Nature's Evil

Discussing this effect, eighteenth-century economists formulated the ‘law of diminishing returns’. It applies only to the gifts of nature, while a reverse effect – ‘economy of scale’ – operates in relation to the products of labour: when manufacturing expands, productivity increases. Each ton of grain, silver or coal extracted is more difficult to get than the previous one; but every nail, boot or car produced is easier to make than the previous one. If a ploughman enlarged his field or added more fertiliser, then his expenditure per bushel of wheat would also increase; but if a miller increased his output of flour, his expenses per bushel would reduce. 7 This was ‘a view of the world which filled with deep-seated melancholy the founders of our political economy,’ wrote John Maynard Keynes about a century ago. 8 The imminence of climate catastrophe has added to these debates our most basic resources – air and water. During the nineteenth century, the per capita consumption of energy doubled; in the twentieth century it grew a hundredfold. But we’ll run out of air before we run out of oil. Critical theory becomes more radical as the pace of changes accelerates. Marring the present, the crisis transforms the understanding of the past. In the era of the Anthropocene, the neoliberal canon feels neither new nor liberal.

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.