The Roles of Money and Technology in the Ecology of Empire

If much economic and technological expansion can indeed be visualized as the product of ecological imperialism, redefined as ecologically unequal exchange, we must conclude that mainstream beliefs about the societal roles of money and technology are incomplete.

The gradual world-historical transition from tributary to increasingly mercantile and industrial imperialism is generally viewed as progress, and in some respects this is certainly a valid perspective. At the same time, we must not ignore the global inequalities and unevenly distributed ecological consequences that have accompanied this development, which might justify the question, “Progress for whom?” Whatever transformations the next few centuries have in store for world society, whether managed or unintentional, it will be important to develop as full as possible an understanding of global socio-ecological processes. This should include recognizing that market exchange can mask asymmetries in global resource transfers, and that what we think of as technological development can in fact rely on such asymmetric transfers. Even “globalized” environmental problems such as climate change have highly unequal repercussions for different parts of global society.^[1111] Moreover, we need to acknowledge the temporal dimension by considering how the combustion of fossil fuels and depletion of finite resources also imply a colonization of future generations everywhere.

There is no doubt that all-purpose money and global market exchange provided the means toward new forms of ecological imperialism, particularly after the establishment of intensive transoceanic trade in the sixteenth century. Money is a curious cultural institution that continues to mystify socio-ecological processes—for instance, the accumulation of new technologies in particular sectors of the worldsystem.

Moreover, toward the end of the twentieth century, the idea and institution of money became the foundation of yet another and even more opaque strategy of accumulation that we might call financial imperialism.^[1112] Much as in earlier imperial strategies of enrichment, our difficulty in grasping its exploitative nature is an essential condition for its existence. Power is founded on obscuring the relation between the material and the symbolic. Ubiquitously, it entails both unequal access to material resources (e.g., energy or land) and cultural mystification of such inequalities (e.g., through concepts such as “market prices” or “debt”). Ubiquitously also—not only in Marx's nineteenth-century capitalism—political relations to other people masquerade as relations to things. These material “things” include landscapes, commodities, money, and technology.

Landscapes

Environmental historians have assembled the details of landscape transformations in the wake of imperial expansions. In the ancient agrarian civilizations, the most conspicuous cultural transformations of landscape were deforestation and the establishment of various kinds of landesque capital.^[1113] The traditional Chinese landscape of rice paddies, mulberry trees, and fish ponds was largely a product of two millennia of Chinese Empire, as the Mediterranean landscape of grape vines and olive trees was a product of ancient Greece and Rome. The terraced Andean slopes and irrigated coastal valleys of Peru likewise reflect millennia of state expansions, ending with the Inca, as do the extensive investments in raised fields in waterlogged areas such as Titicaca and the Basin of Mexico. The landscape legacies of the Spanish and British empires include abandonment of indigenous landesque capital and an initial reforestation in the wake of indigenous depopulation, followed by renewed and unprecedented deforestation and cultivation in connection with colonization and the establishment of plantations, frequently leading to serious soil erosion and degradation.

European expansion in the New World also brought devastated mining landscapes, collapsed fisheries, and a severe decimation of numerous wild species ranging from North American beavers (and the concomitant hydrological and vegetation changes following the abandonment of beaver dams) to Caribbean sea turtles. To this we should add, of course, the introduction and often explosive expansion of Old World species of animals and plants, both wild and domesticated. As Crosby and others have shown, the expansion of European empires since the sixteenth century is largely responsible for the global distribution not only of cattle, sheep, pigs, and wheat, but also of rats and dandelions. These early modern empires may have transformed their natural environments more dramatically than ancient empires such as Rome,^[1114] but it is no exaggeration to observe that the landscapes of significant proportions of all continents have been molded by world-systemic conjunctures of imperial command and market demand over the past two millennia. These landscapes can thus be viewed as the historical imprints of social and political relations between humans, inscribed on the ecosystems of which they are a part.

Commodities

The goods that constituted the essential metabolic flows in the empires mentioned earlier, and the production of which significantly shaped their landscapes, are in themselves perhaps the clearest illustration of how relations between people masquerade as relations between things. Commodities are ultimately embodiments of human labor and natural resources, but present themselves to our senses as decontextualized items of exchange. Their exchange on the market, including the rates at which they are exchanged, has no systematic relation to the quantities of labor time or natural resources that they embody. The extent to which their exchange entails asymmetric transfers of embodied labor time or natural space must thus be investigated separately, without guidance from the vocabulary of economics, except when the actual exchange rates help us to empirically assess the specific quantities of labor time or natural space that are transferred in a particular context.

Money

Like commodities, money was recognized by Karl Marx to have a fetish-like aspect, in that it focuses our attention on a concrete reification of a wider social system of material exchanges. Money fetishism prompts us to attribute to non-living objects like bills and coins certain properties of living things, such as a capacity for autonomous growth (“interest”), rather than acknowledging that the appearance of having such properties is a result of social relations of exchange. As argued earlier, this capacity of money to mystify the material substance of unequal exchange has for a very long time been an important ingredient in imperial expansion. The literature attempting to grasp the emergence of this elusive cultural phenomenon is vast and impossible to summarize, but a highly promising attempt is the comparative economic anthropology of David Graeber.38 Although his analysis is not concerned with material asymmetries in resource flows, or the material dimensions of capital accumulation, he persuasively relates the world-historical emergence of money and markets to cultural conceptions about predatory lending, debt slavery, state institutions, mercenary soldiers, and violence. Money, we suggested earlier, is basically a symbolic capacity to make claims on other people's labor and landscapes. It is an idea, embodied in things, which developed as a means of extending control over people beyond relations of kinship, proximity, and trust, in order to get them to behave in ways they might not otherwise have done.

Technology

Finally, as argued previously, technology is also a category of “things” which can mystify unequal relations of exchange. Viewed from the perspective of time-space appropriation, technological obj ects reflect their owners' harnessing of the deflected agency of other people. Modern technology can be reconceptualized as a strategy to locally save (human) time and (natural) space, at the expense of time and space lost elsewhere in the world-system.

Although it has been suggested that the earliest proto-machines (water-mills) were built in the late Roman Empire in part to replace (increasingly expensive) slaves, as a continued preoccupation with the delegation of work to other beings/things, the question remains if technology has not so much replaced as displaced slavery. We need only think of the role of Caribbean plantation workers and British coal miners during the Industrial Revolution, or the working conditions of Peruvian copper miners and Brazilian sugarcane harvesters today. Like commodities, technological objects are fetishized, obscuring asymmetric exchange relations and distant investments of labor time, embodied land, or energy. The “Western” fetishization and glorification of technology has been abundantly

³⁸ Graeber 2011. documented, particularly by historians of British and American imperialism.^{^[1115]} It is a pervasive component in the mainstream narrative of “development,” which legitimizes the hegemony of wealthier nations by representing poverty as failure and global inequalities as a temporary state of affairs.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume One: The Imperial Experience. Oxford University Press,2020. — 584 p.. 2020

The Roles of Money and Technology in the Ecology of Empire

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