Globalisation Flashcards
Henry Carey (Mid-19th Century)
- Influential in Europe, not so much America.
- Denounced British trade based on ecological-economic analysis - which predates conventional thought.
- Focused on soil anxiety. Thought on soil depletion led to dynamic theory of value based on the cost of reproduction. Called for development strategy based on local recycling of all goods (incl. Waste) from animate and inanimate sources.
- Rejected by JS Mill and Marshall, Schumpeter and Marx.
- Strong advocate of protectionism.
- Quotes: ’salvation, it is in me, and my books’; ‘“the rude produce of the earth to be sent to England, there to be subjected to those mechanical and chemical processes required for bringing it to the form in which it was fitted for consumption”; “”[speaking as Britain] Labor being cheap with us, we can manufacture more cheaply than you do. Do not, therefore, once and for all build mills or furnaces; continue year after year to expend your labors in carrying goods back and forth; continue to exhaust your land; continue to have no combination of effort among yourselves; and you will grow rich”
- Trade leads to ecological disaster - removes soil fertility from point of origin.
- Not Malthusian. Argues that progress in technology and social organisation could overcome scarcity. Where Malthus stipulated that society will have to resort to poor soil over time, he instead saw this as a stimulus for society to move from poor soils to rich ones.
- Argued Britain had become “the farmers of Brazil and the United States.”
- Value . . . is simply our estimate of the resistance to be overcome, before we can enter upon the possession of the thing desired.
- Just as Ricardo warned that British prosperity hinged on a willingness to freely trade grain, Carey insisted that compliance with the British policy of trade would lead inevitably to disaster, annihilating the potential gains from endogenous growth. Carey insisted that extensive trade with Britain would preclude the United States from enjoying the bounty of future technological progress.
- Carey rejected the idea that manufacturing would experience increasing returns to scale and that agriculture would be unable to avoid diminishing returns to scale. Instead, Carey proposed that returns to scale would be constant in manufacturing and rising in agriculture—at least in a regime of commerce.
- British farming models were ‘robbing the soil of its nutrients’
Richard Ligon 1600s
Historian of the Caribbean. True and Exact History of the Caribby Islands: “I saw by the growth, as well as by what I had been told, that it was a strong and lusty plant, and so vigorous, as where it grew, to forbid all Weeds to grow very neer it; so thirstily it suck’d the earth for nourishment, to maintain its own health and gallantry.”
Dumas 1800s
Air was the source of all movement in Dumas’s natural system. Air in the atmosphere absorbed, mixed and transported all the basic elements of life in a global cycle. What left the air always returned in altered form, to be carried forth once again. Air constantly redistributed the elements—hydrogen, carbon, ammonia, and nitrogen—to all earthly beings. ‘Veritable combustion apparatuses,’’ animals ‘‘reproduce carbonic acid, water, ammonia acid and nitrogen acid, and return them to the air.’’
Marx 1800s
Human beings were mere possessors and beneficiaries of the soil, who “have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres familias [good heads of the household]”
“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie overs the whole surface of the globe”… “it must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere”
Waring (1850)
“No soil is inexhaustible. The fertility of the earth’s surface depends on the presence in the soil of certain materials which are employed in the growth or formation of plants. These materials do not act externally. They enter the structure of the plant, and become incorporated with its parts, thus forever to remain until liberated by the decomposition of its tissues”
Thomas Hancock 1880s
Commenting on what Gutta Percha is used in, ‘Almost every species of toy is made from this gum; the furniture, the decorations, and even the covering of our houses are constructed from it; and we make of it soles for our boots and shoes, and linings for our water cisterns. It is used for pipes, alike for the conveyance of water and sound.’
William T. Brannt
“It may be said without exaggeration that if gutta percha and its properties had not been known, submarine telegraph lines would perhaps never have been successful.”
Vandelli 1789
- Issue in Brazil - colonisation of the land was combining two negative and apparently opposite elements: under-settlement and over-exploitation.
- Vandelli’s progressive stance in economic matters made him disgusted with the fact that ‘the immense country of Brazil [was] almost deserted of people and uncultivated.”
