‘We can overcome division only by refusing to be divided.
That is a personal decision but then a social action.’
- Raymond Williams
‘All economic analyses begin with the cultivation of the earth. To the mind’s eye of the astronomer the earth is a ball spinning in space without ulterior motives. To the bodily eye of the primitive cultivator it is a vast green plain, from which, by sticking a spade into it, wheat and other edible matters can be made to spring.’
- George Bernard Shaw
Historian Fred Cooper, in his 2005 book Colonialism in Question, argued persuasively for avoiding large totalizing concepts such as ‘empire,’ ‘global’ or ‘identity’ in all historical or scholarly writing.’ However, Cooper’s scholarly interpretations and his political stakes turned out to be problematic. This essay attempts to show that global thinking fundamentally is necessary for understanding various locals. Considering collective environmental impact, resource and energy requirements, people movements, commodity flows, and global commercial interconnectivity, this essay reinterprets American historiography on the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that explicitly or implicitly addresses these issues. By examining environmentalists’ notions of cumulative impacts, sociologist Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, and the belief that we live in what legal scholar and biochemist Joseph Guth called an ‘ecological age,’ I will demonstrate how local actions, and therefore local histories, possess global consequences. In this essay, I place the human subject not simply in a city, or on the Mediterranean, or in the Atlantic World. Rather, scholars must re-imagine local agencies contained on a planet, especially considering global warming. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s call for research that explored the intersections of the history of capitalism and “species history” demonstrated a vital framework for us to ponder.
Human beings are a geological agent. Perhaps, as some scholars have argued, we are living in the Anthropocene. Chakrabarty wrote, ‘we may not experience ourselves as a geological agent, but we appear to have become one at the level of the species.’ There are crises that ‘affect us all.’ And therefore, we can think about climate change now. Chakrabarty noted that, ‘climate change is an unintended consequence of human actions and shows,’ especially given mounting and distressing scientific evidence, that, ‘the effects of our actions as a species’ matters greatly. Therefore, as histories of global capitalism proliferate, and attendant inequalities and environmental damage, ‘species may indeed be the name of a placeholder for an emergent, new universal history of humans that flashes up in the moment of the danger that is climate change.’ Although our ‘species’ is not static, there is no denying our cumulative impact.
When dealing with ecological history, or history of humanity on a planet, one encounters the relational problem of individual subject to larger fields, such as the atmosphere. Is there one ‘atmosphere’ related to a Humanity, or are there many atmospheres, related to specific individual locations? A thousand different case studies or individuations, given a certain definable and framed perspective, can be organized into a larger unit of analysis. Latour addressed what he called a ‘crisis . . . at the center of the social sciences’ governing this very conundrum. ‘For better or for worse,’ he wrote, ‘sociology, contrary to its sister anthropology, can never be content with a plurality of metaphysics; it also needs to tackle the ontological question of the unity of this common world.’ This search for a common world, and a notion of ‘the commons,’ is central to an understanding of history in an ecological age. Latour rightly emphasized that the social sciences and the humanities have been ‘involved in the normal business of multiplying agencies’ while forgetting larger conceptions of Humanity and the collective consequences of our existence.
Historians have been conditioned to notice multiplicities, various identities, and engage the politics of difference. Also true, scholars, after accruing multiple specificities, spend the rest of their energies ‘stabilizing or disciplining some of them.’ This trick means that the scholar captures a slice, reifies a moment, writes something down, and artificially defines and captures movement, time, history. I argue that this sort of ‘stabilizing’ can be done for any-sized unit of analysis, without deviation from the principals of ‘good history.’ This ability is necessary in order to understand cumulative impacts in history, and to write about historical trajectories of single people, and large masses of people set in finite ecological spaces.
Cooper Matters
In Colonialism in Question, Fred Cooper encouraged scholars to write ‘good history,’ to stop using massive, unifying categories. According to Cooper, such categories have lost all meaning and are not effective categories of analysis. He urged historians to avoid static largeness, to eschew reifying grand units of analysis that ignore realities on the ground. This type of large-scale imagining led to the problems of colonial history in the first place, and was the principal drive of interventions by the ‘new’ colonial scholars such as Ann Stoler and Cooper himself. Cooper would like to see specificity and particularity, to show the true ‘middle ground’ realities on the ground, to controvert the narratives of bigness (like the global) that ignore political possibilities for people in local communities, that neglect negotiations that occur within complex power structures. Historical research must show how people appropriate and rewrite the constraining structures or top-down impressions inscribed by colonial officials in the metropole. The crux of the new colonial history was to demonstrate how the metropole could never control the colonial periphery, that empire was ‘thin,’ and real people found the gaps within this thinness. Cooper did not want scholars to ‘limit the political imagination,’ in other words to write such big histories that political possibilities were ignored. This approach revealed his political project – to maintain the agency of real people within so-called massive hegemonic structures like ‘empire’ or ‘capitalism.’
Cooper’s call possessed a few limitations. For one, after local, empirical ‘personal politics’ have played out on the ground, what is left behind? Can we speak of constraining structures, such as capitalism, over the longue duree, however much they display multiplicities? For example, Toussaint L’Ouverture did lead a local revolution in San Domingue and utilize specific, contingent political possibilities. However, he never desired to leave France or the empire, and his newly independent nation, his island, failed to wrench itself free from the truly limiting Atlantic/global forces of commerce and capital, forces that have impoverished and marginalized Haiti, in a variety of ways, to this day. As scholars show careful, detailed history from below, or in the local sphere, always aware of historical contingency, they have to be able to discuss the larger movements that limit personal politics. We have to be able to talk about the limitations, the stops and containment, of, say, the ‘everyday acts of resistance’ in Robin Kelley’s zoot suits. If wearing a zoot suit is real engaged politics, then capitalism’s most destructive imperatives will not be challenged and politics remain piecemeal.
Cooper did not want readers to lose sight of Africa, the specific place, in all the concerted babble of ‘modernization,’ ‘globalization,’ and ‘identity.’ And so he wrote in his notes that ‘even as modernization theorists in the 1950s and 1960s were spinning their unified visions of global transformation, on-the-ground research was already revealing a more complex picture.’ Africa, if anything, paints a picture of ‘deglobalization.’ However, one reason Africa is marginalized, or less globally productive, is because of the global forces scholars highlight. Africa is ‘deglobalized’ because of external pressures upon it, much as Haiti has been over time. Yes, scholars of the left detail hope in local, personal politics, or Lawrence Levine’s rewrites of consciousness and culture. But these stories profoundly diminish or miss entirely the complex, constraining pressures of expanding corporate capitalism. We must study personal political potential, and the structural and discursive powers that constrain any ability to truly challenge hegemonic rule or order regimes.
