224]

From the late eighteenth century, Britain's textile industry underwent a major revolution through a series of technological advances, most notably the spinning jenny and later the steam engine.

Nineteenth-century Britain consolidated control over India, turning it from a major supplier of textiles into a producer of cash crops, such as cotton, tea and opium. Britain's sub-continental possessions gave it a comparative advantage, which it then used over China. The British introduced plantations of opium poppies into India, to produce a drug—opium—t o pay for its manufactured goods in China, thus addressing a balance-of-payments deficit. Over the nine­teenth century, Bengal opium accounted for 6-15 percent of British India's tax revenue. Opium fields “stretched for 500 miles across the Ganges River Valley, with over a million registered farmers growing poppy plants exclusively for the company.”^[1226] In another instance of how empire enriched Britain, introduced tea plants into India and Sri Lanka reduced British reliance on Chinese imports of that beverage.^[1227]

Cash-crop monocultures of cotton, opium, and tea altered ecologies, economies, and societies. In 1867, Clement Markham estimated that over 24,000 hectares of western Ghats' s forests had made way for plantations of tea, coffee, and cinchona.^[1228] Plantations caused soil degradation, deforestation, and biodiversity loss. Plantation workers labored in inequitable conditions, such as debt peonage.^[1229] Deforestation associated with cash crops on the Ganga-Jamna Doab caused climate change and salinization, and expanded malaria's range; water-storage tanks incubated malaria's Anopheles mosquito vectors.^[1230] Colonies and ecologies responded to consumer de­mand.

Everything from plantation agriculture to forest management responded to the nineteenth-century clarion call to improve, improve, improve that had swept up late-eighteenth-century Britain in a whirlwind of agricultural innovation, stock breeding, and enclosures.^[1232] Science promised to meet God's injunction to subdue and make the earth plentiful, and provided the means of understanding, control­ling, and improving nature.^[1233]

In empire, scientific bureaucracies developed to rationally and efficiently survey and exploit resources, from forests and animals, to foodplants and humans.^[1234] Improvement schemes took many forms. India's fixed land-revenue drove British ex­pansion ofagricultural production, thanks often to irrigation expansion, especially in the latter nineteenth century. By 1892, almost 22,209 kilometers of canals and other smaller channels slaked some 13.4 million acres of land.^[1235] In the Punjab—British India's irrigated heartland—67,800 kilometers of canals were irrigating 30.6 million acres of land by 1947.^[1236] Training for hydrological engineers proliferated here, as in other possessions, such as Egypt, where irrigation was a necessity.^[1237]

The satellite institutions orbiting Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, developed an­other crucial science of empire. This enterprise improved and sent new cash crops around empire, its agents sometimes engaging in “bio-prospecting,” or plant espio­nage.^[1238] For example, cinchona grows naturally in South America, and was an im­portant constituent in anti-malarial drugs. Smuggled out of South America, staff at Kew improved it and then sent it to grow in Britain's sub-continental colonies.^[1239] Local botanical gardens also drove improvement: Peradeniya's Royal Botanic Garden helped develop Ceylon's plantation economy.^[1240]

Colonial development exhausted environments and caused extinctions, but also stimulated new ways of managing resources.

Improvement schemes often brought unanticipated—and unwanted—ecological and human impacts, often impacting the poorest.^[1246] Salinization haunted impe­rial irrigation, by rendering thousands of acres irredeemable for agriculture.^[1247] Meanwhile, ever more complex water-engineering projects heightened vulner­ability to flooding and even sometimes spread disease, such as canal redevelop­ment spreading malaria, or perennial irrigation from Egypt's Aswan Dam (1902) helping to introduce chronic water-borne diseases.^[1248] Furthermore, ecological changes encouraged sand-drift and desertification, and a host of other ills, while boom-and-bust colonial cities crowded together people in unsanitary conditions that encouraged disease to spread.^[1249] Warfare, disease, land confiscation, and other policies reduced indigenous population across the empire.^[1250]

But local peoples adapted to and challenged colonization. Some nineteenth­century Maori tribes, armed with European weapons, dominated others, later challenging imperial power, just as the Comanche did in southwestern North America.^[1251] Both ultimately lost, but in countless other ways, local peoples made use of the ecological (and technological) opportunities that imperialism offered.

