Solved by verified expert:there are 3 total readings two of them are attached and this is the name of the third one that a summary can be easily found on google for “McNeil, Something New Under the Sun” the assignment does not require you to do the full readings with full understanding just the general ideas summarized and conclusions from skimming them over i have also attached a guidance file no work cited page needsplease try not to use quotes as much it’s only two pages no need for quotes try to address those questions 1. What was the role of social/economic class in the development of fossil fuel capitalism? 2. How and why did fossil capitalism develop and what have been some of its consequences?
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INTL 101
Professor Matthew Vitz
Response Papers and Critical Reading
Participation in class and reading responses are not merely about summarizing the
main points or arguments of readings, although doing this is also very important. I expect
each student to have thought critically and reflected on the readings. For example, one
might question and analyze the argument/s or theses of the author or the “baggage” he/she
carries. Does the evidence used by the author substantiate the argument or specific claim?
Are there contradictions or inconsistencies in the argument? Does a particular prior
theoretical/conceptual framework (the “baggage”) limit the text in some way? Or, does the
author hold certain biases that prevent him/her from taking into account certain factors?
Does the author make false assumptions? Do you prefer another viewpoint or perspective
that you’ve already read to the one put forth by the author, or maybe you wish to compare
perspectives? If there’s more than one reading assigned, you may also decide to compare
them and argue why one is more convincing than the other. These are just some of the
questions you can ask and approaches to take to analyze and critique a text(s). Critiquing
doesn’t necessarily mean you have to disagree or have a negative response, but it does mean
you have to think analytically about the reading and develop a response that is substantiated
with evidence. If you do disagree, substantiate your points. Avoid purely emotional
responses to readings in favor of critical responses grounded in evidence, your experiences,
and logical reasoning.
Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68
brill.com/hima
The Origins of Fossil Capital:
From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry*
Andreas Malm
Human Ecology Division/LUCID, Lund University
Andreas.Malm@lucid.lu.se
Abstract
The process commonly referred to as business-as-usual has given rise to dangerous climate
change, but its social history remains strangely unexplored. A key moment in its onset was the
transition to steam power as a source of rotary motion in commodity production, in Britain and,
first of all, in its cotton industry. This article tries to approach the dynamics of the fossil economy
by examining the causes of the transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century. Common perceptions of the shift as driven by scarcity
are refuted, and it is shown that the choice of steam was motivated by a rather different concern:
power over labour. Turning away from standard interpretations of the role of energy in the
industrial revolution, this article opens a dialogue with Marx on matters of carbon and outlines a
theory of fossil capital, better suited for understanding the drivers of business-as-usual as it
continues to this day.
Keywords
Fossil fuels, steam power, water power, cotton industry, labour, space, time, carbon dioxide,
capital accumulation
In those spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his
myriads of willing menials, and assigns to each the regulated task, substituting for
painful muscular effort on their part, the energies of his own gigantic arm, and
demanding in turn only attention and dexterity to correct such little aberrations
as casually occur in workmanship.
– Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures1
The chemical changes which thus take place are constantly increasing the
atmosphere by large quantities of carbonic acid [i.e. carbon dioxide] and other
* Many thanks to Alf Hornborg, Stefan Anderberg, Rikard Warlenius, Max Koch, Wim Carton,
Vasna Ramasar and other LUCID colleagues, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful
comments at various stages of this work.
1. Ure 1835, p. 18.
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013
DOI: 10.1163/1569206X-12341279
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A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68
gases noxious to animal life. The means by which nature decomposes these
elements, or reconverts them into a solid form, are not sufficiently known.
– Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures2
Introduction
Global warming is the unintended by-product par excellence. A cotton
manufacturer of mid nineteenth-century Lancashire who decided to forgo his
old water wheel and, at long last, invest in a steam engine, erect a chimney
and order coal from a nearby pit did not, in all likelihood, entertain the
possibility that this act could have any kind of relationship to the extent of
Arctic sea ice, the salinity of the Nile Delta soil, the intensity of the Punjab
monsoon, the altitude of the Maldives, or the diversity of amphibian species in
Central American rainforests. Nonetheless, sporadic forebodings appear in the
literature of the time. One notable flash of apprehension about the atmospheric
consequences of employing steam power in factories can be found in the first
chapter of Charles Babbage’s classic treatise On the Economy of Machinery
and Manufactures. Babbage is credited with being the father of the modern
computer, and his book is considered the first to introduce ‘the factory into the
realm of economic analysis’.3 He made his fleeting remark, quoted above, some
two-and-a-half decades before John Tyndall explained the greenhouse effect,
and more than half a century before Svante Arrhenius first calculated the rise
in surface temperature of the Earth following an increase in the emissions of
carbon dioxide (called ‘carbonic acid’ by Arrhenius as well).4
But the environmentally concerned enquiry of the pioneer economist
was truncated, due to sheer lack of knowledge. Babbage was verging on yet
uncharted territory. Instead, his book continued as one long encomium to the
wonders of machinery – first and foremost ‘the check which it affords against
the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents’.5 With that
turn of phrase, Babbage established a leitmotif for mid nineteenth-century
bourgeois thinking on the triumphant powers of the machine. It evolved on
the basis of the operating procedures of manufacturers, continuously checking
the idiosyncrasies of human agents with ever more machinery impelled by ever
more powerful steam engines, unsuspecting of any particular noxious effects.
As the world teeters on the brink of unimaginable catastrophe due to global
warming, it is about time we revisit the origins of our predicament. How, simply
2.
3.
4.
5.
Babbage 1835, p. 18.
Rosenberg 1994, p. 24. See also Schaffer 1994.
See Weart 2003; Arrhenius 1896.
Babbage 1835, p. 54.
A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68
17
put, did we get caught up in this mess? Why were modern economies put on
the track of perpetually increasing consumption of fossil fuels? This is the
question of the emergence of the fossil economy: an economy characterised by
self-sustaining growth predicated on growing consumption of fossil fuels, and
therefore generating a sustained growth in emissions of carbon dioxide. Thus
defined, the concept refers to an expansion in the scale of material production
realised through expansion in the combustion of coal, oil and/or natural gas.
In the lexicon of climate change discourse, the term ‘business-as-usual’
is commonly employed as a stand-in for the fossil economy. As usual as this
business now appears, it is not a fact of nature, nor the product of geological
or biological history. The fundamental ontological insights of climate science
tell us as much, and moreover, fossil fuels should, by their very definition, be
understood as a social relation: no piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself
into fuel. No humans have yet engaged in systematic large-scale extraction of
either to satisfy subsistence needs. Rather, fossil fuels necessitate commodity
production and waged or forced labour as components of their very existence.
A primary scientific task should therefore be to write a social history of
business-as-usual or – synonymously – the fossil economy, and yet it is sorely
neglected, in a field awash with data on the disastrous effects of the process
but comparatively poor on insights into the drivers of the danger. Most climate
science still dwells in the noiseless atmosphere, where everything takes place
on the surface, rather than entering the hidden abode of production, where
fossil fuels are actually produced and consumed. What follows is a modest
contribution to the filling of this gap.
The birth of the fossil economy
The obvious birthplace of the fossil economy is Britain. As late as 1850, this single
country was responsible for more than 60 per cent of global CO2 emissions
from fossil fuel combustion. It raised three-and-a-half times more coal than the
US, France, Germany, Belgium and Austro-Hungary combined, the lion’s share
of it for combustion on the British Isles; per capita consumption was more than
ten times higher than in France and Germany.6 For quite some time, Britain
was the sole economy of its kind, the place of origin of business-as-usual, from
which it eventually spread to other advanced capitalist countries.
By the mid-nineteenth century, however, coal had been regularly utilised as
a source of heat in Britain for almost two millennia. Stumbling upon outcrops
of the black stone, the Romans began to burn it for heating military garrisons
and villas, working iron in smitheries, and keeping the perpetual fire alive at the
6. Boden, Marland and Andres 2011; Church 1986, p. 773; Cameron 1985, p. 12.
18
A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68
temple in Bath.7 Coal fell into disuse with their departure, only to reappear in
the thirteenth century – primarily in the smitheries – and experienced a surge
in the late sixteenth, when it spread rapidly as a fuel for domestic heating. By
1800, most people in towns probably bought coal to heat their homes and cook
their meals.8 The household continued to be the chief hearth for combustion.