As scholars require precise empirical localities that subvert totalizing schemes, there also is room for theoretical fields that help us understand large processes or units of analysis, like global capitalism or the Atlantic world. We can always locate particular exceptions. Theory and empiricism go together in their contributions to human knowledge, and to the ways history contributes to meaning for human beings.
The Problem and the Material Stakes
The historical problems evoked by this essay are many, but it is appropriate to begin with understanding and defining politics, and the potentiality for critique, subversion, and effective agitation. The problem learned from political economy and history is that there is no isolatable individual, no local. Politics of the local are severely limited to misunderstood appropriations of space and cultural representation, so that cultural access often means participating in consumption, so that ‘citizenship’ no longer means suffrage or even property ownership, but buying and consuming. This perspective, for some, illustrated that growth without end was unsustainable. Many historical actors thought, without partisan equivocation, that the stakes of unsustainability were ecological destruction and threats to the existence of human life on this planet.
The earth possesses definable limits, spatially fixed and exact. If historians desire specificity, this is it, the ultimate specificity. Humans will not transcend these boundaries. Therefore, to deny a unifying globe, as an organism on a unifying, total planet, a finite space that totally defines human life on it, universally contextualizes human movement, reproduction, politics, culture and society, is an unfortunate limitation on the part of scholarly tradition. The global necessity of this claim, of this way of seeing, points to the circumscribed nature of masterly works of history, solely based on the restricted vision in books on the Mediterranean world, Chicago and its hinterland, the centrality of the Pacific, or the Atlantic as units of analysis. Why stop short? Why constrain one’s thinking? Go ahead, historian, contemplate the subject and the globe.
Stating the problem illustrates why this kind of interventionist history is important. These circular histories, or holistic histories, defend not simply an individual’s or group’s subjectivity, but struggle to address an actual threat to human life on earth. There has never been a more important time for fresh developments in historical scholarship. Where there was social history, the linguistic turn, the vital contributions of cultural history, of gender as a category of analysis, there is now local-global as system cognizant of ecology, of critical political economy and its attack on the mythology of unregulated markets and free-moving individuals, of globe-as-material as a category of analysis. This actor-network history apprehends a unit of analysis that includes the human individual possessing agency and a solar system, that understands history – as a human story of meaning about the past – together with an undeniable force such as photosynthesis. There is no such thing as a local isolate.
Merchants and Laborers – Dirt and Sunshine
Considering human temporality, the rising and setting sun is inexorable. So, too, is the flow of the Susquehanna into Baltimore Harbor, the crash of waves in the Chesapeake Bay, and the constant movement of ships, from and to the city, a topic that was the focus of historian Seth Rockman’s Scraping By. Ineluctable, too, was the flow of excrement from too many horses in this burgeoning urban space, and constant sediment accruing in the harbor – realities of dynamic motion that gave rise to the primary sources in Rockman’s case study. Rockman highlighted the underpaid, unfree labor that went into the development of Baltimore’s infrastructure, in addition to the capital that exploited this labor.
The materiality of the globe influenced the development of this human moment, and thus a given historical interpretation. ‘No amount of effort could stop sediment filling up Baltimore’s harbor,’ Rockman noted, but also ‘no amount of labor could guarantee a decent living to men on the mudmachine.’ The mudmachine, along with the daily toil working on it, allowed Baltimore to develop, as did the daily toil on it. As with Braudel’s Mediterranean, we can see labor, capital, machine and urban development, as well as rivers, mud, earth movements, and photosynthesis yielding grain for people, oats for horses, and manure flowing through the entire system. At numerous points in Scraping By, Rockman illuminated global connections, through geographical combinations, demographics, commodity flows, and credit systems. Equally numerous were continual reminders of the materiality of sedimentation and flow, a global, ecological, Braudelian nonmarket reality. These nonmarket entities at times acted as competitive advantage, and at times as constant obstacles to overcome.
A given network can be how the scholar maps it, first as a way of apprehending, then as a method for sharing. Rockman wrote about the watery journey from the Atlantic, into Chesapeake Bay, and then into ‘the Patapsco River, which was less a river than a wide inlet.’ Ships approaching Baltimore passed the 1795 quarantine hospital at Hawkins Point. As William Novak’s The People’s Welfare emphasized regulation in a supposed small-state, laissez-faire era, here too the regulatory apparatus of the early republic reminds one of integrated political economic systems. City officials inspected, regulated, organized, and at times condemned the ‘free’ movement of goods into Baltimore. Governing officials feared pests, pathogens and parasites, especially the ‘ballast water in the holds of ships’ that they imagined caused yellow fever. By their very existence, quarantine laws revealed global movements, as well as an integrated global consciousness.
Rockman’s study was a labor history that won prestigious labor and social history awards, but it also was larger than that. There were ‘wage labor, slavery, and survival in early Baltimore,’ certainly. However, Scraping By placed these wage workers, individual slaves, and capitalist employers within larger geographical and geological structures. Profit, surplus value, and accumulation existed here as the alkaloid expression of constant growth, expansion without end, consumption, and the exploitation of resources. This growth, this human frenzy, driven by speculation and dreams of profit, reflected a larger, perhaps Malthusian impulse. A view of constant growth connected Baltimore – a very particular, local place – to London, Hong Kong, Leiden, Antwerp, Madeira, Lisbon, Indonesia and Africa in a manner that raised questions about humanity and meaning, globality and space, population and survival. Emphasis on specific subjectivities or curiously optimistic identity politics, disregards contextual pressures that no amount of ‘politics of daily resistance’ can subvert. This specific interpretation was why labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein in The Return of Merchant Capital – his tale of Wal-Mart, Home Depot and Target – had grown weary of talk about the hopes for and limitations of weapons of the weak. This may be a pessimistic vision. But to maintain hope for an ecological age, to engage in any effective dismantling efforts of hierarchies of power, historians must renew their focus on top-down histories, as well as local-global, colonist-colonized, capital-labor, and the middle grounds between.
Rockman’s analysis focused on legible technologies like the mudmachine and the almshouse, both of which left records. But what was the mudmachine? Why did it exist? It dredged Baltimore’s harbor, prone to constant sedimentation, so that the ‘third largest city’ in the early Republic could engage its vision of a commercial entrepot, a necessary trading zone for the Atlantic, and, as understood by its commodity movements, ties with Asia as well. Thus, the mudmachinists would not have possessed their jobs, nor would their records have existed, without tying the harbor to the Chesapeake, the Atlantic and the rest of the world. This larger vision illuminated the very meaning of people’s lives, their social relations as dictated by new capitalist modes of production, divisions of labor, and the necessary legal and economic means to consolidate local power – all of them explicitly, profoundly, and inextricably tied to a larger web of relations.
