The Capitalocene

Part I: On the Nature & Origins of Our Ecological Crisis

Jason W. Moore1
Fernand Braudel Center and Department of Sociology
Binghamton University
This essay builds out an argument for understanding the past five centuries as the Cap-
italocene, the “age of capital.” The present essay – the first of two parts – engages the
now-dominant Anthropocene reading of modern history and its accounting of ecological
crisis. Situating the Anthropocene perspective within green thought since the 1970s, I
show that the emphasis on the Industrial Revolution as the origin of modernity flows from
a historical method that privileges environmental consequences and occludes relations of
capital and power. Underscored by – but hardly limited to – Anthropocene arguments,
this consequentialist bias is pervasive to green thought’s engagement with history: as a
succession of social processes that cause environmental consequences. This bias underpins a
series of important mis-recognitions. Above all, green thought’s love affair with the Indus-
trial Revolution has undermined efforts to locate the origins of today’s crises in the epoch-
making transformations of capital, power, and nature that began in the “long” sixteenth
century. The alternative to the “Age of Man” (the Anthropocene) is the “Age of Capi-
tal” (the Capitalocene). In this, capitalism is understood as a world-ecology, joining
the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature in dia-
lectical unity. This alternative is developed in successive philosophical, historical, and theo-
retical registers. First, I highlight the problem of Cartesian dualism in global environmen-
tal change. The alternative implies a shift from humanity and nature to humanity-in-
nature. Second, I reconstruct early capitalism’s extraordinary environmental transfor-
mations through its mutually reinforcing transitions in science, production, and power. Fi-
nally, I argue for a historical frame that takes capitalism and nature as double internali-
ties: capitalism-in-nature/nature-in-capitalism. The generalization of the value-form
(the commodity) is possible only through the expanded reproduction of value-relations
that unify wage-labor with its conditions of expanded reproduction: the unpaid work of
human and extra-human natures.

When and where did humanity’s modern relation with the rest of nature begin? The question has
gained new prominence with growing public concern over accelerating climate change. For the past
decade, one answer to this question has captivated scholarly and popular audiences alike: the An-
thropocene.

1
Address correspondence to: jasonwsmoore@gmail.com, Jason W. Moore Department of Sociology, Binghamton Uni-
versity, Binghamton, NY. Special thanks to Diana C. Gildea, and also to Henry Bernstein, Holly Jean Buck, Phil Campa-
nile, Giuseppe Cioffo, Christopher Cox, Sharae Deckard, Joshua Eichen, Sam Fassbinder, John Bellamy Foster, Kyle
Gibson, Matt Huber, Rebecca Lave, Emmanuel Leonardi, Ben Marley, Phil McMichael, Michael Niblett, Roberto José
Ortiz, Christian Parenti, Andy Pragacz, Michael Niblett, Shehryar Qazi, Stephen Shapiro, Dale Tomich, Jeremy Vetter,
Richard Walker, Tony Weis, Anna Zalik, and Xiurong Zhao for conversations and correspondence on the themes ex-
plored in this essay. March 2014.
It is, in Paul Voosen’s apt phrase, “an argument wrapped in a word” (2012).

Just what kind of argument is it? As with all fashionable concepts, the Anthropocene has been sub-
ject to a wide spectrum of interpretations.2 But one is dominant. This one tells us that the origins of
modern world are to be found in England, right around the dawn of the nineteenth century
(Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Crutzen, 2002; Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill, 2007; Steffen, et al,
2011a, 2011b; Chakrabarty, 2009; The Economist, 2011a, 2011b). The motive force behind this epoch-
al shift? In two words: coal and steam. The driving force behind coal and steam? Not class. Not
capital. Not imperialism. Not even culture. But… you guessed it, the Anthropos: humanity as an un-
differentiated whole.

The Anthropocene makes for an easy story. Easy, because it does not challenge the naturalized ine-
qualities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and produc-
tion. It is an easy story to tell because it does not ask us to think about these relations at all. The mo-
saic of human activity in the web of life is reduced to an abstract humanity as homogenous acting
unit. Inequality, commodification, imperialism, patriarchy, and much more. At best, these relations
are acknowledged, but as after-the-fact supplements to the framing of the problem. This framing
unfolds from an eminently commonsensical, yet I think also profoundly misleading, narrative: one in
which the “human enterprise” is set against the “great forces of nature” (Steffen, et al., 2011b, 2007).
The taxonomy of “Anthromes” (Ellis, et al., 2010) – ecosystems dominated by humans, and there-
fore not “wild” – precedes the interpretation of historical change, substituting highly linear notions of
time and space for historical-geographical change. At the same time, Anthropocene scholars cannot
escape the conclusion that humans, too, are a “geophysical force” – the singular is important here –
that operates within nature (Steffen, et al., 2011b, 741). This is the “One System/Two Systems”
problem common to green thought in its mainstream and critical currents. Philosophically, humanity
is recognized as a species within the web of life; but in terms of our methodological frames, analyti-
cal strategies, and narrative structures, human activity is treated as separate and independent. There
are “human constructions” and “natural” constructions (Zalasiewicz, et al., 2011b: 837) – even as
humans are recognized as a geophysical force. This dissonance creates rather more fog than light,
for the recognition of humanity-in-nature becomes a kind of philosophical cover for reductionist
narratives of humanity and nature.

Holism in philosophy, dualism in practice. This is the generalized condition of green thought today.

If regional environmental historians and political ecologists have challenged this general condition
(White, 1995; Bakker, 2003), global environmental change scholars have clung to the nature-society
binary ever more tenaciously over the past decade. The key question we may pose to this latter
group is this: Is the reduction of humanity’s patterns of variation and coherence acceptable as any-
thing other than a first-order sketch of modern historical change? Is humanity as “geophysical

2
The argument over the periodization of Anthropocene rages on. Some archaeologists now argue for converting most
or all of the Holocene into the Anthropocene, either from the mega-fauna extinctions at the dawn of the Holocene, or
the origins of agriculture, c. 11,000 B.P (summarized in Balter, 2013; see Smith, et al., 2010; Ruddiman, 2005, 2013;
Gowdy and Krall, 2013). Still others argue for an Anthropocene c. 2,000 years B.P (e.g., Certini and Scalenghe, 2011).
While other still argue, albeit weakly, for a post-1945/1960 periodization (Zalasiewicz, et al., 2008). Empiricist concepts
like the Anthropocene are often a conceptual and historical mess, precisely because they propose to engage reality as
bundles of quantitative aggregates prior to discerning the actually existing historical relations within which such numbers
can be given historical meaning. The facts in the debate may be more-or-less correct, but adding up facts does not a
historical interpretation make (see, e.g., Carr, 1962).

2
force” and unified “enterprise” a reasonable historical proposition? As a metaphor for communi-
cating the significant – and growing – problem posed by greenhouse gas emissions and galloping
climate change, the dominant Anthropocene argument is to be welcomed.3 But only to a point.

There are really two major dimensions of the Anthropocene argument today. One is a strict empha-
sis on atmospheric change and its proximate drivers. The other, and there is frequent slippage with
the first, is an argument about history, and therefore about the global present as historical moment.
In this latter, the dominant Anthropocene argument goes beyond the domain of earth-system sci-
ence, reaching into the very heart of historical analysis: the dialectically-bound questions of historical
agency and periodization.

The Anthropocene argument takes biogeological questions and facts – turning on the presence of
variously significant stratigraphic signals (Zalasiewicz, et al., 2008, 2011) – as an adequate basis for
historical periodization. Two subtle but powerful methodological decisions underpin this approach.
In the first instance, empirical focus is narrowed to the consequences of human activity. In this, the
Anthropocene argument embodies the consequentialist bias of green thought across the Two Cultures.
The case for humanity’s domination of the earth is constructed almost entirely on the basis of a sig-
nificant catalogue of biospheric changes. The drivers of such changes are typically reduced to very
broad “black box” descriptive categories: industrialization, urbanization, population, and so forth
(Steffen, et al., 2011a, 2011b). The second methodological choice turns on the construction of hu-
manity as “collective” actor (e.g. Zalasiewicz, et al., 2011). Here the historical-geographical patterns
of differentiation and coherence are erased in the interests of narrative simplicity. This erasure, and
the elevation of the Anthropos as a collective actor, has encouraged several important mis-
recognitions: 1) a neo-Malthusian view of population typically lurks on, or just beneath, the surface
of these analyses (see esp. Crutzen, 2002; Fischer-Kowalski, et al., forthcoming; Ellis, et al., 2013), 4 ig-
noring the modern world-system’s actually existing patterns of family formation and population
movement (e.g. Seccombe, 1992, 1995; Massey, et al., 1999); 2) a view of historical change in which
technology-resource complexes drive historical change; 3) removing the issues of scarcity from the
actually existing relations of capital, class, and empire, and depositing the former into the container
“nature,” ontologically independent of these relations; and 4) assigning responsibility for global
change to humanity as a whole, rather than to the forces of capital and empire that have given mod-
ern world history its coherence.