- “Agriculture is expanding along the borders of rivers in the interior of the country, but it does so in a manner that in the future will reveal itself harmful. It consists of burning ancient forests whose wood, because of the ease of transportation by means of the river themselves, would be very useful for naval construction, or for extracting dyes, or for cabinet making.” (Doesn’t not want to cut them down…)
Rodrigo de Sousa Countinho
- Countinho envisaged a federalisation of the Portuguese empire, with Brazil as the seat of the crown, and this increased his concern with the fate of Portugal’s largest colony.
- Countinho recruited young Brazilians to drive forward a vanguard of Brazilian environmentalism
Jose Gregorio de Moraes Navarro (1799)
- Wanted to see the introduction of ploughing techniques, soil nourishment, banning of forest burning, reform of industrial hearths, conservation of forests
- Navarro’s conception of earth is that in which it is presented as a feminine force.
Pierre Poivre (1760s)
- Persuaded of the value of tree planting and protection based on observations of Indian and Chinese forestry + knowledge of botanical gardening techniques from the Dutch.
- Exp. In Mauritis would lead him to preach the dangers of deforestation.
Stephen Hales (1670s)
Hales spent much time devising models of the motions of the planets, and the circulation of blood. A multiple, but likned, preoccupation, on different scales, with planetary and bodily circulation thus emerges in his mind. From this point it was only a logical (and short) step to move on to consider the dynamics of atmospheric circulation.
Montesquieu 1748
Stressed the influence on climate on the development of people - Mediterranean populations seen as less industrious whilst did not require as much labour to yield goods. North tended to be more capable.
Labourdonnais 1735
Governor of Mauritius - found crop failure led to interventionist strategies to satisfy population food demands.
Early acquaintance with dearth seems to have awoken him to the basic limitations on the island. Immediate term, had to rely on Rodriguez to supply goods. Tortoises used for meat - resulted in extinction by 1740s.
Alexander Von Humboldt
Emerged as the major figure behind the acceptance of a very specific kind of environmental world view.
Promotion of Edenic principles in New World pursuits -> interconnections of Man and Nature
Herder
- Spoke vigorously against European dominance and the brutalising effect of great wealth: ‘Why do the poor suffer hunger and with benumbed senses drag on a wretched life of toil and labour? That the rich and great may deaden their senses in a more delicate manner’
- Fond of Indian culture: . The Hindus “are the gentlest branch of humanity. They do not with pleasure offend anything that lives. They honour that which gives life and nourish themselves with the most innocent of goods, milk, rice, the fruit of trees, the healthy herbs which their motherland dispenses… the most extreme yoke of humanity”
Boussingault
• Strong interest in the consequences of deforestation stemmed not only from his academic specialisation in plant chemistry but more directly from a contemporary French preoccupation with deforestation, soil erosion and flooding.
C.R. Markham - 1866
English Geographer - “Human action has produced great changes in the physical condition of the earth’s surface. Vast tracts of swampy wilderness have been converted into fresh pastures or cultivated fields, and barren uplands have been covered with stately trees. On the other hand, many regions, in all parts of the world, which were once clothed with verdure are now treeless and arid wastes. All these changes are the work of man… ”
Marquis of Daihousie
Follower of Bentham - pushed for development of communication technologies to civilise Asians.
Alfred Russel Wallace
One of the most celebrated naturalists of the Victorian era, perhaps best known for the so-called ‘Wallace Line’ that separates the faunal zones of Asia and Australia. Were it not for Darwin, he would almost certainly be remembered as the founder of evolutionary theory.
Conwentz
Defined a natural monument as ‘an original—that is, entirely or almost entirely untouched by cultural influences—and characteristic feature of the landscape or an original and characteristic natural living condition of extraordinary, general, patriotic, scientific, or aesthetic interest’. It was a fuzzy concept open to all manner of interpretation.
First, the terminology of a monument focussed attention on individual areas or objects of natural history rather than on larger biophysical systems or communities. This was symptomatic of the concern of early nature protection—quite unlike environmentalism in the late twentieth century —with symbols of nature rather than matters such as pollution or health. Second, and more fundamentally, nature was primarily associated with the ‘untouched’ and ‘pristine’. It resided only where people did not.