Critical political economy excels at denaturalizing markets -- and mythologies of individuals acting alone in a realm of total freedom -- by highlighting municipal and state regulation, shifts in the law to accommodate new economic realities, and the competitive advantage of geography. Rockman touched on these aspects as he illustrated the difficulties Baltimore’s elite had in ruling their world. They could hire and fire employees, but there were multiple aspects of social and economic life that were beyond leading capitalists. Baltimore’s success, according to Rockman, ‘stood at the mercy of British trade policy; the ebb and flow of foreign investment capital; the fickleness of Philadelphia and New York banks; unfavorable regulation from a hostile Maryland Assembly; congressional legislation on tariffs, banks, specie, and internal improvements; and the length and intensity of winter freezes and summertime epidemics.’ The importance of weather patterns, geology, the very existence of laborers’ bodies, and the blind luck of much entrepreneurial activity belie the fiction of individual excellence, but also the ability to truly conceive of a local study. Scraping By offered numerous examples of supposed ‘free’ enterprise – embedded social spheres wherein ‘the ability of private individuals to purse self-interest depended on sustained public investment in the infrastructure of commercial exchange.’ Scholars of the left perpetually remind that individual enterprise is always embedded in the social, and in politics.
Braudel, Marx, and historian William Cronon converged when Rockman situated Baltimore geographically, and integrated its hinterland regions, multiple technologies, and vigorous quest for surplus value. ‘Baltimore was prepared to sate the Atlantic market’s appetite for American produce,’ Rockman noted. The city was located at the ‘convergence of three grain-producing regions,’ and it was the grain that drove Baltimore’s growth, its economic and its population expansions, its increase in unfree labor, and the social problems inherent in such a system. The story is whole; the story bears a necessary circularity. The top, middle and bottom, struggled and worked within a network that included the promise of individual agency, and the problems of contextual limitations.
Cooper rightly feared that a totalizing ‘globalization’ or monolithic ‘capitalism’ remained amorphous, impalpable and mysterious, and thus capable of resisting any politics of the local, of real world subversions of the universal hegemon. Rockman insisted that scholars not separate the local from the global, in order to illustrate that capitalism is not ‘natural, uncontestable, and inevitable,’ and that labor history narratives must detail the history of capitalism. Rockman desired to tell a history of both ecological-human relationships, and the history from above and below. He composed a ‘history of capitalism predicated on the polyphony of multiple workers’ voices and experiences,’ because real people are the soulful elements of history. But he endeavored to illustrate the dynamic workings of the political economy of capitalism – the shifting structural limitations to human agency that lately few scholars attempt to tackle. There is a ‘thing’ called capitalism, whether multiple or unified. Rockman joined the actor and the network, the laborer and a rapidly developing capitalism in the early republic. Additionally, he paid close attention to human geography and ecology, inspired by William Cronon’s Changes in the Land and Nature’s Metropolis, both of which detailed human impact on the land, the development and abandonment of space, and local communities connected to larger networks.
The Agent, the Ecosystem, and Private Property’s Real-Ideal
Cronon managed to decenter humanity from the environment, but just for a moment. He succeeded in demonstrating that colonial landscapes dramatically changed during the ‘transition to capitalism,’ not merely urban landscapes and manufacturing centers of later centuries. Capitalism as a system of economic and thus social relationships ‘alienated the products of the land as much as the products of human labor, and so transformed natural communities as profoundly as it did human ones.’ Important in a world endangered by human activity – implicitly Cronon’s ultimate statement – capitalism, as a product of human invention, endangered the natural ecology of seventeenth-century New England in Changes in the Land. The human could never be removed from the landscape, nor could nature be considered wild or free from human intervention. Transformed landscapes and commercial integration embraced ‘colonists and Indians together’ – here the exploiter and the exploited of the new colonialism studies of Stoler and Cooper. The changing circumstances within a unified but constantly shifting system, of native and invader, top and bottom, local and global, nature and human, ‘began a dynamic and unstable process of ecological change which had in no way ended by 1800.’ Cronon’s point was that this particular process continued in 1983, when he wrote the book, as well as today.
Historical scholarship, after the linguistic turn, became mired in the idea-sphere of discourse, in turns of phrase and intelligent interventions that wowed new generations of graduate students. ‘Americans,’ wrote geographer Carl Sauer, ‘had not yet learned the difference between yield and loot.’ William Bradford’s, and especially Cotton Mather’s, theological wisdom saw no room for the difference. ‘Ecological abundance,’ wrote Cronon about this errand in the wilderness, ‘and economic prodigality went hand in hand: the people of plenty were a people of waste.’ Individual human agents in local, integrated landscapes helped narrate Cronon’s early history for an ecological age.
Along with Cronon’s study, Historian John Frederick Martin’s Profits in the Wilderness made explicit the private property regime playing out on sections and slices of continent. James Scott detailed the rise of codicil mapping: the fencing, enclosing, and marking of identifiable and defendable plots in order to sell, trade and accumulate. First land, now water and the human genome. Land for early European settlers existed as ‘a form of capital, a thing consumed for the express purpose of creating augmented wealth. It was the land-capital equation’ that led to destructive/productive transformations of entire landscapes, and the social adjustments people were forced to make because of their actions. In Profits, Puritan ‘town fathers’ – local elites with the wherewithal to found towns – established incorporated townships and chose who could or could not live within town boundaries.
Though hopeful to establish their totally-removed city on a hill, many colonists maintained their strong connections to Europe in the form of debt structures and economic ideologies. For Cronon, ecology in New England interlinked with economy across the Atlantic, and the ‘colonists’ economic relations of production were ecologically self-destructive.’ Colonists buying land, establishing towns, felling trees for building materials and fuel, and raising livestock ‘assumed the limitless availability of more land to exploit, and in the long run that was impossible.’ The story of New England in the seventeenth century had been of human ‘growth’ and ‘development’ almost everywhere, whether driven by capitalist modes of production or not. People tended to utilize ‘new land until it was exhausted,’ shifted it to pastureland and then moved to another tract of forest, whereupon they cut down more trees for fuel, building requirements, or boardwood shipped to the West Indies and Europe, to places that had already lived through deforestation and population expansion.
Bradford’s excitement about the colonial fur trade, and his lament at its passing, was emblematic of the American experience through the centuries and across geographical regions. Agriculture, lumbering and the trade in animal skins ‘were able to ignore the problem of continuous yield because of the temporary gift of nature which fueled their continuous expansion.’ Cronon’s analysis of the local implicitly incorporated a warning for the entire planet: ‘expansion could not continue indefinitely.’
Changes in the Land was Cronon’s moral lesson. Cronon demonstrated that individuals and specific locales were embedded in ecology, economy, politics and the social.Cronon’s ‘vulgar’ materialism was refreshing. Constructed upon energy, ecological constraints and economy, Cronon’s case study symbolized the continent vis-à-vis United States history, and the rest of the globe – all nuanced, locally specific, globally generalized and related to capitalist modes of production. Note the hubris and assumptions that the colonists brought to New England, even in the likeable, intelligent Bradford. Most capitalists and corporations presumed the limitless availability of resources. Rather than apply sustainability or precaution, capitalist growth assumed that when one energy source attenuated, another would be found. Economic theory presupposes growth and consumption; Humanity, too, presumes continual growth, especially under the current paradigm.