The two principal framing devices – consequences determine periodization, the Anthropos as the
driver of these consequences – stem from a philosophical position that we may call Cartesian dual-
ism. As with Descartes, the separation of humans from the rest of nature – “Are humans over-
whelming the great forces of nature?” (Steffen, et al., 2007) – appears as self-evident reality.5 In its

3
So too its analogues in the radical tradition (e.g. Foster, et al., 2010).
4
Strictly speaking, the view of Ellis and his colleagues follows a Boserupian model in which rising population leads to
innovation and “intensification” (2013; Boserup, 1965). This model simply turns Malthus on his head, positing popula-
tion growth as opportunity rather constraint. The problem is that the whole history of capitalism, certainly from 1450-
1850, was one of declining person-to-land ratios on a systemic basis; indeed the whole thrust of capitalism’s geographical
expansion produced recurrent downward revisions in the labor-to-land ratio. Moreover, capitalism’s commodity fron-
tiers were frequently the sites of the most intensive and rapid changes in land use, from the sugar commodity frontiers of
the long 17th century to the wheat and cotton frontiers of North America in the 19 th century.
5
One major break within the emerging Anthropocene conversation is found in the argument of Pálsson and his col-
leagues (2013), who rightly challenge the neo-Malthusian conception of limits, the dualism immanent in the dominant
Anthropocene argument, and the reluctance of earth-system scientists to take seriously questions posed by the “envi-

3
simplest form, this philosophy locates human activity in one box, the rest of nature, in another. To
be sure, these two acting units interact and influence each other. But the differences between and
within each acting unit are not mutually constitutive, such that changes in one imply changes in the
other – although such dialectical relations are empirically acknowledged from time to time (Steffen,
et al., 2011a: 845-846). This dualism leads Anthropocene advocates to construct the historical period
since 1800 on an arithmetic basis: “human activity plus significant biospheric change = the Anthro-
pocene.” In this, too, the Anthropocene perspective incorporates the common sense of green
arithmetic: “society plus nature equals environmental studies.”

It all makes wonderful sense, again up to a point. The problem is that the parts do not add up to the
whole. Human activity not only produces biospheric change, but relations between humans are them-
selves produced by nature. This nature is not nature-as-resource but rather nature-as matrix: a nature
that operates not only outside and inside our bodies (from global climate to the micro-biome) but
also through our bodies, including our embodied minds. Humans produce intra-species differentia-
tions which are ontologically fundamental to our species-being: inequalities of class especially, inflected
by all manner of gendered and racialized cosmologies. Human history as a whole, but modern world
history in particular, is full of contingency and rapid change that has not only produced non-linear
shifts, but has also been produced by non-linear relations of power and wealth, already bundled with,
and within, nature as a whole.

From this vantage point, we might do well to pause, and to ask, Does the Anthropocene argument
obscure more than it illuminates?

I think it probably does.

The dominant Anthropocene argument obscures the actually existing relations through which women
and men make history with the rest of nature: the relations of power, (re)production, and wealth in
the web of life. To be sure, some radicals have sought to recuperate the Anthropocene argument as
crystallizing “capitalism WITH nature” (Swyngedouw, 2013: 16). But I find it difficult to square such
recuperations with the Anthropocene’s fundamentally bourgeois character: above all, its erasure of
capitalism’s historical specificity and the attendant implication that capitalism’s socio-ecological con-
tradictions are the responsibility of all humans.

There is no denying the urgency that many scholars – and many citizens – feel in relation to climate
change in the 21st century (e.g. Foster, Clark, and York, 2010; Hansen, 2009). There is little question
about the pressing realities of climate change. But does the urgency to communicate the realities of
climate change override the need for an adequate historical interpretation of the problem? Concep-
tualizations of a problem and efforts to resolve that problem are always tightly connected. So too are
the ways we think the origins of a problem and how we think through possible solutions.

And it is here – in thinking through the origins of the problem of rapid and fundamental biospheric
change – that we find the central historical, and therefore political, problem with the Anthropocene ar-
gument, whether posed in centrist or radical terms. If we shift our historical method from one that
unduly prioritizes environmental consequences to one that prioritizes the relational/consequential
nexus – viewing differentiated and geographically-specific “modes of humanity” as products and

ronmental humanities.” What is striking about this argument, however, is its unwillingness to question the historical peri-
odization of the Anthropocene, and the problematic slippage between geological and historical periodizations of time.

4
producers in the web of life6 – a very different view of the Anthropocene problem comes into focus.
From this standpoint, the origins of a new pattern of environment-making began in the Atlantic
world during the “long” sixteenth century. Why is this not “merely” a historical problem, but also a
political one? In sum, to locate the origins of the modern world with the steam engine and the coal
pit is to prioritize shutting down the steam engines and the coal pits. (And their 21 st century incarna-
tions.) To locate the origins of the modern world with the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450,
with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationaliza-
tion, is to prioritize the transcendence of the relations of power, knowledge, and capital that have
made – and are now unmaking – the modern world as we have known it. Shut down a coal plant,
and you can slow global warming for a day; shut down the relations that made the coal plant, and
you can stop it for good.

The erasure of capitalism’s early modern origins, and its extraordinary reshaping of global natures
long before the steam engine, is therefore of some significance in our efforts to develop effective
political strategies to global warming… and far more than global warming alone! Ask any historian
and she will tell you: how one periodizes history decisively shapes the interpretation of events, and
one’s choice of decisive relations. Start the clock in 1784, with James Watt’s rotary steam engine
(Crutzen, 2002), and we have a very different view of history – and a very different view of moderni-
ty – than we do if we begin with the English or Dutch agricultural revolutions, with Columbus and
the conquest of the Americas, with the first signs of an epochal transition in landscape transfor-
mation after 1450. Are we really living in the Anthropocene, with its return to a curiously Eurocentric
vista of humanity, and its reliance on well-worn notions of resource- and technological-determinism?
Or are we living in the Capitalocene, the historical era shaped by relations privileging the endless ac-
cumulation of capital?

How one answers the historical question shapes one’s analysis of – and response to – the crises of
present.

CAPITALISM AS A WAY OF ORGANIZING NATURE

To ask about humanity’s modern relation with the rest of nature is to shift our focus from the con-
sequences of these relations to the relations that enfold and unfold these consequences. Conse-
quences are crucial. Those issuing from climate change are especially salient, perhaps especially in its
suppressive impact on labor and land productivity in world agriculture: signaling the end of capital-
ism’s longue durée cheap food regime (Kjell, et al., 2009; Zivin and Neidel, 2010; Peng, et al., 2004;
Moore, 2012, 2013b). But to periodize historical change on the basis of consequences – or a highly-
stylized interpretation of the Industrial Revolution fueled by fossils – is to cloud our vision from the
outset. Of course we must begin with the decisive shifts in the dominant relations of power and
production, of classes and commodities. To leave it at that, however, says nothing new. What the
more sophisticated versions of the “coal and capitalism” argument appreciate is that the long 19th
century transition in the relations of power and production was one that went beyond relations be-
tween humans; it also implied a transition in humanity’s relation with the rest of nature (e.g. Huber,
2008; Malm, 2013).

I would go further. The radical engagement with the Anthropocene has proceeded through an
agreement on periodization – the Two Century Model – which is problematic enough. More fun-
6
Credit goes to Roelvink for the turn of phrase, “modes of humanity” (2013).

5
damentally, both centrist and radical approaches to the Anthropocene argument have converged on
an ontological agreement: the “co-production of society WITH nature” (Swyngedouw, 2013: 16, em-
phasis added; also Davis, 2010; Gowdy and Krall, 2013), as if these were two independent entities
(but see Sayre, 2012). While co-production is the right way to put it, its association with a Na-
ture/Society vocabulary short-circuits the effort to move from modernity WITH nature towards
modernity-in-nature. Why? Because the philosophy of co-production depends on acting units that
are themselves co-produced. To be sure, radicals such as Swyngedouw – a pioneer in the critique of
Nature/Society dualisms (1996) – understand this. But the distance between philosophical critique
and world-historical interpretation has been great. The Achilles’ Heel of the post-Cartesian critique
has been historical analysis, resulting in a disjuncture between the “production of nature” as theoret-
ical construct and world-historical process. Without a sufficient historical grounding, the critique of
Nature/Society dualism tends to stumble on the terrain of world history, precisely the turf staked
out by the Anthropocene position.

