My question is not which comes first, resources or institutions. The relations between them are not cause and effect but are based on cohabitation, even symbiosis. The non-human agents of history interact with working, suffering, hopeful or disillusioned human beings. Harnessing nature, people endow natural phenomena with independent agency and deprive themselves of this agency. We will discern such elective affinities between sugar cane and British mercantilism, between hemp and Russian feudalism, between oil and globalisation. Every primary commodity is a social institution, and each one is different. Different natural resources have different political qualities and generate different cultural forms of reflection.
Inspired by the material turn in the study of the humanities, which has replaced the earlier fascination with language, I wish to combine a history of matter with a history of ideas. 9 You can’t understand the thoughts of the past without addressing the things which were so familiar to the people who lived then – silk and grain, gold and coal. Material history and intellectual history are both interwoven with moral history. You can’t understand the origins of the state, or revolutions, or global warming, without understanding political evil – its variety, origins and change. Political evil entails violence, economic inequality and the suppression of freedom. This isn’t news. What is news is the realisation that, in our world, ecological damage has also become a part of political evil. The confluence of the four axes of history – politics, economics, ecology and morality – is a particular feature of modern life. And the further forward this rhombus of history goes, the more obvious it is that ecology should supersede economics and moral judgement should trump political choice.
In recent times, post-colonial research has concentrated on the Global South, post-socialist research on the Global North – and both have contributed to our understanding of the natural history of evil. This book is Eurocentric and examines global commodities from a North European perspective. It focuses on the historical experience of Northern Eurasia, from England and Holland to Siberia, and refers only occasionally to events in China, Africa or the Indies. The North is just as global as the South. The rivers, bogs and trackless wildernesses of Eurasia are no less romantic than the high seas and deserts of the South. Living through the climate catastrophe, we feel a new power in the cold, mist-shrouded stories of the North – in the poems of Ossian, in Wagner’s operas, in Tolkien’s novels or, to give a current example, in Game of Thrones . But my book is concerned with real, not fictional history. Presenting a global picture of the rise and fall of resource-dependent empires, I often support my arguments by drawing on the historical experience of Russia. No more or less important than any other empire, the Russian state has been typical in its permanent reliance on the trade in raw materials; in its repeated crises which came with the switch from one resource platform to another; and, despite frequent setbacks, in its growing role in the external and internal colonisation of the human world.
New problems call for new ways of interpreting ancient arguments – and for acknowledging that some current ideas are obsolete while other long-forgotten theories are right up to the moment. Marx wrote, ‘primitive accumulation plays in political economy about the same part as original sin in theology.’ 10 With similar irony, Walter Benjamin imagined ‘historical materialism’ as ‘a puppet in Turkish attire’ whose master is theology, ‘small and ugly and … out of sight’. 11 Indeed, the history of matter is interdependent with the history of the spirit. From Luther to Swedenborg, and from the medieval alchemists to the Russian Old Believers, religious thinkers and dissenters were involved in extracting, processing and interpreting the gifts of nature (see chapter 6 ). From silk to sugar, and from gunpowder to oil, many of these commodities had oriental origins, like Benjamin’s puppet.
The historian is a prophet looking backwards, 12 but economists and sociologists often believe in presentism: you can only understand the present within its own context. While I don’t entirely share this belief, neither do I agree with the kind of historicism that says that today’s news is a development of yesterday’s trends. The most important news is not a development – it is a fresh start. Material history focuses on situations of change, moments of danger, states of emergency. Following Benjamin, my position also combines the philosophies of moralism and naturalism. Evil has its roots in nature, and nature also limits it. But the choice is ours; we are making it here and now, as we always have done. We do not know the outcomes of our current choices, but we know the consequences of those that people made in the past. Paradoxically, it is the uncertainty of the future that makes historical experience relevant for the present. The world is the unity of human beings and nature; and, since we have failed to change the world, now is the moment to understand how it works. In our gloomy age this is the task for a New Enlightenment.
The Age of Enlightenment culminated in a disaster. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 shook the world, inviting a re-evaluation of the nature of evil. If God created the earthquake, then he is either not omnipotent or not good. Among the survivors is the hero of Voltaire’s novel Candide, or Optimism . Candide, a sweet-natured youth, believes everything his tutor, the philosopher Pangloss, tells him: ‘It is demonstrable, that things cannot be otherwise than as they are … Stones were made to be hewn … Pigs were made to be eaten … Individual misfortunes lead to the common good, so the worse such misfortunes, the better.’ But then the tutor falls ill with syphilis and witnesses the death of 30,000 people in Lisbon. Candide flees to Eldorado, where golden fountains flow with rum, and then to the Dutch colony of Surinam. On a sugar plantation he meets a black slave, who lost his hand when it was crushed by a millstone. He tried to run away and had his leg cut off. ‘This is the price at which you eat sugar in Europe,’ says the black man. He doesn’t know the word ‘optimism’, and Candide explains: ‘it is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong.’ 1 3
Notes
Notes
1 Tacitus, The Annals , Book 6, secs 13, 19; Panchenko, ‘Tiberius i finansovyi krizis v Rime’. 2 Auty, Resource Abundance and Economic Development ; Dunning, Crude Democracy . 3 Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities . 4 On the staple theory, see Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada , and Watson, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis ; on the fetishism of commodities, see Marx, Capital , and Pietz, ‘Fetishism and materialism’. 5 Latour, Politics of Nature , p. 33. 6 Hardin, ‘The tragedy of the commons’. 7 Cannan, ‘The origin of the law of diminishing returns’; Rainert, How Rich Countries Have Been Enriched ; Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism . 8 Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace , in Collected Writings , Vol. 2, p. 6. 9 Two books were the most significant for the material turn: Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel , and Mitchell, Carbon Democracy . See also Bennett, Vibrant Matter ; Miller, Cultural Histories of the Material World ; LeCain, The Matter of History . 10 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, p. 784. 11 Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’, in Selected Writings , p. 389. 12 Ibid., p. 405. 13 Voltaire, Candide , p. 2.