The lack of God in Bradford’s and other Puritan writers astounds readers accustomed to histories of errands into the wilderness, pursuits of religious freedom, and deconstructed jeremiads. Puritans possessed ample justification for taking native lands that appeared wild, uninhabited and uncultivated. Diseases that decimated native habitations provided excuses for expropriation. ‘If the English believed that cornfields were the only property Indians had improved sufficiently to own,’ Cronon emphasized, ‘the wiping out of a village – and the subsequent abandonment of its planting fields,’ indicated to the colonists that Providence was on their side, and that land virtually was free. Cronon quoted a Puritan source who acknowledged that disease swept ‘away great multitudes of the natives’ so that God ‘might make room for us there.’ John Winthrop declared that God ‘hath hereby cleared our title to this place.’ Title, property and improvement: some viewed forest clearing as positive development, some saw destruction.
Natives had little understanding of property according to English law. John Winthrop managed to obtain title to the town of Ipswich in 1637 and the surrounding region. Deeds extinguished ‘all Indian rights’ and shifted them ‘to an English purchaser or . . . a group with some corporate identity.’ If challenged at the time, private property was backed first by a piece of paper, then local comrades who might be marshaled to emphasize a claim, then the Massachusetts General Court, and ultimately by English common law and the military might of the Crown. Any local moment of contest, struggle and contingency over property rights in 1637 went through a system of power relations allied with the rapidly-spreading private property regime, a notion and a material manifestation. If John Winthrop won any challenge to his claim, it was not necessarily Winthrop who emerged the victor, nor the town of Ipswich, Massachusetts Bay Colony, or even the Crown – triumph rested with the entire system of private property, one that extended outward toward Asia and across the Atlantic to the New World.
The principle focus of Changes in the Land was energy, as a vitalistic force of life governed by capitalistic social relations and appropriation-distribution. Cronon’s history included emphasis on the elements : the waxing and waning of moons, sunshine and darkness, extremes of heat and cold, long and short days during different seasons. These elements matter deeply to individual agents in the world. Every living thing, including people, adjusts productive and consumption rhythms according to these cycles. Cronon spoke of plants storing energy in root systems during winter, and then shifting ‘that energy first to its leaves and then to its seeds’ as the local world warmed. ‘Such patterns of energy concentration are crucial to any creature which seeks to eat that plant. Because animals, including people, feed on plants and other animals,’ material existence, ecological health, and economies integrally are linked in mappable, historicizable systems. William Bradford’s account, and John Smith’s narratives of Jamestown, were replete with tales of colonists who were assured of abundance and ease of work and then dying because of this misinterpretation.
Cronon totalized in refreshing ways, reminding of possibilities for critical political economy and scholarship for an ecological age. Cronon foreshadowed Nature’s Metropolis when he wrote of the colonial pig as an economic and ecological agent, much as granaries and slaughterhouses in his Chicago, that directly related to deforestation, soil degradation, and ‘the fence, dandelion, and a very special definition of property.’ The pig represented accumulation of wealth and survivability; it became abstracted in new economic systems that existed far beyond its new habitat. It was an ‘organic machine’ and a money thing, a commodity. According to Cronon, historians must study the total pig, not necessarily the local one. New England sow integrated with ‘the development of a world capitalist system’ that has ‘brought more and more people into trade and market relations which lie well beyond the boundaries of their local ecosystems.’ Today’s activist networks, legal scholars studying global governance, NGOs combating the proliferation of toxic chemicals, or agitation that focuses on the social and environmental perils of multinational corporations, are reflections of the world capitalist system, so that the focus on environment, ecology and human injustice – following capital, technology, transportation, and communication networks – becomes a global aspect.
Commodities and Ideas
Sidney Mintz’s still-influential Sweetness and Power traced sugar, plantation slavery, commerce, and shifts in European social relations in a multilayered and moving world network. His professional and political interests led him to emphasize political economy, anthropology of consumption and food-as-energy. Everything from taxation regimes to ‘enslaved and coerced workers,’ and from commodities to cultural values were ‘pressed into sugar’s service.’ Cooper might have cringed at Mintz’s global schematics. But Sweetness and Power showed that ‘sugar was obviously not always and everywhere a moneymaker within the empire – many an investor, as well as many a planter, ended up bankrupt.’ There was variation in local realities, Mintz emphasized, but sugar’s ‘cumulative value to crown and capital alike was enormous.’ It was more than enormous – it changed the world, it placed Africans in the West Indies, it led to the rise of industry and modern capitalism, shook nations to their core, led to revolutions, and, Mintz argued, contributed to shifts in social relations and work disciplines in the Old World. There were particular sugars, and there were generalized, cumulative sugar structures.
Mintz demonstrated how sugar transformed from a luxury item to a cheaper, commonly consumed commodity that contributed to the changing structure of European society. Sucrose was the ‘favored child of capitalism’ and could be used as fulcrum and symbol in the study of global capitalism and its particular histories. For Mintz, the stakes were the highest, absolutely aligned with soil, nutrients, energy, people, the planet and the sun. Laborers drank ‘the first sweetened cup of hot tea’ and this act opened up a new world of social relations, individual identity, and contests between capital and labor. Further, ‘the relationship between producers and consumers, of the meaning of work, of the definition of self, and the nature of things’ changed dramatically. The commodity, as Marx revealed, became a new kind of thing, with new meanings, and individuals absorbed these transformations. ‘In understanding the relationship between commodity and person,’ Mintz wrote, ‘we unearth anew the history of ourselves.’ Our relationships to things, and their production and consumption, possess histories.
Sweetness and Power united the individual eater-survivor with nutrients, exploited labor, and networks spanning the entire globe. For Mintz, these integrated individual-networks were not quaint matters of quantifiability that edified in a rather general way. Instead, his research consisted of a concise, non-polemical radical critique that outlined how we live and consume today. Millions of people interacted with sugar, in its distinct isolated instances, and its larger sugar-sphere, and all were ‘thrown into productive combinations by social, economic, and political forces that were actively remaking the entire world.’ Mintz desired that readers visualize ‘technical and human energies,’ the force of living plants, and of sugar refining. Producers created new commodities from sugar in order to increase profits, and sugar became, much as Cronon’s corn in Chicago or New England hog, symbols of money upon which lives altered and fortunes accrued. But more radical than any of these aspects, Mintz wove an actor-network narrative based on food as human vital energy, as necessary for individual and mass, and the way food production, distribution and consumption-survivability changed over time.