My position is that the critique of Nature/Society dualisms is not only relevant to historical analysis,
but that the history of capitalism cannot be explained in terms of a ping-pong of nature-society in-
teractions. The bundle of transformations that gathered steam in the closing decades of the 18th cen-
tury were co-produced by human and extra-human natures (in which the latter are also directly consti-
tutive of so-called “society”) – not only at the level of consequences, but in terms of the strategic
relations behind capitalism’s peculiar reordering of the biosphere over the longue durée. This perspec-
tive views capitalism as, at once, producer and product of the web of life. The patterns of co-
production are contingent but cohered, and this coherence reveals itself in specific patterns of envi-
ronment-making that reach well beyond conventional reckonings of landscape change. This coher-
ence is realized and reproduced through definite rules of reproduction – of power, of capital, of
production. For capitalist civilization, these rules embody a value relation, quite literally determining
what counts as valuable and what does not.7 Different civilizations have different value relations,
that prioritize different forms of wealth, power, and production. Feudal Europe, for instance, privi-
leged land productivity while the world capitalist system increasingly privileged labor productivity
after 1450. To this we will return later in the essay. For the moment, I simply wish to highlight that
capitalism’s “law of value” – understood more expansively than for Marx, but in the spirit of Marx’s
method (Marx, 1973; Hopkins, 1982; Sayer, 1987) – produced an exceedingly peculiar form of
wealth. This is of course capital as value-in-motion, whose substance is abstract social labor. Im-
portantly, abstract social labor may be accumulated only through a far-flung repertoire of imperialist
enclosure and appropriation of nature’s “free gifts” in service to commodity production (Burkett,
1999; Moore, 2011a). Capital is value-in-motion is value-in-nature. Value is a bundled relation of
human and extra-human natures (e.g. Marx, 1977: 283; Burkett, 1999). Hence Marx writes that the
natural fertility of the soil may “act as an increase in fixed capital” (1973: 748): an observation preg-
nant with socio-ecological implications for the analysis of capital accumulation.

We may begin to unpack these implications through a suggestive proposition: Value operates
through a dialectic of exploitation and appropriation that illuminates capitalism’s peculiar relation
with, and within, nature. The relations of exploitation produce abstract social labor. The relations of
appropriation, producing abstract social nature, enabled the expanded accumulation of abstract so-
cial labor. On the one hand, the system turns on a weird coding of what is valuable, installing human
work within the commodity system (wage-labor) as the decisive metric of wealth. In this domain, the

7
The argument for global value relations has been articulated by Araghi in a distinct but complementary register (2009a,
2009b).

6
exploitation of labor-power is pivotal, upon which all else turns. On the other hand, the exploitation
of wage-labor works only to the degree that its reproduction costs can be checked. The mistake is to
see capitalism as defined by wage-labor, any more than it defined by the world market. Rather the
crucial question turns on the historical connections between wage-work and its necessary conditions
of expanded reproduction. These conditions depend on massive contributions of unpaid work, out-
side the commodity system but necessary to its generalization. Sometimes this is called the domain
of social reproduction (e.g. Bakker and Gill, 2003), although it is here that the adjective “social”
seems especially unsuitable – where does the “social” moment of raising children end, and the “bio-
logical” moment begin? Clearly, we are dealing with a zone of reproduction that transcends any neat
and tidy separation of sociality and biology, which are better viewed as internal to each other. Nei-
ther is this zone of reproduction – the domain where unpaid work is produced for capital8 – a nar-
rowly human affair. For unpaid work not only makes possible the production of potential – or the
reproduction of actual – labor-power as “cheap” labor; it also involves the unpaid work of extra-
human natures. In this domain of reproduction, the appropriation of unpaid work is central.

My use of appropriation therefore differs from Marx, who deployed the term more or less inter-
changeably with the exploitation of wage-labor. Appropriation, in what follows, names those extra-
economic processes to identify, secure, and channel unpaid work outside the commodity system into
the circuit of capital. Scientific, cartographic, and botanical revolutions, broadly conceived, are good
examples, and themes to which we will return later in this essay. Movements of appropriation, in this
sense, are distinct from movements of the exploitation of wage-labor, whose tendential generaliza-
tion is premised on the generalization of appropriative practices. 9 So important is the appropriation
of unpaid work that the rising rate of exploitation depends upon the fruits of appropriation derived
from cheap natures, understood primarily as the “Four Cheaps” of labor-power, food, energy, and
raw materials (Moore, 2012).

This use of appropriation therefore implies a labor/work distinction, insofar as labor in the Marxist
tradition has been used as a shorthand for abstract social labor (Marx, 1967 and especially 1967, I:
ch. 18; e.g. Mandel, 1981). Work, in what follows, signifies the historically-grounded forms of geo-
and bio-physical activity as they “bundle” with humanity’s distinctive forms of sociality and embod-
ied thought (e.g. White, 1995). This allows us to see that only some energy becomes work, and only
some work becomes value. These broadly-entropic transitions allow us to highlight the self-
consuming character of the capital relation, which in any given historical configuration tends to burn
through its necessary biophysical conditions (included workers) and in so doing jack up the organic
composition of capital (Marx, 1977: 377-380; Luxemburg, 1913: 328-427). Thus, capitalism’s cheap
nature strategy, and the recurrent cyclical movements in favor of ever-cheaper nature until 2003
(Grantham, 2011), may be understood in relation to the cyclical threat of the Four Cheaps turning
dear (Mandel, 1975; Rostow, 1978). Costly nature turns cheap through appropriating unpaid work
on the commodity frontiers inside and outside the heartlands of commodification (respectively,

8
I do not mean to suggest that life-activity in the zone of reproduction is work as such, only that capital views it as such.
Indeed, as I will show, a significant part of capitalist history is the identification and development of symbolic-material
practices that aim to activate new streams of unpaid work in service to capital.
9
The dialectic paid/unpaid work does not, therefore, displace the centrality of the value-relations with the circuit of capi-
tal. The terms paid/unpaid work serve to illuminate the constitutive relations through which socially-necessary unpaid
work makes possible the successive determinations of systemic labor-time. In other words, the present argument agrees
with the classical Marxist position on the centrality of the exploitation of labor-power. My point is that the historical-
geographical reproduction of this central relation cannot be explained absent the relational movements that channeled
unpaid work into the circuit of capital.

7
(Hochschild, 2002; Moore, 2000b). These cheap nature movements, at least until 2003, counteracted
capitalism’s tendency to voraciously consume both the geological accumulations and biological con-
figurations of unpaid work as manifold capitals compete at the point of production. The competitive
struggle in production – not merely the market, as environmental historians and sociologists would
suggest (e.g. Cronon, 1991; Foster, 2001) – compels capitalists to pursue rising rates of labor
productivity, often through mechanization. Rising labor productivity tends strongly towards the ris-
ing throughput of materials per quantum of necessary labor-time. The constant danger, given capi-
talism’s industrial dynamism and commitment to expansion, is that the value of inputs will rise, and
the rate of profit, fall. This tendency towards the overproduction of fixed capital and the underpro-
duction of raw materials was so important for Marx that he called it a general law (Marx, 1967, III:
119-121; also Moore, 2011a; Bukharin, 1915). 10

Such post-Cartesian readings of capitalism’s “general laws” – or other propositions regarding the
longue durée movements and moments of the capitalist world-ecology – opens up the possibility of
moving from the “environmental” consequences of “social” processes to the socio-ecological con-
stitution of Anthropogenic drivers themselves. Too often, the environment leads an unduly narrow
existence, as a zone of consequences, impacts, and conditions. Green scholars study the metabolism
of globalization, industrialization, and agrarian change, rather than studying globalization, industriali-
zation and agrarian change as metabolisms, as ways of organizing nature. I think this transition from
the political ecology or environmental history of social change towards social change as environment-
making is now a possibility, with significant intellectual and therefore political implications. To move
from a focus on the environmental consequences of so-called social processes to a view of social
processes as co-produced by human and extra-human natures involves more than philosophical
assertion, and entails more than registering political and theoretical protest. Such a move also de-
mands historical reconstruction – a reconstruction made possible by generations of environmental
scholars across the Two Cultures since the 1970s.

Such historical reconstruction calls into question any periodization premised on a dualistic “social
driver plus environmental consequence” model. This remains the hegemonic model within global
environmental studies, even as regional studies have long since transcended such dualisms (e.g.
White, 1995; Kosek, 2006). From this standpoint, the Anthropocene argument is not only philo-
sophically and theoretically problematic – viewing humans as separate from nature and erasing capi-
talism from the equation – it also offers an unduly narrow conceptualization of historical time. This
plays out at two levels. One is an awkward conflation of geological notions of time with the periodi-
zation of historical change. The other is the Anthropocene’s recuperation of an older historiograph-
ical vista which saw the “real” changes of “real” modernity beginning in the later 18th century.

In this respect, the Anthropocene argument feeds into Green Thought’s longstanding love affair
with the Two Century model of modernity: industrial society, industrial civilization, industrial capital-
ism. The notion that It all began with the Industrial Revolution has been with us for a very long time
(e.g. Toynbee, 1894/1884/1881; Beard, 1901). After taking a pounding in the 1970s (Wallerstein,
1974; Frank, 1978), the Two Century Model came roaring back at the dawn of the 21st century. Not
just Anthropocene advocates, but many critical historians and social scientists, came to embrace the

10
It is of course true that rising labor productivity – in value terms – may or may not involve rising throughput. This
latter is the strongest tendency. Nevertheless, it would be possible to increase labor productivity without rising through-
put by reducing the value composition of production; such a downward reduction would likely take the form of wage
cuts. Even in these instances, such reductions would be temporary and partial, except in the case of an epochal crisis.