Some Europeans chafed at environmental changes. Through poetry and suitably titled artworks, Australasian artist, poet, and writer Alfred Sharpe painted pro­test landscapes—highly romanticized environments on the cusp of change, cities despoiled, or, more spectacularly, factories belching out pollution, poisoning earth and air.^[1254] Sharpe's critique of civic environmental change is a reminder of empire's urban dimensions—of the transforming role of imperial ports and cities as conduits of change, as sources of new organisms, capital, and policies, and as global markets. Urban sprawl and its infrastructure—such as city parks, road and rail networks, and plumbing—and pollution brought tangible environmental change and engendered new ways of living and thinking about nature. The shift to fossil fuels profoundly changed cities' metabolism and their relationship to centers of agricultural pro­duction. While industrialized Europe continued to rely upon the largely organic economies of its empires, industrializing imperial cities outside Europe also al­tered relationships with their peripheries. As motorized transportation replaced horses and night-soil collection declined, they reduced organic transfers from city to fields. (Oil not only adds carbon to the air, it adds a lot of nitrogen, and that fertilizes downwind of cities to a cumulative degree over a longish period compa­rable to fertilizing fields).^[1255]

Encounters with unfamiliar imperial environments stimulated advances in thinking about natural processes,^[1256] most famously and—independently—Darwin and Wallace's ideas of natural selection. Imperial environments inspired nature studies and museums, as men, women, and children sketched, collected, and dis­played natural history, their endeavors contributing to both species preserva­tion and their decline.^[1257] Infamously, Walter Buller's attempts to collect the last specimens of New Zealand's Huia bird (Heteralocha acutirostris) hastened its de­mise,^[1258] a sad illustration of Ryan Tucker Jones's postulation of a possible “global conjuncture between declining ecological diversity and an intensification of natural history study.”^[1259]

Empires also reached environmental limits. Especially in tropical empires, new disease regimes debilitated and killed the military, officials, and settlers,^[1260] as well as their livestock.^[1261] Testing the mettle of scientists, it also led to new fields such as tropical medicine and tropical veterinary science.^[1262] Tropical medicine, with san­itary measures, developed to enable Europeans to more safely live in the tropics. Furthermore, some medical breakthroughs originated in empire. Thanks to his research in India, Ronald Ross proved malaria's mosquito-borne origins. While studying plague in situ in Hong Kong in 1894, Alexandre Yersin identified the bu­bonic bacillus.^[1263]

If tropical powers constrained imperial effectiveness, then their temperate Canadian and Australasian colonies—as neo-Europes—offered opportunities for the transposition of permanent white settlement and agricultural practices into new lands. As Crosby has argued, New World plants and animals gave Europeans an early advantage in Australasia that also relied upon such windfalls as the indigenous-created grasslands of southeastern Australia and eastern New Zealand, which proved ideal for settler pastoralism. Into these lands, acclimatiza­tion societies introduced many organisms.^[1264] As more recent scholarship shows, however, Europeans tapped into a wider range of sources, and engaged in a more complex series of exchanges, than Crosby's pioneering work recognized.^[1265]

New Zealand's transformation into a neo-Europe, for example, also relied on historical conjunctures other than ecological factors alone. This included indus­trialization, stockbreeding, technology, and especially colonial land policy. Quite fortuitously, in the 1870s the clip from New Zealand's specially bred Corriedale sheep proved ideal for production of high-quality worsted at Bradford's woolen mills. New, late-nineteenth century technology (refrigeration, dairy processing, steamships) enabled frozen meat and dairy products from New Zealand (and other neo-Europes) to reach British consumers just as European butter production was declining. This drove significant deforestation in New Zealand's North Island, stimulated large-scale pasture introduction, and encouraged further colonial development.^[1266]

Australasian farmers, however, needed to consolidate and sustain “their pros­perity and status as neo-Europes after exhausting the windfall of frontier colo­nialism.” After the initial flush of productivity provided by burning, soil fertility declined, as did yields. Consolidation, argues Gregory T. Cushman, “required a second stage of ecological imperialism involving the massive importation of soil nutrients and other natural resources from overseas empires in the Pacific Basin”^[1267] Neo-ecological imperialism, as Cushman calls it, called for the redistribution of nutrient-rich soils (bird droppings) from small Pacific islands, which Britain, Australia, and New Zealand assumed control over post-1919. Between 1920 and 1958 over 1.2 million metric tons of phosphatic fertilizer from Nauru, Tuamotus Islands, and Ocean Island were dumped on New Zealand.^[1268] This source sustained New Zealand's grasslands revolution of the 1920s, as it did production in both Australia and Britain.

New Zealand's colonization and ecological remaking underlines a factor vital in empire: the securing and control of land, commonly achieved by force and legal measures.^[1269] Maori agriculture's great success (see earlier) demonstrates that non­Europeans could take advantage of new organisms and technology to grow wealthy, but also how settler land hunger, supported by military force, confiscation, and legal frameworks, could destroy it.^[1270]