George Perkins Marsh
1864 - George Perkins Marsh - “The vast extension of railroads, of manufactures, and the mechanical arts, of military armaments, and especially of the commercial fleets and navies of Christendom within the present century, has greatly augmented the demand for wood”
Case Studies
Caribbean Plantation
- 17th c. European colonisation saw removal of Taino, Arawaks, Caribs - gradually marginalised and driven to extinction by Europeans. New crops introduced replaced thousands of species.
- Conuco - farming style prior to colonisation which prevented soil erosion
- Francis Bacon - ‘Planting of countries’ comparative to planting woods. Takes 20 years to yield profit.
- Used for sugar - addictive, high consumption in Europe. Started 1640s, Barbados. 1645-60: Barbados transformed from poor tobacco colony to a significant producer of sugar.
- Annexation of Jamaica 1656 increased British sugar-control capacity.
- 120 slaves, 100 horned beasts, 12 horses and goats needed for plantation (Father Labat)
- Swine and cows reproduced rapidly in this environment.
- Horses were imported from Amsterdam - if 48 of the 52 loaded made it across, it was a successful venture. Highly profitable - would sell within two days according to Dr Sporri (vet who voyaged often). Animals exacerbated rates of soil erosion and compaction.
- Horses and oxen were used to drive rollers in sugar mill. Killed many. Whistler notes in 1654: “the mills they now use destroy so many horses that it beggars the planters”.
- “The Devil was in the Englishman, that he makes everything work; he makes the Negro work, the Horse work, the Ass work, the Wood work, the Water work and the Winde work.” - Slave.
- Barbados - tropical rainforest all but marginal by 1665. Colonel Modiford: “This island of Barbados cannot last in an height of trade three years longer especially for sugar, the wood being almost already spent”.
- Richard Blome remarks that the larger Jamaica had the capacity to receive colonists from “used up” islands: “is island being so large and fertile, it is capable of receiving those great numbers of people that are forced to desert the Caribbee isles: their plantations being worn out, and their woods wasted”.
- Bird population nose-dived, two species of tree went extinct (palmito and mastick), monkey population decimated. Parsley, cabbage, sage, lavender, onion, garlic - thrived on island.
- Mosquito - A. Aegypti - hit Barbados first. Predators - birds - were eliminated by deforestation. Empty clay pots provided stagnant water for breeding. Killed 20/30% of pop.
Case Study
French Manure
‘The excremental material that a man produces in one day is enough to create twenty-five pounds of vegetable soil… make bread with human excrement’ - Pierre Leroux
The sexual passion stimulated a growing population and a demand that nature could not hope to supply. Leroux rejected the dire consequences of Malthus’s arithmetic and geometric ratios. When we eat, he argued, we recreate our own food.
French chemists in this period invented a cosmology of nature as the great recycler - seeing animal emissions as one end of an ever-renewing cycle
Even the venerable Victor Hugo promoted Leroux’s vision in a chapter of Les Miserables.Human manure promised a means to feed the poor without the aid of urban factories.
Dumas and Boussingault recast physiocracy in engineering terms. Like the physiocrats, the chemists believed that the most important kind of work, the most productive of value, was that of extraction. Man withdrew the stuff of life and resubmitted that same material into nature’s great circulation. In this industrial physiocracy, the body was the greatest, most efficient machine.
East Asian farmers appeared far ahead of Europeans in their agricultural economy. A chemist influenced by Dumas: ‘‘everyone knows how the Chinese today scrupulously collect excremental substances, liquid and solid, in order to use them in agriculture.
In ‘‘Jews, the Kings of Today,’’ Leroux’s natural recycling body found its antipode, the corrupt and bloated Jewish body. Humanity met its ‘‘GRAN NEMICO, . . . enemy, adversary, that is one who only exists as a negation, a contradiction of the one who exists truly and for himself.’’ As we have seen, Leroux incarnated his utopia in the natural body. Conversely, he embodied capital in the figure of the Jewish speculator.