8
Industrial Revolution as the source of all things difficult and divergent (e.g. Pomeranz, 2000; Harvey,
2010). Within green thought, the embrace of the “industrialization thesis” on the origins of ecologi-
cal crisis has been especially warm (Moore, 2003b; see, e.g. Daly and Farley, 2004; Huber, 2008;
Heinberg, 2003; Jensen, 2006; Malm, 2013; O’Connor, 1998; Steffen, et al., 2007, 2011; Wrigley,
1990, 2010).

What this Two Century model obscured was the remarkable remaking of land and labor beginning
in the “long” sixteenth century, c. 1450-1640 (Braudel, 1953). (About which, more presently.) Ig-
nored – even by environmental historians (see Moore, 2003a, 2003b) – was the important historiog-
raphy of economic change in early modern Europe and the Americas, written during the postwar
era.11 Only occasionally were these analyses framed in terms of capitalism; but for these historians
there was no question that the early modern transformations of economies and landscapes were
dialectically bound (see inter alia, Braudel, 1972; Galeano, 1973; Kellenbenz, 1974, 1976; Kriedte,
1983; Nef, 1964; Malowist, 2009; Prado, 1967; Wallerstein, 1974; Brenner, 1976; Sella, 1974; de
Vries, 1974, 1976; Cipolla, 1976). Since the 1970s, for all their distinctive geographical emphases and
interpretive differences, the view of early modernity as real modernity has persisted (e.g., de Vries and
van der Woude, 1997; de Vries, 2001; Brenner, 2001; Crosby, 1997; DuPlessis, 1997; Jones, 1987;
Komlos, 2000; Landes, 1998; Seccombe, 1992; Mokyr, 1990: 57-80; Moore, 2003a, 2003b, 2007,
2010a, 2010b; Nef, 1964; Prak, 2001; van Zanden, 1993). For some, this ongoing “revolt of the early
modernists” (van Zanden, 2002) did not go nearly so far enough: the decisive period begins some-
time just after the turn of the millennium (van Zanden, 2009; Levine, 2001; Arrighi, 1994; Mielants,
2007).12 And yet, green thought has been slow – very slow – to engage this literature. This holds true
even for students of early modern environmental history (e.g. Richards, 2003; Warde, 2006a, 2006b;
Grove, 1995; Williams, 2003). Industrialization appears, in the metanarratives of green thought, as a
deus ex machina dropped onto the world-historical stage by coal and steampower.

There are two questions here. First, is Industrialization the Big Bang of modernity, or is it instead a
cyclical phenomena of capitalism from the long sixteenth century? Second, is Industrialization the
most useful concept for explaining large-scale and long-run patterns of wealth, power, and nature in
historical capitalism?

If the first question was tackled during the 1970s and ‘80s (e.g. Hopkins and Wallerstein, 1977; esp.
Wallerstein, 1989), the second question has rarely been posed, much less answered. This is much
more curious than one might initially supposed. For postwar economic history was arguably the one
field in world social science that took seriously ecological questions. A modest dose of intellectual
history may therefore explain some measure of the problem. Here the conjuncture of the 1970s is
important. In this decade, the “new” environmental studies emerged (e.g. Worster, 1977; Merchant,
1980; Schnaiberg, 1980), and the “old” economic history, which had been strongly committed to the
study of material life (e.g. Nef, 1964), passed from the scene. Economic history since the 1970s has
rarely taken environmental matters seriously in the Industrial Revolution (e.g. Allen, 2011; but see
Jonsson, 2012; Warde and Marra, 2007; Wrigley, 1990, 2010). Marx’s conception of industrialization
– of the rise and development of “large-scale industry” – might have come to the rescue. This could
have permitted a view of industrialization as a crystallization of technology, class, and nature – a
synthesis whose outlines had been suggested by Marx (1967, 1977), and theoretically (but not historical-

11
Indeed, the field of economic history – prior to the cliometric revolution of the 1970s – was the most consistently
environmentally-aware field of world social science in the first three-quarters of the 20th century.
12
Much of this literature is often extraordinarily Eurocentric – Landes, Jones, and van Zanden especially.

9
ly) reconstructed at the end of the last century (Burkett, 1999). But the cutting edge of marxist
thought in the 1970s was found in historical sociology and political economy, typically abstracted
from their bio-geographical conditions (Anderson, 1974a, 1974b; Mandel, 1975; but see Wallerstein,
1974, 1980). Questions of nature, agro-ecology, and resources were explored only by a few Marxist
(or marxisante) trailblazers (see, inter alia, Commoner, 1971: 249-291; Enzensberger, 1974; Harvey,
1974; Leiss, 1972; Marcuse, 1972; Schnaiberg, 1980; Schmidt, 1973; Walker, 1979; Williams, 1972;
Young, 1973, 1979).13

This conjuncture of the 1970s decisively shaped the field of investigation for environmentally-
oriented historians and social scientists. Amongst the key consequences for green thought was the
acceptance of the Industrial Revolution in two major ways: 1) as an essentially technical and resource
phenomenon abstracted from class relations (e.g. Wrigley, 1990); and 2) as the “explanatory nexus”
of modern environmental problems, and indeed of modernity as a whole (Wallerstein, 1986: 67; e.g.
Ponting, 1991). It need not have been this way. Prior to the 1970s, a significant historiography had
long emphasized industrialization, not as a singular event, but as a succession of industrializations,
commencing in Europe as far back as the thirteenth century (Carus-Wilson, 1941; Gimpel, 1976;
Nef, 1964). This would appear favor a conceptualization of world history in which successive waves
of industrialization took shape out of successive of eras of socio-ecological innovation and thence
crisis. (It would also have corrected the one-sided emphasis on scarcity that was a defining feature of
green thought in the 1970s [e.g. Meadows, et al., 1972). But environmental historians have been slow
to take advantage of this opportunity. Today, we still do not have a comprehensive environmental
history of the Industrial Revolution, even in its most conventional historical and geographical set-
ting: England, between the 1760s and the 1860s. 14 Nor do we have comprehensive ecohistorical
interpretations of the “second” industrial revolution of the later 19 th century, or of the “third” indus-
trialization of the Global South – China above all! – since the 1970s.

But is industrialization really the best way to frame the origins and subsequent development of mo-
dernity’s “ecological” crisis? At its best, industrialization is a shorthand for the tensions between
technology and power, between the “forces” and “relations” of production; these are hardly novel
historical problems. But these tensions have, almost universally, been framed in dualistic terms, con-
tained within a “social” universe of human relations ontologically prior to the latter’s engagement
with web of life. This is the problem of Cartesian dualism, one that bears bitter fruit in the hege-
monic narrative of industrialization as acting upon, rather than developing through, nature.15 At a

13
The question to ask is not, Why didn’t Marxists pay attention to ecology?, but rather: Why did these pioneering anal-
yses gain so little traction?
14
For an insightful survey of environmental historians’ relation to the Industrial Revolution narrative, see Barca, 2011;
also Osborne, 2003; Steinberg, 1986. A perceptive marxist re-examination is offered by Malm, 2013.
15
Naming is always fraught with new challenges. In speaking of Cartesian dualism, it is of course true that all blame
should not be heaped upon poor Rene. He personified a much broader scientific and especially philosophical move-
ment:

The effect [of Descartes’ argument] is to enforce a strict and total division not only between mental and bodily
activity, but between mind and nature and between human and animal. As mind becomes pure thought—pure
res cogitans or thinking substance, mental, incorporeal, without location, bodiless—body as its dualised other be-
comes pure matter, pure res extensa, materiality as lack. As mind and nature become substances utterly different
in kind and mutually exclusive, the dualist division of realms is accomplished and the possibility of continuity is
destroyed from both ends. The intentional, psychological level of description is thus stripped from the body
and strictly isolated in a separate mechanism of the mind. The body, deprived of such a level of description and
hence of any capacity for agency, becomes an empty mechanism which has no agency or intentionality within

10
time when Cartesian dualism, as philosophical construct, finds itself widely questioned across the
spectrum of green thought (e.g. Harvey, 1996; Latour, 1993; Plumwood, 1993; Braun and Castree,
1998; Castree and Braun, 2001), such dualism retains its hegemony over the methods, theory, and
narrative frames of world-historical change (see Moore, 2011a). Left ecology still tends to think of
capitalism and nature rather than capitalism-in-nature (e.g. Foster, Clark, and York, 2010; Heynen, et
al., 2007). This is the largely-unacknowledged dissonance at the core of green thought today, be-
tween the philosophical recognition that humans are a part of nature (humanity-in-nature) and the
construction of histories, recent and remote, that proceed as if human relations are ontologically
prior to the web of life (humanity and nature).