Mintz’s analysis of a single commodity and its cultural and material constructions served as the crux for employing the atom-global as a unit of analysis. Sugar, food, diet and modernity converged with ‘the strangely imperceptible attrition of people’s control over what they eat, with the eater becoming the consumer of mass-produced food rather than the controller and cook of it.’ Capitalist rationalizations for sugar acted in similar ways to Alfred Chandler’s railroads. Consumption itself had to follow ‘channels predictable enough to maintain food-industry profits, the paradoxical narrowing of individual choice, and of opportunity to resist this trend.’ Mintz underscored that large-scale corporate agriculture, even three centuries ago, contributed to ‘the extent to which we have surrendered our autonomy over our food.’ Mintz’s and Cooper’s personal/scholarly politics were similar. Cooper’s entire reason for his essay was to privilege the local so that appropriation and subversion remain as possibilities within increasingly totalizing scenarios of global capitalist/colonialist hegemony. Here, though, Mintz reminded readers that economic, political and social structures have altered food consumption, individual lives, and the possibility of resistance to these global trends. This heterodoxy returns us to the critique of individual rights politics and identities, and even to Lichtenstein’s laments about limitations of the weapons of the weak against global corporations. Mintz demonstrated the absolutely real world historical changes that have altered eating-as-survivability and placed much of the world’s population at the mercy of corporate prerogatives.
Mention of temperance and tea in Mintz’s exploration of sugar calls for further elaboration. Imagine, even in broad strokes, the role of tea in global commodity movements, capital accumulation and corporate formation. Tea economics, state power, and temperance joined in a confluence of local-global, top-bottom, ideology-materiality, cultural-economic that exampled complexity and sophistication. Explicit in tea’s price diminution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the state’s proscription of the East India Company’s monopoly, and tea production ‘localized in British colonies,’ this particular commodity became a vital resource for the government. ‘By the 1840s, bohea, the cheapest China tea,’ was ‘taxed at 350 percent.’ At the same time, this narrative entailed combining economic materiality with intellectual history, morality, and cultural values.
Tea became a temperance beverage, as religious moralists and social reform activists labored to eradicate alcohol from society. Tea was a drug, a food, a product and a symbol. ‘Some of the largest and most important retailing concerns in world history,’ Mintz wrote, ‘such as Lipton’ and Twining, ‘were built on tea.’ The story of tea, temperance and commerce included religion, morality, social activism, women’s rights, and individuals from all classes and interests. It was a local study on the one hand, and incorporated political, economic, state power, military power, law and capitalism on the other. In the twentieth-century United States, temperance, as moral activism and cultural values, integrated with the state and capital in a history that detailed Constitutional amendments, local political action, black markets, and free enterprise threatened by state action.
Global governance and new interventionist histories strive to demonstrate a model for international, interdependent polyglot regulation similar to that uncovered by legal historians William Novak and Morton Horwitz in their local studies. During the same period analyzed in The People’s Welfare – which showed how supposedly quintessential free enterprise existed in intense negotiation and conflict with state authorities and local police powers – Mintz’s history revealed analogous conflict-compromise-struggle dynamism on a global scale. The story of tea involved the East India Company and its China monopoly, and the empire’s cultivation and exploitation of teas in India, in a three-ocean expanse of trade that embraced chartered companies from Holland, France, Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Spain, and Prussia. International competition included state regulation and taxation, and concomitant smuggling, black markets and privateering.
The British government regulated and intervened directly in corporate prerogatives. British capital ‘with total government support’ grew tea in India and mixed those teas with Chinese plants, plants integrated in their own economies of soil nutrition and photosynthesis. In 1813, according to Mintz, the British government stepped in to ‘intercede in the company’s administrative and commercial activities,’ as state regulators began questioning the Company’s exclusive domination of the trade. In 1833, coincidentally a year before slavery was abolished in the West Indies, the government ended the Company’s monopoly. State regulation mixed with state support, in conflict and compromise with private capital, existed in a patchwork global system that affected domestic labor conditions, social relations, as well as capital and commodity flows around the world. Regulation existed in the early republic, throughout the British empire and the Atlantic commercial world, and for today’s ecological age – a promise of global governance in real, material terms outside the rhetoric of rampant neoliberalism.
Historian Eugene Genovese and Mintz argued that understanding large capitalist structures and political economy not only was necessary for the development of slaveries in the sugar-producing colonies and the American cotton South, but correspondingly for their demise. Historian Ira Berlin emphasized the many kinds of slavery over the course of four hundred years, in different regions, for different crops, in multiple periods. However, comprehension of the larger systematic slave trade and commercial exchange are fundamental for reimagining the local example. Amy Dru Stanley viewed American emancipation and the postbellum era through a gendered political economic lens, underscoring capitalism’s roles in slavery before and after. More important, she detailed the continuation of coercive regimes, from slavery to sharecropping, slavery to debt peonage, slavery to supposed free labor and freedom of contract. Genovese and Mintz demonstrated that new methods of production in the North, expansion of markets, changes in technology, and new banking procedures led to slavery’s diminished economic and social effectiveness. Global economics and the history of capitalism’s transformation helped explain slavery’s rise and fall, and the variety of exploitations and unfreedoms, exposing that ‘closed trade circuits . . . [were] not going to last forever.’ Slaveholders were unable to insulate the world they made.
Heterogeneities and homogeneities depend on scale and angle of perception. The ‘great masses’ of exploited workers possessed distinct histories, and here scholars should heed Cooper’s call. Are ‘Labor’ and ‘the working class’ totalizing rubrics? The ‘forms of labor exaction they embodied’ additionally were dissimilar, and these unfree laborers ‘evolved in different parts of the world.’ Therefore, particularized, localized, specific histories enable scholars to uncover the importance of local politics of subversion and possibility, or even those individual communities that perhaps escaped some purported integration into a ‘system.’ Mintz concluded, however, that these unique, disaggregated laborers and their exploiters existed in social, political and ‘economic functions in the world trade system,’ and these regional realities ‘were overlapping, even interdependent.’ Distinct workers, with individual identities, values and associations, were ‘created by the single system’ of which all were parts. These early studies from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are vital to our understanding of globalization today.
For example, Scraping By showed Baltimore as a ‘node in a broader exchange system,’ connecting the city and its broader region to the ‘Caribbean, South America, the Mediterranean, West Africa, Europe and the Pacific.’ And Kenneth Pomeranz provided examples of trade from China flowing to Africa to support the traffic in human beings, Chinese demand for silver influencing New World trade, and Chinese textiles moving through Europe and the Americas. The familiar commodity tobacco in eighteenth-century Maryland, noted Rockman, departed the eastern seaboard as ‘hides from Surinam, sugar from St. Kitts, linens from England, indentured servants from Germany, and enslaved men, women, and children from Africa’ moved with multitudinous things, itemized stuffs, practical and luxury items, in a definite expression of global interconnectivity that eminently is mappable. These maps of fluctuation included Old World diseases that decimated indigenous populations worldwide, and staggering mobility employing every possible technological means to convey workers, merchant capitalists and families around the world.
