Fluent Essays

Make sure to read sufficient required reading materials to write a 2-page essay by answering the questions provided below in the file assignment requirement. Make sure to use examples from the readings to substantiate your answers. Practice paraphrasing (see syllabus under Academic Integrity) rather than using long quotes. assignment_requirement.docx steinberg.pdf malm___2013___the_origins_of_fossil_capital_from_water_to_steam.pdf santiago.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview Required Books to read: Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History (Langham, 2000) Reading Reflection 1 Due Jan 16 Thursday by 11am Points 3 These questions will help guide your reading of Malm and Santiago. Answer them for your reading reflection paper for Thursday. (For the Malm reading, please read to page 46). 1. Why does a class analysis (that is, an analysis of the relationships between those who own production and make investments in the industrial economy and those who work for a wage to produce commodities) matter in understanding the development of fossil fuel capitalism? 2. For Malm, how and why did fossil capitalism come about? 3. What, according to the readings, have been some of the consequences of fossil fuel capitalism? Use examples from the readings to substantiate your answers. Practice paraphrasing (see syllabus under Academic Integrity) rather than using long quotes. I have also uploaded critical reading tips to our week 2 module. These are general tips on how to critically analyze and evaluate any reading you come across. The reflection must be between 1.5 and 2 pages long double spaced, 12 point. 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? false assumptions? Does the author make 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. Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History Author(s): Ted Steinberg Source: The American Historical Review, Vol. 107, No. 3 (June 2002), pp. 798-820 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/532497 . Accessed: 09/05/2013 19:25 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions American Historical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions This content downloaded from 132.248.2.130 on Thu, 9 May 2013 19:25:07 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 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 16 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 ... Purchase answer to see full attachment