Whereas the Anthropocene argument begins with biospheric consequences and moves towards so-
cial history, an unconventional ordering of crises would begin with the dialectic between (and
amongst) humans and the rest of nature, and thence move towards geological and biophysical
change. These consequences, in turn, constitute new conditions for successive eras of capitalist re-
structuring across the longue durée. Relations of power and production, themselves co-produced with-
in nature, enfold and unfold consequences. The modern world-system becomes, in this approach, a
capitalist world-ecology: a civilization that joins the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and
the production of nature as an organic whole (Moore, 2003, 2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2013a, 2013b; also
Deckard, 2012, 2013; Leonardi, 2012; Niblett, 2012, 2013; Mahnkopf, 2012; Marley, 2013; Marley
and Fox, forthcoming; Oloff, 2012; Ortiz, forthcoming; Parenti, 2014; Weis, 2013). This means that capi-
tal and power – and countless other strategic relations – do not act upon nature, but develop through
the web of life. Crises are turning points of world-historical processes – accumulation, imperialism,
industrialization, and so forth – that are neither social nor environmental in the usual sense, but ra-
ther bundles of human and extra-human natures, materially practiced and symbolically enabled. In
world-ecological perspective, nature stands as the relation of the whole. Humans live as one specifi-
cally-endowed (but not special) environment-making species within the web of life.

The challenges involved in translating the philosophical premise of humanity-in-nature into histori-
cal methods and narrative strategies are considerable. Certainly, a core problem has been the difficul-
ty in forging a conceptual vocabulary that grasps “society” and “nature” as a singular ontological
domain, such that all human activity is simultaneously producer and product of the web of life. The
problem has been recognized for a long time, and especially since the 1970s (Birch and Cobb, 1981;
Harvey, 1993). Elsewhere, I have tackled the problem with the concept of the oikeios, signifying the
creative, generative, and multi-layered relation of species and environment (2011a). The oikeios pro-
vides a way to move beyond the narrative trope of “the” environment (as object) in favor of environ-
ment-making (as process), at all turns a co-production of specifically bundled human and extra-human
natures (Moore, 2013a). “Nature” and “society,” in world-ecological perspective, are viewed as vio-
lent abstractions that – by positing discrete ontological domains of humans without nature and na-
ture without humans – dissolve the messy, bundled, and creative co-productions of historical
change. The idea of nature as external to human relations is not, however, a magician’s trick of

itself, but is driven from outside by the mind. The body and nature become the dualised other of the mind
(Plumwood, 1993: 115).

It is certainly true that a humans had long recognized a difference between “first” and “second” natures, and between
body and spirit. However, capitalism was the first civilization to organize on this basis. For early modern materialism, the
point was not only to interpret the world but to control it: “to make ourselves as it were the masters and possessors of
nature” (Descartes, 1637/2006: 51). This sensibility was a key organizing principle upon which capitalist civilization
organized.

11
smoke-and-mirrors; it is a real historical force. Capitalism, as project, emerges through a world-praxis
that creates external natures as objects to be mapped, quantified, and regulated so that they may
service capital’s insatiable demands for cheap nature. At the same time, as process, capitalism emerges
and develops through the web of life; nature is at once internal and external. In this way of seeing,
the oikeios is a general abstraction that gains historical traction only insofar as it provides the condi-
tions for recasting the great drivers of world-historical change – foremost among them the perennial
darlings of industrialization, imperialism, capitalism, modernity – as co-produced by humans and the
rest of nature.

If capitalism as a “way of organizing nature” gets us moving in the right direction, this is a statement
more of the “what” of modernity-in-nature than of the “how.” To recast the “how” of capitalism as
world-ecology – how power, capital, and nature form an organic whole – we might turn to Mum-
ford’s notion of technics (1934). Mumford grasped that a new technics emerged in the early modern
era – crystallizing tools and knowledge, nature and power, in a new world-praxis, one that reduced
both “man” and “nature” to abstractions. For Mumford, power and production in capitalism em-
bodied and reproduced a vast cultural-symbolic repertoire that was cause, condition, and conse-
quence of modernity’s specific form of technical advance. This was not, Mumford made plain, a story
to be celebrated. It was, rather, one to be recognized, and critiqued, for its peculiarity: “The Chinese,
the Arabs, the Greeks, long before the Northern European, had taken most of the first steps toward
the machine… [T]hese peoples plainly had an abundance of technical skill at their command. They
had machines; but they did not develop ‘the machine’” (1934: 4, emphasis added). Here Mumford might have
stopped, as have so many green thinkers. But he did not. At the heart of Mumford’s argument was
the idea that machines, technics, and the alienated violence of capitalist civilization move through the
web of life. It was the

discovery of nature as a whole [that] was the most important part of that era of discovery which
began for the Western World with the Crusades and the travels of Marco Polo and the
southward ventures of the Portuguese. Nature existed to be explored, to be invaded, to be
conquered, and finally, to be understood… [A]s soon as the procedure of exploration was
definitely outlined in the philosophy and mechanics of the seventeenth century, man himself
was excluded from the picture. Technics perhaps temporarily profited by this exclusion; but
in the long run the result was to prove unfortunate. In attempting to seize power, man tend-
ed to reduce himself to an abstraction, or, what comes to almost the same thing, to dominate
every part of himself except that which was bent on seizing power (Mumford, 1934: 31, em-
phasis added)

In the absence of a world-ecological concept of technics, much of green thought conflates the Indus-
trial Revolution with modernity (Steffen, et al., 2011a, 2011b; Malm, 2013). The question of origins
is elided – not resolved – through recourse to a meta-narrative premised on the self-evidently peri-
odizing implications of rising CO2 emissions and other eco-consequential phenomena. The question
of the origins of world-ecological crisis is axiomatically reduced to a surficial representation of the
drivers and consequences of 19th century industrialization. Of course it all began with coal, says the
Anthropocene argument, because the consequences are measurable, and this is, after all, what
counts. The consequences of this approach – green thought’s consequentialist bias – are more sig-
nificant than commonly recognized. Kingsnorth puts this well:

My feeling is that the green movement has torpedoed itself with numbers. Its single-minded
obsession with climate change, and its insistence on seeing this as an engineering challenge
12
 which must be overcome with technological solutions guided by the neutral gaze of Science,
has forced it into a ghetto from which it may never escape. Most greens in the mainstream
now spend their time arguing about whether they prefer windfarms to wave machines or nu-
clear power to carbon sequestration. They offer up remarkably confident predictions of what
will happen if we do or don’t do this or that, all based on mind-numbing numbers cherry-
picked from this or that ‘study’ as if the world were a giant spreadsheet which only needs to
be balanced correctly (2011).16

I would go still further. The fetish of industrialization quickly leads to others. A stylized love affair
with machinery leads quickly to a stylized love affair with resources. This is not surprising given the
faint influence of political economy and class analysis in most green interpretations of industrializa-
tion. But even for those on the left who favor a class-relational approach, a certain fossil fuel-
fetishism appears, as when Malm suggests (2013) that we insert fossil fuels as the spark that ignites
the engine of capital (also Altvater, 2006; Huber, 2008). “Capital,” in these accounts, forms inde-
pendently of the web of life, and intervenes in “nature” as an exogenous force, variously intruding
in, and interrupting, a pre-given “traditional balance between humanity and nature” (Foster, 1994:
40). This view of capitalism as an exogenous rather than endogenous actor in relation to the web of
life has the paradoxical effect of reducing nature to a substance that can be variously protected or
destroyed (e.g. Martinez-Alier, 2002). No matter how dialectical the conception of capital, so long as
this conception unfolds within a Cartesian frame – humans without nature, nature without humans
– the analyst is compelled to engage capital’s relation with nature as “tap” and “sink” first, and only
later as the field within which modernity unfolds. When push comes to shove, the philosophy of
humanity-in-nature gets pushed aside in favor of analytical practicality (compare Harvey, 1993 with
Harvey, 2003, 2005). 17

It is always tempting to “think in terms of realities that can be ‘touched with the finger’” (Bourdieu
and Wacquant, 1992: 228). In this way of thinking – Bourdieu calls it substantialist (ibid.) – substanc-
es form prior to, and independently of, events and fields of relations, rather than developing through
environments cohered by definite patterns of events (Birch and Cobb, 1981: 79-96 and passim;
Moore, 2011a, 2011b). Substantialism, in this sense, is at the heart “human exemptionalist” social
theory (Catton and Dunlap, 1979), which isolates humanity from its extra-human conditions of re-
production. The result is a way of thinking humanity as ontologically independent – a kind of human
substance apart from the ‘substance’ of Earth/Life. Even when the professed goal is holism, sub-
stantialist dualism fetters the move towards synthesis (e.g. Foster, 2013b). Why? Largely because
human exemptionalist social theory – and this is still most social theory (e.g. Ritzer, 2005) – pre-
sumes humanity’s specificity in the absence of a historical specification of the whole: the natures
within which human activity unfolds, and to which human activity actively contributes. 18 The very

16
Lohmann advances a similar argument in relation to Bill McKibben and 350.org, which have succumbed to a “CO 2
fetish”: “As apolitical objects seemingly susceptible to manipulation, management and mastery by experts,… [these
molecules] are easily treated, fetishistically, as ‘the’ cause of global warming” (2012: 100, 106).
17
Human exemptionalism embraces humanity as “an ‘exceptional’ species… [in which] the exceptional characteristics of
our species (culture, technology, language, elaborate social organization) somehow exempt humans from ecological
principles and from environmental influences and constraints” (Dunlap & Catton, 1979: 250).
18
And yet, it would be silly to deny the signal accomplishment of a broadly “green” social theory, which is now signifi-
cant. Indeed, the present argument is possible precisely because green social theory has, in its critique of nature-blind
theorizations, made possible an argument for transcending the dualism of the “social theory and the environment” tradi-
tion (e.g. Barry, 2007; Sonnenfeld and Mol, 2011; Benton and Redclift, 1994). Nor do I intend to take lightly the
groundbreaking contributions of a (very broadly defined) “production of nature” tradition formulated by critical geogra-

13
procedure that might establish humanity’s “dialectical historicity” is in the process denied (Meszaros,
1970: 40). What Marx and Engels called “historical nature” (1970: 41) is too often missing from crit-
ical and mainstream green perspectives.