Populations and Pathogens
The armed gangs of noble exploiters in feudal Britain that Raymond Williams has discussed morphed into complex systems of power, coercion and resource distribution. Demographer and historian Philip Curtin traced sugar plantations, labor regimes and markets over time and space, and also detailed what he termed ‘trade diasporas.’ These people and commercial networks were ‘often made up of peaceful merchants’ of the kind Bernard Bailyn and David Hancock uncovered in their histories, although we could query just how peaceful were war profiteers. These trade diasporas included complicated relationships with privateers, pirates, and state power. Merchants constructed systems of protection payments in addition to worrying about supply, demand and international maritime law. European global trade diasporas ‘from the sixteenth century far into the eighteenth,’ Curtin wrote, ‘were armed from the beginning.’ Increasingly in complex ways, trade involved state arms and legal protections into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well. Viewing his ‘plantation complex’ from close analysis and an expansive distance, Curtin highlighted European merchants, traders, and military men on the African, Indian and Indonesian coasts who constructed ‘militarized trade diasporas’ and ‘trading post empires.’
Curtin’s collection of essays about the movement and transformation of sugar across the world and his focus on the plantation complex enabled him to write what he termed world history. He began this particular study with the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago, and in broad strokes moved through domesticated animals, diseases, people movements and the cultural, political and economic aspects of ‘the sugar revolution.’ Readily he acknowledged that the sweeping nature of the book might dissatisfy specialists in each proprietary field of history that he covered. But the ‘plantation complex,’ he wrote, ‘is nevertheless an interrelated aggregate of human experience that deserves investigation as an entity.’ The interrelated aggregate viewed from his particular vantage can be seen in its apparently colossal aspect with a clear, professional, empirical focus that does not lose sight of local, regional and individual complexities.
Curtin, an Africanist like Cooper, chose to explore links between Africa the continent, many local Africas, and the rest of the world. He employed the concept of ‘intercommunicating zones’ in world history to map a brief rise of towns and cities and thus trade between settlements. Curtin followed zones of trade and information flows from China to Mesopotamia and North Africa. As Braudel noted, ‘in time, the whole of the Mediterranean basin became part of an intercommunicating zone.’ If anything, Curtin’s plantation complex was a narrow lens through which to analyze world movements of people, ideas and goods. Using the logic of this essay, it takes but one additional step to understand the entire globe as a human intercommunicating zone.
As people and information spun around the Mediterranean, human motion included the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans so that, today, a feasible definition of ‘globalization’ is a world intercommunicating zone of hyper speed. This world zone was traceable in its multiple variations, permutations, and differences in Bailyn’s seventeenth century merchants and Hancock’s global citizens, and both Curtin and Mintz employed sugar as agent of change and nucleus of their analyses. Economic rationalization demanded the trade in information as well as goods, and political and legal structures became more complex so that interrelation reached a tipping point of no return.
Curtin aimed to ‘provincialize’ slavery in the southeastern United States. He established that the plantation complex, after moving out of the Levant to the Atlantic islands off the coast of Africa, and then to Brazil and into the West Indies, arrived in the American South slowly and late in the complex’s history. In order to decenter American slavery, Curtin employed a world history focus, a sequence of large events and movements across the face of the entire planet. The sugar revolution was not static, was always contested, and never accepted as natural. At times sugar cultivation moved with great rapidity, developing new technologies or moving to ‘empty’ land as soil depleted. During other periods the sugar regime moved slowly, with economies and technologies of plantation cultivation remaining stable over long stretches. ‘Some of the more ethnocentric versions of U.S. history imply that the American South was the heart of the plantation sector in the New World. This was not the case.’ Historian Thomas Bender’s call for an American historiography to include ‘America in the world’ monographs or a ‘nation among nations’ should be emphasized. Americanists can go their entire careers without seeing Brazil or the West Indies in their constructions of historical meaning, and comparative slavery histories, of the sort Ira Berlin explored, have sometimes been overlooked as too ‘thin.’ Curtin’s Brazil and Greater Antilles, and especially his longer monograph studies of Jamaica and the demographics of the slave trade, leave little doubt as to the need to rewrite our understanding of the American South.
The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex was at its best when detailing hybrid communities, human movement in geography, and multiple peoples in near constant motion. The gauchos of Argentina and Peru, and the Vaqueros of Mexico, herded and hunted escaped cattle and pigs brought from Europe. These animals acted much like people and pathogens, in that they altered the landscapes, human communities and local ecologies. This livestock was considered ‘an open resource, in the jargon of economists, like the fish in the sea.’ Critical political economy shows how the individual ‘right’ to such resources as fish, game, or petroleum fundamentally affects all of local and global society. This is why, in an ecological age, Novak’s local regulatory regimes governing morality and pollution can be applied to today’s global governance.
The gauchos, for example, lived a reality very similar to peasants in England and the rest of Europe. In the seventeenth century, these roaming herders and raiders constructed their own societies, according to the rules of free land and plentiful resources. Two hundred years later, however, ‘they too had to face the encroachment of an advancing frontier of sedentary settlements from Europe – private ownership of cattle, private ownership of land, and finally, barbed wire fences and wheat farming.’ Political economy merged with ‘political ecology’ and ‘cultural ecology’ in this period of frontiers and borderlands. In Curtin’s own words, ‘the ecological conditions that made their way of life possible grew out of the post-Columbian exchange of diseases and cultigens.’ With native populations cleared from the land, the pigs, cattle and goats shipped from Europe became feral and ‘were there for the taking.’ Hybrid communities survived beyond the reach of the nation-state. Wherever they existed outside the plantation complex, they were ‘a voluntary community of stateless persons.’ Again, to fully appreciate the nuance of transfrontier peoples, briefly captured from their constant motion, is to study local and global conditions that explicitly yield a cause-effect, effect-cause circularity. Uprooted people always are rooted somewhere.
Disease combined with political economy in the plantation complex in particular ways in specific locations. But the movement of people, products and pathogens was a general one that united economic imperatives with rampant, unmitigated death. Plantation owners and businessmen making pragmatic decisions, often from great distances from their landholdings, chose African servile labor over Europeans. The latter were cheaper, but their unequal contracts ‘ran for only three to seven years,’ and they often died before completing their indenture. As Genovese and historian Edmund Morgan uncovered, freed white laborers served as a political threat to the landholding, slaveholding class. Genovese claimed that backward technological advancements and minimal railroad building in the American South occurred because of this real threat to plantation hegemony. Further, Morgan showed how the very ideas of freedom and liberty could only exist because of poor white alliances with the plantation class structured on racial exclusion. These alliances, however, were fragile and fraught. Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women and Sylvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch argued about the power of reproductive labor, and slaveholder accounting that went into making new slaves. Owners of human capital in the Caribbean calculated likely death and survivability rates as factors in their material decision-making. Reproductive labor required communal searches for energy, and represented population growth and severe pressures on land and resources, however appropriated, administered and distributed.
