Nature's Evil

PART ONE

HISTORY OF MATTER

Good history writing has always interwoven different peoples and disciplines. The link between resources and institutions lies at the deepest level of this interweaving. Social history aspires to reconstruct ‘history from below’, but it has usually ignored the very lowest level – raw materials. Endowed with their own life, each and every one of these commodities makes a rich and fascinating subject for historical study. Together with people, they have also been agents of our joint history. ‘For men and commodities are the real strength of any community,’ wrote David Hume. 1 Agency is always partial. No single agent is completely autonomous – neither man, nor nature, nor a sovereign ruler. A sack of grain, a bale of cotton, a barrel of oil – they all have their agency. The history of resources is the real history from below: you can’t go any lower. And this history is full of its own distinctive agency. It is not a reductive explanation of human experience. On the contrary, I wish to learn how to find partners in a grain of wheat, a fibre of hemp or a lump of coal.

Addressing a huge variety of natural resources, I will explore their economic, cultural and political lives from the bottom up – from the earth to the state. Each chapter takes four steps in this upward movement. First, we look at the inherent characteristics of the raw material. Second, we learn about the methods of processing it, which define the specifics of the labour required. Third, we switch our attention to the institutions which organise this labour and which derive income from this material. Fourth, we engage with the political features of the state which depends on the given resource .

Note

1   Hume, Political Essays , p. 124.

ONE

Cry Fire

Our forebears migrated from the African savannah about 70,000 years ago. Hairless skin and the ability to sweat from all parts of the body allowed them to adjust to living in the subtropics. They were not particularly swift but had stamina: over a long distance, a man could catch up with almost any mammal. Having settled in the wetlands and coastal areas, humans learnt to make use of sticks and stones and to domesticate animals. Climate change forced people to migrate in search of new spaces. They soon learnt to cross open water, to catch fish and to seek a better life.

Not slash, but burn

Human migration northward was made possible by a revolutionary technology – the mastery of fire. Having learnt to walk upright, this particularly successful primate could now use his hands to strike a spark from a flint and set fire to dry grass. By gathering and burning the first non-edible resources – brushwood and reeds – people were able to control the temperature in their lairs or caves. Now that they were able to cook food over a fire, people consumed seeds, beans and bones that they couldn’t digest raw. Practically everything that humans have made subsequently – terracotta and brick, bronze and iron, salt and sugar, petrol and plastic – they have made in collaboration with fire. In the myth of Prometheus, the hero steals fire from the gods, hides it in the hollow centre of a reed and carries it to humanity. The gods’ revenge is long-drawn-out and cruel. All the details of the myth are significant – from the hero on the frontier between two worlds to the humble reed, with which the whole story begins.