It turns out that, as with pregnancy, one cannot be a little bit Cartesian. For nature is either abstract
and external or historical and immanent to everything that humans do, including those large-scale
and long-run patterns of power and production that we call civilizations, world-systems, modes of
production, and so forth.

The conceptualization of historical natures matters quite a bit to our periodizations of capitalism.
For if nature is neither pre-given nor external, we are confronted with the thesis that historical
change is a bundled movement of human and extra-human natures. In capitalism, these bundles
assume multiple forms, foremost among those of capital, state and imperial territoriality, and class
relations. But we may also look the family of “regimes” of food (Friedmann and McMichael, 1989),
energy (Podobnik, 2006), and raw materials (Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005). Capitalism as a whole, I
wish to emphasize does not have an ecological regime, but is in its most fundamental historical a
sense a way of organizing nature. But this merely established a new set of questions around how
these specific regimes mark specific crystallizations of nature and wealth, tools and power.

On the terrain staked out by the Anthropocene argument, we might consider how the definite rela-
tions of early capitalism – co-produced in the web of life – transformed coal from a rock in the
ground to a fossil fuel. Let us be clear that the call for the relationality of humanity-in-nature does
not deny the materiality of resources. (Moore, 2011a, 2011b). Far from it! The world-ecology alter-
native argues that resources are relational and therefore historical. Geology is a “basic fact”; it be-
comes a “historical fact” through the historically co-produced character of resource production,
which unfolds through human/extra-human nexus: the oikeios (quotation from Carr, 1962; Moore,
2013a; Harvey, 1974). Geology, in other words, co-produces power and production as it bundles
with (equally co-producing) human patterns of power and production – hence the re-bundling of
capitalist relations across the later 18th century North Atlantic as the energy regime shifted from
charcoal and peat to coal. Specific geological formations, under definite historical circumstances, can
become once object of human activity and subject of historical change. This allows us to see civiliza-
tions moving through, not around, the rest of nature.

Geology becomes geo-history through definite relations of power and production; these definite rela-
tions are geographical, which is to say they are not relations between humans alone. (Any geograph-
ical point of view unfolds from the premise that human activity is never ontologically prior to its
geographical conditions and consequences.) At the risk of putting too fine a point on the matter,
geology does not “directly determine” the organization of production (Bunker and Ciccantell, 2005:
25), precisely because the organization of production is not directly determined at all, but rather co-

phers (e.g. Harvey, 1974, 1996; Smith, 1984; Braun and Castree, 1998; Swyngedouw, 1996). Here too we find arguments
that enable the post-Cartesian formulation of a theory of historical change, the heart of social theory: whose contribution is to
facilitate the interpretation of historical change in the modern world. What is striking, for all the pioneering labors of
green theorists, is the weakness of this tradition in destabilizing the Cartesian premise that social relations are ontologi-
cally prior to the web of life. This is of course far more than a theoretical problem. It is problem, at its core, of narrative
language, of methodological bias (within humanity or simultaneously within and between modes of humanity-in-nature),
of theory as the designator of decisive strategic relations and the ontology of those relations.

14
produced. Articulations of production and reproduction are mediated through the oikeios, especially
its dialectic of organic life and inorganic environments (Birch and Cobb, 1981; Moore, 2013a). 19

In the case of coal, we might note the revolution in English coal production began not in the eight-
eenth century but in the first half of the sixteenth century. If the Anthropocene begins not in 1800
but in the long sixteenth century, we begin to ask much different questions about the drivers of
world-ecological crisis in the 21st century. The onset of the English coal revolution, c. 1530 (Nef,
1932: 19-20, 36, 208), directs our attention to the relations of primitive accumulation and agrarian
class structure, to the formation of the modern world market, to new forms of commodity-centered
landscape change, to new machineries of state power. This line of argument only appears to return
to “social relations” because the legacy of Cartesian thought continues to tell us that state formation,
class structure, commodification, and world markets are about relations between humans… which
they are not. These too – states, classes, commodity production and exchange – are bundles of human
and extra-human nature. They are processes and projects that reconfigure the relations of humanity-
in-nature, within large and small geographies alike.

From this standpoint, to stick with coal, we can say that geology co-produces energy regimes as his-
torically-specific bundles of relations; geology in this view, is at once subject and object. The view
that geo-material specificities determines social organization does not highlight geology;s role in his-
torical change; it obscures it. This is so for two reasons, tightly-linked. First, to say that geology de-
termines historical change is to confuse geological facts for historical facts. Second, to conflate geo-
logical facts for historical facts is to engage in environmental determinism of a specific kind: the
“arithmetic” of Nature plus Society.

But Nature plus Society does not add up. Perhaps most significantly, environmental determinisms,
however partial or sophisticated they may be, leave intact the Cartesian order of things, in which
society (humans without nature) and nature (environments without humans) interact rather than
interpenetrate. The alternative, to see geology co-producing historical change through the oikeios,
allows us to see energy regimes – even whole civilizations – moving through, not around, the rest of
nature. The definite relations of early capitalism – co-produced in the web of life – transformed coal
from a rock in the ground to a fossil fuel. Material flows and their particularities do matter. But their
historical significance is best understood through a relational rather than substantialist view of mate-
riality, one in which the flows of resources, circuits of capital, and the struggles of classes and states
form a dialectical whole.

19
Bunker’s great insight was that the history of capitalism is centrally about space and nature. This was foundational
proposition (Bunker, 1984; Bunker and Ciccantell, 1997). However, for Bunker, Nature remains condition and conse-
quence, but not directly constitutive in the co-production of capital and empire. The result has been an oscillation be-
tween social and environmental determinisms; the consequence of saying that extra-human natures are “theoretically
independent” of social relations is that social relations are conceptualized as theoretically independent of nature (Ciccan-
tell and Bunker, 2002: 70). Material specificity – of wood, of coal, of oil – is taken as a closure rather than as a point of
departure for the co-production of historical change. The Innis-Bunker position, taken as empirical assertion rather than
methodological opening, therefore blunts the argument for nature’s agency before it can reach its greatest potential. This
potential is not found in a retro-fitted environmental determinism, but rather in the coevolution of world commodity
production and exchange as ways of organizing nature, product and producer of epoch-making transformations in life,
land, and labor.

15
Bunker’s insight that material particularities shaped industrialization as much as industrialization
shaped the rest of nature is an important corrective to the prevailing wisdom (Bunker and Ciccantell,
2005). For much of the green left – one finds little fundamental difference with the Anthropocene
argument – industrialization is a matter of society acting upon the earth, drawing upon fossilized
carbon and spewing forth all manner of nasty effluents. This substantialist view of industrialization,
and its conflation with capitalism, has encouraged a powerful metabolic fetish, one reproduced even
by radical scholars in the critique of “fossil capitalism” (e.g. Altvater, 2006). In this scheme of things,
“material flows” are given ontological priority over the relations that create, enfold, and develop
through these flows. The ontological relationality of material flows and class relations (inter alia) is
denied as a matter of research practicality. Cartesian practicality, as in the logic of metabolic fet-
ishization, pushes the movements of classes and capitals from the analysis altogether (e.g. Fischer-
Kowalski and Haberl, 1997, 1998; Haberl, et al., 2007, 2011)! For radical and mainstream scholars
alike, there is a tendency to invoke an exogenous nature that creates an “ahistorical and apolitical
bottom line.” This is the view of “nature [as] external, [in which] the laws of thermodynamics are
immutable… [O]ver time, [the argument holds] human actions will ‘wind down’ the earth’s energy
and resources” (Braun, 2006: 198).