Energy and Growth – People and Power
There was a perpetual focus on energy use, population pressure, and social relationships to land throughout historian Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence. When he wrote about a community, however large, that was ‘capital-intensive, energy-intensive, [and] land-gobbling,’ this can be read as the linguistic equivalent of population explosion, governing various understandings of ‘growth.’ The Malthusian Big Four of human survival on earth – food, fiber, fuel, and building materials – placed massive pressures on Britain and the continent. Deforestation demanded a search for alternative energy sources. Energy, in greater quantities and from whatever source, fueled ‘breakthroughs in transportation or heavy industry,’ yet was difficult to locate. These factors, according to Pomeranz, ‘limited everyone’s horizons,’ including individual, familial and national horizons in Asia as well as Europe. But here was his crux: efficient use of coal enabled Britain to circumvent traditional resource limitations and ignite its industrial increases and its thrust outward, which in turn necessitated greater quantities of fuel. Britain and other parts of Europe could only take advantage of these new energy sources by importing New World cultivated materials. The movement of these flows established ‘the preconditions’ for ‘capitalism and military fiscalism’ that existed as aspects of ‘a large global conjuncture.’ Pomeranz’s gaze was one possible unit of analysis, and does not diminish, but helps illuminate, more locally based empirical studies.
The importance of energy as central causation in the Atlantic slave trade or the ‘European’ and the American industrial revolutions has too often been ignored by historians. Coal as a miracle efficiency find after the deforestation of Britain is of course one possible approach. Historians in the United States and Europe adequately have studied ‘cotton, iron, steel and railways,’ in pursuing knowledge about capitalism, growth, slavery, and imperialism. However, as Pomeranz pointed out, all industrial sectors ‘except for cotton’ depended on coal. By expanding one’s vision, even cotton can be tied to coal extraction, by either studying financial entwinements or textile production and distribution on the far end of the cotton plantation system.
But Pomeranz proved that even an expansive thinker sometimes possessed limited vision, especially by assuming national or geographical boundaries that defined aspects of a study, while forgetting that these boundaries were porous, admitting motile elements such as air pollution or pathogens. For example, Pomeranz argued that Atlantic commercial networks should be seen ‘in terms of how much they relieved the strain on Europe’s supply of what was truly scarce: land and energy.’ Expansion and resource exploitation in the New World yielded profits, he admitted, and these utility and growth aspects of human life relieved the pressure of ecological restriction, of finite space and population expansion. Coal in England and mineral extraction by other European nations in the Western Hemisphere allowed these countries to avoid ‘a world of Malthusians constraints.’ As industry and profits increased, they added pressure on existing localized fetters instead of relieving them, as growth dictated.
Contained in this narrative were notions of an ‘ecological windfall’ and Britain’s eventual ‘epochal turn to fossil fuels.’ Lost in this interpretation, though, was Pomeranz overlooking that ecological limits went with the settlers and adventurers as they ‘prospered,’ that relief in one region or historical moment does not mean that the total threat to interconnected ecosystems was removed. ‘Land and energy squeezes,’ as Pomeranz called them, merely were temporarily displaced. Industrial production, economic health, smokestacks spewing – these materially indicate and symbolize growth. To understand economic vibrancy, one must contemplate people. Thus, population growth in an ecological age points to the limitations of a regional or national perspective. These real subjective emigrants brought the phenomenon of ecological constraints with them, and they illustrated why cumulative impacts in history unify.
Both actor-network, and cause-effect, highlighted population expansion as evidence of these new forms of growth and social order. The ‘dominant interests’ in Raymond Williams’s account of this period supplied the backstory of Hancock’s wealthy, slaveholding, arms dealing, opportunist ‘citizens of the world,’ in addition to Bailyn’s merchants. Coupled with an appreciation of Harold Cook’s Matters of Exchange and his research on the rising bourgeois Dutch Republic in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, a fuller picture emerged of internal-external pressures on the contingent development of global capitalism. This capitalism represented some form of entity, or category, that should be analyzed in depth. As Edmund Morgan and Rockman showed, the ‘dominant interests’ in these narratives were constructed upon mobile, unfree labor – as were towns, cities and nations. The transition from a feudal to a capitalist social order entailed that ‘for the majority of men it was the substitution of one form of domination for another.’ But Williams cautioned us, as had Latour, that the ‘hyphen’ of the ‘intermediate classes’ complicates any simplistic serf-landowner story, and that histories true to the newly reassembled social must account for other groups, communities, workers, professionals, small landowner and small slaveholder who also positioned themselves, in social and political battles, for legal and communal space.
Reading Williams on land conquests, the rise of a self-important aristocracy, and the shift from feudalism to capitalism helps scholars interpret the history of North America in a much longer history, and much broader perspective. Central to new interventionist arguments, ecology and human movement determined much of the political economic history illuminated here. Williams saw people settling the land, farming and establishing villages, and living during a time when population pressures were minimal. Land cultivation and population were central to his literary and cultural analysis, to his understanding of people in the world, to economy and social relations. As with Bradford’s account, much of this early history on ‘virgin land’ represented a ‘direct struggle with nature, the clearing of wild land.’ Bradford saw wilderness, but the land already was cultivated by some invisible one. However, these early settlements ‘were under the power of the sword and of tribute . . . based on general and local seizure.’ During this period, people moved in and out of local view, ‘in conquest and in the flight from bad land, or from famine or terror.’ Communities constructed military systems, and ‘from inside and outside there was this remorseless moving-in of the armed gangs, with their titles of importance, their kingships and their baronies, to feed from other men’s’ harvests.’ The exploiters, and carriers of arms and disease – whether conquistadores, Puritans, or capitalists – naturalized, rationalized and defended the new order. This scholarly point of view, as method and perspective, mirrors one that uncovers the primitive accumulation in Robinson Crusoe’s usurpation of Friday’s labor, Bradford’s/Winthrop’s/Mather’s appropriation of local knowledges, land, and resources. Again, note Crusoe’s and Bradford’s fortifications, and continual efforts to defend through mortal combat and law their recent illegal acquisitions.