It could not give rise to a fossil economy: as long as coal was mostly used in the
domestic production of heat, fossil fuels remained unattached to an engine of
self-sustaining economic growth. No matter how much coal British households
burnt, consumption levels were constrained by the slow march of population
growth, rather than boosted by the exponential expansion in the scale of
material production we associate with business-as-usual. It would be absurd
to date its onset to the Roman occupation or the thirteenth century.
But long before 1850, coal had also made inroads into manufacturing, as a
fuel in the production of salt and soap, lime and ale, bricks and glass, copper
and pottery and a range of other commodities. Most importantly, the owners of
blast furnaces shifted from charcoal to coke in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, ushering in a boom in iron production. By 1800, the iron sector took
some 10–15 per cent of all coal – a rapidly rising share, though still rather small
in relation to that of domestic heating (somewhere between a half and two
thirds).9 In furnaces, kilns and breweries, coal served the same purpose as in
cottage stoves: it provided heat for smelting, boiling or distilling the matters in
hand. A substitute for wood, it was confined to the processing of substances
whose properties required heating. For coal to be universalised as a fuel for all
sorts of commodity production, it had to be turned into a source of mechanical
energy – and, more precisely, of rotary motion.
Only by coupling the combustion of coal to the rotation of a wheel could
fossil fuels be made to fire the general process of growth: increased production –
and transportation – of all kinds of commodities. This is why James Watt’s
steam engine is widely identified as the fatal breakthrough into a warmer
world.10 Newcomen’s engine had managed to force a piston up and down, up
and down, in a vertical motion well suited for the pumping of water in mines,
but not for driving machinery. That was the feat of the device patented by Watt
in 1784, when he finally ‘adapted the motion of the piston to produce continuous
circular motion, and thereby made his engine applicable to all purposes of
7. Dearne and Branigan 1995.
8. Nef 1966; Flinn 1984; Hatcher 1993.
9. Nef 1966; Flinn 1984; Hatcher 1993; Buxton 1978; Hyde 1977; Humphrey and Stanislaw 1979.
10. See, for example, Crutzen 2002; Crutzen and Steffen 2003; Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill
2007; Zalasiewicz, Williams, Smith, Barry, Coe, Bown, Brenchley, Cantrill, Gale, Gibbard, Gregory,
Hounslow, Kerr, Pearson, Knox, Powell, Waters, Marshall, Oates, Rawson and Stone 2008.
A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68
19
manufacture.’11 But a patent cannot by itself spark off something like a fossil
economy. The mere existence of a steam engine as certified in the legal rights
of the inventor tells us nothing about the extent to which such engines were
actually installed, their function in the economy, or the propensity to emit
carbon dioxide. History is replete with inventions petrified into objects of
exhibitions or fantasies da Vinci-style, including in the annals of steam power,
the basic principles of which were known long before Watt, including in
China.12 The question of the steam engine is therefore the question of why it
was adopted and diffused – in Britain, and, first of all, in the cotton industry.
The most advanced branch of industrial production, following Richard
Arkwright’s establishment of the factory system, the cotton industry was eyed
by Watt as the natural outlet for his product. The assembling of machines under
one roof demanded a regular, smooth and dependable propulsive force, posing
the technical challenge Watt wrestled with, and promising a vast market for him
and his business partner Matthew Boulton once he succeeded. And indeed, the
promise was eventually realised. The steam engine owed its coming position as
the defining prime mover of industrial production to its success in the cotton
mills.13 But that was by no means an automatic or predetermined affair. In fact,
as we shall see, cotton manufacturers preferred another prime mover for at
least four decades after Watt’s patent: the water wheel.
A traditional source of mechanical energy, leaving no traces of CO2 behind –
‘carbon-neutral’, in today’s parlance – water was the foundation of the early cotton
industry.14 Water, not steam, carried the first generations of cotton manufacturers
to their super-profits, even as Boulton & Watt did everything to advertise the
advantages of their engine. The water wheel proved extraordinarily resilient to
the challenge of steam, and when it finally gave way, the shift was contingent
upon developments in which neither Watt nor Boulton played any role.