The metabolic fetish, and its manifold resource- and energy-determinisms, is easy to justify quantita-
tively. More energy used, more minerals extracted and metals produced, more urban-industrial
workers and fewer agrarian producers, and so much more. For this reason, perhaps, most environ-
mentally-oriented historians of the Industrial Revolution have preferred to analyze energy (rather
than, say, parliamentary enclosures) with its allure of easy mathematization (e.g. Wrigley, 2010; Sief-
erle, 2001; Malanima, 2006). But numbers are tricky things. They easily entrain a powerful empiricist
logic that can blind its handlers to plausible alternatives that might enfold quantitative data within
world-relational processes.20 Gould elegantly reminds us that “numbers suggest, constrain, and re-
fute; they do not, by themselves, specify the content of scientific theories” (1981: 106). More poign-
ant still, the confusion of numbers for explanation tends to ensnare “interpreters… [in the logic of]
their own rhetoric. They [tend to] believe in their own objectivity, and fail to discern the prejudice
that leads them to one interpretation among many [others] consistent with their numbers” (ibid.; also
Elden, 2006: ch. 3).21 Thus do we have an Anthropocene line of thought that has given rise to many
possible periodizations, with the exception of the one interpretation most consistent with its assess-
ment.

This interpretation is the turning point of the long sixteenth century.

THE ORIGINS OF CAPITALISM: FROM ECOLOGY TO WORLD-ECOLOGY

Capitalism in 1800 was no Athena, bursting forth, fully grown and armed, from the head of a car-
boniferous Zeus. Civilizations do not form through Big Bang events. They emerge through cascad-
ing transformations and bifurcations of human activity in the web of life. This cascade finds its
origin in the chaos that followed the epochal crisis of feudal civilization after the Black Death (1347-
53), followed by the emergence of a “vast but weak” capitalism in the long sixteenth century
(Moore, 2003a, 2007; Wallerstein, 1974; Malowist, 2009; quotation from Braudel, 1961). If we are to

20
A paradigm instance is such enfolding is on offer in Silver (2003).
21
Let me be clear that quantification is not only useful but necessary to any broadly world-ecological, or post-Cartesian,
method. But quantification, as such, cannot be regarded as a superior form of data in any a priori fashion – distinct ana-
lytical tasks demand distinct forms of data collection and analysis.

16
put our finger on a new era human relations with the rest of nature it was in these centuries, cen-
tered geographically in the expansive commodity-centered relations of the early modern Atlantic. At
the risk of putting too fine a point on the matter: the rise of capitalism after 1450 marked a turning
point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature, greater than any watershed since
the rise of agriculture and the first cities – and in relational terms, greater than the rise of the steam engine.
That dramatic consequences and quantitative expansions eventually follow in the wake of new, epoch-
making relations will not surprise any historian. But even the immediate consequences were dramatic.

The rise of capitalism after 1450 was accompanied, and made possible, by an epochal shift in the
scale, speed, and scope of landscape transformation across the geographical expanse of early capital-
ism. The long 17th century forest clearances of the Vistula Basin and Brazil’s Atlantic Rainforest oc-
curred on a scale, and at a speed, between five and ten times greater than anything seen in medieval
Europe (Moore, 2007, 2010b; Darby, 1956; Williams, 2003). Feudal Europe had taken centuries to
deforest large expanses of western and central Europe; after 1450, comparable deforestation oc-
curred in decades, not centuries. To take but one example, in medieval Picardy (northeastern
France), it took 200 years to clear 12,000 hectares of forest, beginning in the 12th century (Fossier,
1968: 315). Four centuries later, in northeastern Brazil at the height of the sugar boom in the 1650s,
12,000 hectares of forest would be cleared in a single year (Moore, 2007: ch. 6). These are precious
clues to an epochal transition in the relations of power, wealth, and nature that occurred over the
course of the long medieval crisis and the expansion that commenced after 1450.

A modest catalogue of the early capitalism’s transformations of land and labor, from the 1450s to
the eve of the Industrial Revolution, would include the following commodity-centered and –
influence changes: 1) the agricultural revolution of the Low Countries (c. 1400-1600) – motivated by
the crisis of sinking peat bogs resulting from medieval reclamation – which allowed three-quarters of
Holland’s labor force to work outside of agriculture (van Bavel, 2001, 2010; Brenner, 2001; van
Dam, 2001; van Zanden, 2003); 2) the mining and metallurgical revolution of Central Europe, thor-
oughly transforming the political ecology of forests across the region (Nef, 1964; Vlachovic, 1963;
Moore, 2007: ch. 2); 3) the first signs of the modern sugar-slave nexus in Madeira, whose rapid rise
and decline (1452-1520s) was necessitated by rapid deforestation (Moore, 2009, 2010d); 4) Madeira’s
crisis was followed quickly by the sugar frontier’s movement to São Tomé (1540s-1590s) and the
first modern, large-scale plantation system, which allowed one-third of the island to be deforested by
1600 and encouraged large-scale slave revolts (Vansina, 1996; Solow, 1987); 5) northeastern Brazil
displaced São Tomé at the commanding heights of the world sugar economy after 1570, from which
issued the first great wave of clearing Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest, unfolding at an unprecedented pace
(Schwartz, 1985; Dean, 1995); 6) meanwhile, the African “slaving frontier” shifted from the Gulf of
Guinea to Angola and the Congo in the later sixteenth century, marking the first of several major
expansions in the slave trade (Miller, 1988); 7) Potosí emerged as world’s leading silver producer
after 1545, and then again with its epochal restructuring after 1571, on the heels of the exhaustion of
Saxon and Bohemian silver mining, itself conditioned by deforestation, declining ore quality, and
labor unrest (Bakewell, 1984; Moore 2010e); 8) the exhaustion of central European mining and met-
allurgy also afflicted iron and copper production by 1550, which favored English iron output (to
1620), and above all, the rise of Swedish iron and copper (Sundberg, 1991; Hildebrand, 1992; King,
2005); 9) American silver depended on European timber, and so Potosi’s efflorescence was accom-
panied by the shift in the forest products frontier from Poland-Lithuania towards southern Norway
in the 1570s followed by renewed movements into the hinterlands of Danzig (again) by the 1620s,
and thence towards Königsberg, Riga and Viborg in successive turns (Moore, 2010b); meanwhile 10)
the rise of the Vistula breadbasket in the 1550s, exporting cheap grain to the maritime Low Coun-
17
tries, was followed by the agro-ecological exhaustion of Polish market-oriented agriculture in the
1630s (Szcygielski, 1967; Moore, 2010b); 11) any shortfalls from the Polish agro-ecological down-
turn were quickly made good by the English agricultural revolution, which made England the bread-
basket of Europe by 1700, albeit on agro-ecological basis that showed signs of exhaustion after the
1760s as productivity stagnated (Overton, 1996; Jackson, 1985); 12) English forests were rapidly
appropriated during the 17th century expansion, such that pig iron output in 1620 would not be ex-
ceeded until 1740 even with rising demand, met by imports, especially from Sweden, where iron
devoured the forests with such speed that even Sweden’s sylvan abundance yielded before the on-
slaught of the iron commodity frontier (King, 2005; Brinley, 1993; Fouquet, 2008: 59-60; Mathias,
1969: 450; Hildebrand, 1992); 13) the stagnation of English iron output after 1620 also stimulated an
iron commodity frontier movement into Ireland, which, along with the manufacture of staves for
export, quickly reduced the Emerald Isle’s forest cover from 12.5 percent to just two percent, such
that little iron would be produced by the mid-17th century (Kane, 1844: 3; Kinahan, 1886-87;
McCracken 1971: 15, 51, and passim); 14) the Dutch energy regime, centered on the extraction of
domestic peat as “cheap fuel,” reached its highpoint in the 17th century, but the easily-tapped zones
were quickly exhausted, and peat output declined sharply after 1750 (de Zeeuw, 1978: 23 and pas-
sim); 15) in southeast Asia, the Dutch imposed a new colonial regime between the 1650s and 1670s,
securing a monopoly over the clove trade during the 1650s through the large-scale removal of “un-
authorized” clove trees, the large-scale relocation of indigenous populations from the interior into
new colonial administrative units suitable for labor drafts, and the establishment of new shipyards
outside the Batavian core (Boxer, 1965: 111-112; Zerner, 1994; Boomgaard, 1992a; Peluso, 1992: 36-
43); 16) from the early 17th century, wetlands across the Atlantic world were reclaimed, often by
Dutch engineers, from England to Pernambuco and Suriname, Rome to Göteborg (Wilson, 1968:
78–81; Rogers, 2005: 51; Richards, 2003: 193-241; Boomgaard, 1992b); 17) the great burst of Iberi-
an and Italian expansion during the “first” sixteenth century (c. 1450-1557) produced a relative, but
widespread, exhaustion of Mediterranean forests – beginning earlier for the Italians and Portuguese,
somewhat later for Spain – and especially their capacity to supply quality shipbuilding timber, by the
early the 17th century (Braudel, 1972; Cipolla, 1976; Moore, 2010a; Wing, 2012; Lane, 1933); resulting
in 18) the relocation of Spanish shipbuilding to Cuba, where one-third of the fleet was built by 1700,
and the more modest yet significant expansion of Portuguese shipbuilding in Salvador da Bahia and
Goa (Parry 1966; Funes Monzote, 2008; Morton, 1978; Boxer, 1969: 56-57); this was followed in the
18th century by 19) the emergence of major shipbuilding centers and significant frontiers for timber
and naval stores in North America during the 18th century (Perlin, 1989; Williams, 2003); 20) the
relentless geographical expansion of forest product and shipbuilding frontiers were bound up, in no
small measure, with the increasingly vast fleets of herring, cod, and whaling vessels that searched and
devoured the North Atlantic’s sources of maritime protein (Richards, 2003: 547-616; Poulsen, 2008);
21) the search for fish was complemented by the search for furs, which had only a modest economic
weight in world accumulation, but whose steady advance (and serialized exhaustion of fur-bearing
animals) across North America (Siberia too), stretching by the 18th century into the expansive Great
Lakes region, encouraged significant infrastructure of colonial power (Leitner, 2005; Wolf, 1982:
158-194; Richards, 2003); 22) the steady expansion of sugar demand and the exhaustion of Bahia’s
sugar complex by the mid-17th century favored successive sugar revolutions of the West Indies, from
Barbados in the 1640s to Jamaica and St. Domingue in the 18 th century, leaving a trail of African
graves and denuded landscapes in its wake (Watts, 1987); 23) human ecologies too were transformed
in many ways, not least through the sharply uneven “cerealization” of peasant diets – and the “meat-
ification” of aristocratic and bourgeois diets – within Europe after 1550 (Braudel, 1981: 190-199;
Komlos, 1990, 1998); 24) the resurgence of Mexican silver production in the 18th century and the
attendant deforestation of already-thin Mexican forests (Bakewell, 1971; Studnicki-Gizbert and
18
Schechter, 2010); 25) the revolution in English coal production from 1530 (Weissenbacher, 2009;
Nef, 1932); and, perhaps most significantly, 26) the epoch-making “Columbian exchange,” as Old
World diseases, animals, and crops flowed into the New World, and New World crops, such as po-
tatoes and maize, flowed into the Old World (Crosby, 1972, 1986).