Williams’s study of ‘improvement’ in fiction underscores why and how Britain’s agricultural ‘revolution,’ with attendant improvements and enclosures of land for greater efficiency, profit, and increased integration with urban and world markets, was not a revolution. Rather, this particular transformation was ‘the consolidation, the improvement, the expansion of an existing social class.’ Rockman’s Scraping By, though careful to acknowledge the exceptionalist argument of improved prosperity and ‘liberty for all,’ argued a similar point. What Williams asserted about Britain’s landowning classes, one could say about the ‘abstraction’ that was the American Revolution, which Terry Bouton recognized in his study of Pennsylvania farmers at this time. There were many revolutions, and varied ideas about what the colonies’ revolt meant, but as often occured the victorious narrative of American exceptionalism gained incredible force. Where Charles Beard wrote about the economic basis of the Constitution, and consequently the revolution itself, one might next wonder whether the Declaration of Independence was in reality the nation’s first free trade document.
Williams’s methodology in his paradigm-shifting cultural materialism was an example of local-global theory in practice, and his social analysis of individual texts and local scenes refuted Cooper’s captivating call. In a reaction to George Eliot’s Adam Bede, Williams reread a scene governing ‘the politeness of improvement.’ A squire improving the land, through enclosure, seemed innocent enough. Williams read social discourse much as Cronon deciphered the changes in the land. This interpretation also can be applied to a reading of primitive accumulation in William Bradford’s arrival in Plymouth, the improvement doctrines expressed in Profits in the Wilderness, and the law that followed such new economic contingencies in Horwitz’s Transformation. Williams noticed in development for profit the contextual reality of economic violence and threats, a ‘reorganization of the tenancy, for the estate’s convenience, which will take away the Poysers’ corn land.’ This new reading required an ‘altered mode of perception,’ and taken further the two adjacent farms as local studies were then seen as caught in a broad web exerting pressure on squire, peasant, and land.
Concluding Ideas and Materials: Credit-Debt and Past-Present
Rockman’s expressed desire to bring capitalism back into the study of slavery, and Cronon’s method of following bankruptcy trails in Nature’s Metropolis, point to the efficacy of following money, people and products in circulation. Epitomizing Hancock’s Oceans of Wine, Curtin followed various links in the Portuguese sugar industry in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Associations between Madeira and Antwerp contributed to the island’s integration into the Atlantic economy before the importance of wine. Antwerp’s capitalists began to solve the finances and mechanisms behind sugar refining. The plantation complex followed sugar’s revolutionary movement away from the Atlantic islands toward Brazil, and ‘the Antwerp capital went with it, and Flemish capitalists financed the early expansion of sugar in Brazil.’ Sugar was a difficult, highly capitalized endeavor, and all the sugar one could produce depended on the mills, refineries, labor power and transportation networks. Costs of entry were prohibitive, and risks pronounced. Planters weighed their risks, salivated at prospective returns, hedged plausible losses, and borrowed their way into potential grand accumulations of wealth. Merchant bankers were happy to lend the money, and supply the necessary insurance against loss. Bailyn’s and Hancock’s merchants of the world combined investment and risk and constructed early global corporate entities. Curtin revealed that slave labor cost ‘about twenty percent of the capital costs beyond the investment in land itself.’ As noted above, some planters made it, and some did not. Suppliers and merchant shippers lived off commodities that grew out of the ground, products that were manufactured from that impulse, and then goods traded in multiple markets. Debt networks could do for historians of the Atlantic basin, the Mediterranean and the Pacific what they accomplished for Cronon’s Chicago.
How effective, in isolation, would be Cooper’s urgent call when studying the current global economic collapse? Cash, debt, and even reputation connect individuals, households and regions to the larger economic network, or global ‘complex.’ Given the vital importance of the politics of today’s ecological age, one must next ask, how do we isolate the local from today’s very global recession, still ongoing? Economist Perry Mehrling wrote in The New Lombard Street, that cashflow ‘is the crucial interface where each of us connects with the larger system.’ According to Mehrling, today’s capitalism strictly is financial. For the 18th and 19th centuries, credit and debt connected the world, as did commodities, commercial exchange, and the ineluctable movement of human bodies. The newest frontier in the politics of possibility requires time-lapse vision. There is the local subject, there is the global complex, and there are the multiple hyphens between. Otherwise, Cooper’s local politics entirely will be subsumed by an unknowable dominant superstructure.
When Puritans landed in Massachusetts in 1620, already they were connected to a broader world impossible to see if we focus merely on the local. For one, Bradford forever complained about their debt to London adventurers. For another, they followed more than two hundred years of European fishing expeditions that had built pathways across the Atlantic, as well as avenues of knowledge. The Puritans knew about the land; their native guide Squanto already spoke English when they arrived. The image of the new colony, the first arrivals, nascence without expropriation, immediately changes the moment scholars conceptualize world movements of people and goods. Local middle groundings for the sake of exhuming the agency of natives cannot exist without knowledge of the primitive accumulation engaged by bodies of men, women and children, material arms, and invisible bodies of pathogens.
Scholars can compare Bernard Bailyn’s Boston of the seventeenth century with the Boston of the 1990s. Bailyn’s The New England Merchants argued for the central role of merchant capitalists in the creation of Boston’s urban space, and its social relations. This development in Bailyn’s analysis required credit, as he highlighted on numerous occasions. One might say that economic historian Joseph Schumpeter’s notion that credit is the core aspect of capitalism’s ‘creative destruction’ dramatically was underscored in the development of the New World proper. There was Bailyn’s Boston, today there is Chicago and Los Angeles, and along the way entire worlds were transformed, whether Native American communities or cities in the twentieth-century rustbelt. ‘The source of capitalism’s dynamism,’ argued Mehrling, is credit, and ‘it provides the crucial mechanism that allows the new to bid resources away from the old.’ This process may be viewed on a grander scale as the dynamic between the Old World and the New. The merchants of New England, along with the region’s capitalist-theologians, would acknowledge these connections. The task of regulation, of course, is to meliorate the excessive swings between up and down, old and new.
Our current fragmented postmodernity includes an integrated feeding system that historian Bruce Cumings mentioned with a sense of wonder. California grows most of America’s agricultural products. Much of those food materials, energized by water and sun, move to other regions of the world with nutrient and protein energy driving conversations about survival. But food was grown and shipped to urban, regional and world markets in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well. In this way, food-as-materiality and survival of individuals and species, food as ‘legitimized’ by the sun’s agency, underscores political economy and the social. It supremely is difficult to disconnect a local community – an island, a town, a rural region, a family – from networks of food distribution, including necessities and luxuries. Food is history, politics and economics on levels most profound.
Raymond Williams mightily struggled to unite country and city, and still could not overcome his personal, cultural and political discourses. Insightfully, he wrote that under the contemporary cognizable global regime, there has been ‘no main current of thought in the world which had not been incorporated within the fundamental forms of the capitalist and imperialist system.’ Given the imperatives of Latour’s perspective, however, this absorption does not necessitate total ‘victory’ for capitalism, rather more the continuation of patchwork isms. Communication, transportation, and human connections were victorious, though, and it was the social drive of humanity that created the integrated world. Is there a totalizing essence for all people everywhere? Inescapably, life on earth is contingent.