Water power was a barrier that had to be knocked down for the fossil
economy to emerge. The British cotton industry was the historical gateway,
on the other side of which the steam engine spread to other major industries,
other countries, completely different applications – such as on the seas – and
11. Farey 1827, p. 13; emphasis in original.
12. On steam engines in China, see Pomeranz 2000, pp. 61–2.
13. See, for example, von Tunzelmann 1978; Lord 1965; Hills 1970; Hills 1989; Briggs 1982.
14. See, for example, Aspin 2003; Fitton and Wadsworth 1958; Chapman 1972; Chapman
1992; Tann 1970; Cooke 2010; Ingle 1997. Insofar as the wheels were built using iron, which they
increasingly were in the first half of the nineteenth century, they were not completely carbonneutral or independent of fossil fuels – compare a bicycle, a windmill or a solar panel today.
However, since depreciation rates were extremely low for water wheels made of iron, the
embedded carbon element in every horsepower delivered must have been all but negligible.
20
A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68
thereby suffused the process of self-sustaining growth with fossil energy.15
The adoption of steam power in the British cotton industry was, so to speak,
a rite de passage for coal, a qualitative leap into the spiral of ever expanding
commodity production. Had the cotton industry – the very spearhead of
industrial capitalism – stayed with water, the fossil economy would not have
come about the way it did (and the first task for history-writing is to account
for what actually transpired). A central question in the writing of the social
history of business-as-usual will therefore be: why did the British cotton industry
switch from water to steam?
False starts in energy studies
While global warming accords novel significance to the energy aspects of the
industrial revolution, interest in them is not, of course, entirely new.16 The doyen
of modern research in the field is E.A. Wrigley. In a path-breaking article in 1962,
he first broached ideas later developed into a grand narrative of the industrial
revolution and, more generally, of modern economic growth.17 In what he
would come to call an ‘organic economy’, all forms of material production are
based on the land. Raw materials, as well as thermal and mechanical energy –
human and animal bodies used to put things in motion – are all drawn from
the yield of present photosynthesis. But that yield is restricted. There is no way
to enlarge it beyond the constant supply of land. A growing organic economy
will inevitably get trapped in fierce competition for scarce resources, making
‘a permanent, radical increase of industrial raw material supply’ – a necessary
condition for modern economic growth – ‘very difficult to obtain.’18 The
dependency on the land puts a low ceiling on industrial production. Fossil
fuels shatter that ceiling.
In a series of subsequent articles and books, culminating in the 2010 magnum
opus Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, Wrigley elaborated on these
theses, whose influence on the study of energy in the industrial revolution
now deserves the epithet of a paradigm.19 That paradigm, however, has deeper
sources than Wrigley himself, as he developed it in continuous engagement
15. For some aspects of the transition to steam power in the British imperial navy, see Malm
2012a.
16. For an excellent overview, see Barca 2011.
17. Wrigley 1962.
18. Wrigley 1962, p. 1. See further Wrigley 1972; Wrigley 1988; Wrigley 1990; Wrigley 2000;
Wrigley 2004; Wrigley 2010.
19. For applications of Wrigley’s theories, see for example Thomas 1985; Mayumi 1991;
Malanima 2001; Malanima 2006; Sieferle 2001; Andrews 2008; Jones 2010. On Wrigley’s centrality
and influence, compare Barca 2011.
A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68
21
with two of the classical political economists: David Ricardo and Thomas
Malthus. For Ricardo, a growing economy would lay claim to more land. Inferior
soils would have to be taken into cultivation: wetlands, steep slopes, fields in
the mountains hitherto left untouched because of their natural infertility.
Higher inputs of capital and labour into such land would inescapably produce
diminishing returns, decreasing profits, falling wages, and an end to growth;
in a Ricardian formulation repeatedly quoted by Wrigley, a state of stagnation
will ‘necessarily be rendered permanent by the laws of nature, which have
limited the productive powers of the land.’20 But coal offers a ‘chance of
escaping the Ricardian curse’.21 At the end of the eighteenth century, the
British economy emancipated itself from the land constraint. Digging into the
stores of past photosynthesis, bypassing the restricted surface area of inflowing
solar radiation, it finally broke the spell of stagnation.
One method used by Wrigley and his followers to illustrate this logic is
to convert coal into acres of land required to generate the same amount of
energy. In 1750, all coal produced in England would have equalled 4.3 million
acres of woodland, or 13% of the national territory. In 1800, substituting woo …
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