Perhaps, one might object, these landscape transformations were nevertheless the output of an es-
sentially preindustrial civilization? This is the common sense point of departure for the Anthropo-
cene argument. Let us take industrialization as consisting of two decisive moments of capitalist tech-
nics. One is industrialization as a shorthand for the rising mass of machinery and inputs relative to
labor time – Marx’s rising technical composition of capital (1981: chapter eight, esp. 244-45). It
might be more fruitful to call these processes mechanization. The other is industrialization as a short-
hand for standardization and rationalization, prefiguring, in embryonic form, the assembly line and
Taylorism of the twentieth century.22 If this rough-and-ready definition holds, we are hardly short of
examples in the three centuries before Watt’s rotary steam engine: the printing press, perhaps the
earliest “great leap forward” in labor productivity with a 200-fold increase after 1450, such that 20
million printed books were produced by 1500 (Febvre and Martin, 1976: 186; Maddison, 2005: 18);
the sugar mill in the colonies, successively boosting labor productivity, and the sugar refinery in the
metropoles (Daniels and Daniels, 1988; van der Woude, 2003; Moore, 2007); very large blast furnac-
es in iron-making (Braudel, 1981: 378-379); new ships, such as the Dutch fluyt, leading to a fourfold
increase in labor productivity in shipping and likely a comparable advance in shipbuilding (Unger,
1975; Luccassen and Unger, 2011); a new shipbuilding regime, led by the Dutch, which combined
Smithian specialization (simplified tasks), the standardization of parts 23, organizational innovation
(integrated supply systems), and technical change (sawmills to displace costly skilled labor) combined
to triple labor productivity (Wilson, 1973; van Bochove, 2008: 196; de Vries, 1993; Noordegraaf,
1993)24; the rapid expansion of iron implements in agriculture (Bairoch, 1973); the mercury-
amalgamation process in New World silver production (Bakewell, 1987); the elaboration and diffu-
sion of screw-presses (Kellenbenz, 1974); the saigerprozess in the Central European copper-silver met-
als complex, and after 1540, the rod-engine for effective drainage, which reached Sweden by 1590
(Blanchard, 1995; Hollister-Short, 1994); the quick diffusion of the “Saxony Wheel” in textile manu-
facturing, trebling labor productivity, accompanied by the diffusion of fulling and napping mills,
advancing productivity still further (Munro, 2002: 264); the doubling of the number of water mills,
already widely deployed in the medieval era, doubled in the three centuries after 1450, and tripling of

22
This shorthand applies not only to machineries but also the rationalization of human and extra-human relations neces-
sary to work these machines – Taylor’s time-and-motion studies in the early 20th century (1914; also Braverman, 1974)
are one indication of the symbolic coding, mapping, and “rational” reorganizations of human/extra-human relations
attendant upon capitalism’s successive industrial revolutions, but hardly new to the 20 th century. Consider, for example,
meatpacking’s “dis-assembly lines” in the antebellum United States (Cronon, 1991), or the rationalization of labor pro-
cesses and landscapes necessary for the early modern sugar plantation (Mintz, 1985; Moore, 2007). Moving beyond the
immediate process of production, one can see a long line of such rationalizations in play across the time and space of
early capitalism – suggested in various if partial ways by Weber’s formal rationality (1947), Foucault’s biopolitics (2003),
and Sombart’s thesis on the “art of calculation” double-entry bookkeeping (1915), a far from exhaustive list! As I will
argue later in this essay, these moments are constitutive of the law of value as a historical process constituted through
the dialectics of abstract social labor and abstract social nature.
23
“In constructing the vessels [in the Dutch Republic by 1600] there was some standardization of design, parts, and
building methods. The busses were all very much alike, while the fluitschip [fluyt]… was designed on simple lines… Such
ships were put together by methods which faintly foreshadowed the modern assembly line” (Heaton, 1948: 275, emphasis added).
24
The new sawmill technology spread rapidly and “could be found in Brittany by 1621, Sweden in 1635, Manhattan in
1623, and soon after Cochin, Batavia, and Mauritius” (Warde, 2009: 7; also Davids, 2003; Moore, 2010b; Boomgaard,
1992a).

19
aggregate horsepower (Debeir, et al., 1991: 90-91, 76); the extraordinary multiplication of spring-
driven clocks (Landes, 1983)… Nor does this exhaust the list.

What do these transformation suggest? A general observation would point towards an qualitative
shift in relation between land and labor, production, and power. If some of the foregoing catalogue
of early capitalist industrializations look more like a quantitative amplification of medieval develop-
ments, as a totality they embodied a qualitative shift. And if many of these transformations fit nicely
into Marx’s distinction between manufacturing and machinofacture, some (the sugar plantation,
shipbuilding, large-scale metallurgy) bore more than a passing resemblance to the latter. In my view,
any adequate explanation of this qualitative shift must recognize that there was a transition from
control of land as a direct relation of surplus appropriation to control of land as a condition for ris-
ing labor productivity within commodity production. This transition was of tremendously uneven
and messy. (Aren’t they always?) Hence, where peasant cultivation persisted across early modern
Europe, there was no dramatic rupture with the medieval rhythm of landscape transformation (e.g.
Plack, 2005) – except where, as in seventeenth century Poland, peasants were directly pushed towards sylvan zones by
cash-crop cultivation (Blum, 1957; Moore, 2010b).25 Wherever primary commodity production penetrat-
ed, however, the tempo of landscape transformation accelerated. Why should this be? Although the
pace of technical change did indeed quicken – and the diffusion of techniques even more so – in the
“first” sixteenth century (1450-1557), I do not think this was enough to compel such an epochal
shift in landscape transformation. In my view, this shift has a lot to do with the inversion of the la-
bor-land relation and the ascendance of labor productivity as metric of wealth, unfolding on the
basis of appropriating cheap natures. It is here that we glimpse the tenuous and tentative formation
of capitalism as a regime of abstract social labor, and the disciplines of socially necessary labor-time.

TOWARDS PROVISIONAL SYNTHESIS: THE ORIGINS OF THE CAPITALOCENE

I have said these transformations are clues to an epochal transition. But clues to what kind of transi-
tion, and to what sort of capitalism? Let me offer two working propositions, one explanatory, the
other interpretive. First, these transformations represented an early modern revolution in labor
productivity within commodity production and exchange that was dialectically bound to a revolution
in strategies of global appropriation.26 Crucially, this labor productivity revolution in the zone of
25
Cash-crop agriculture is, of course, a different story with a spectrum of market-dependent farmers transforming land-
scapes at a rapid pace, from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in locales as diverse as the maritime Low Countries and
Madeira (Brenner, 2001; Moore, 2009, 2010d).
26
Our conceptual language on this point is still imprecise. “Labor productivity” is here understood in Marx’s terms of
value composition and the rate of exploitation. Hence, rising labor productivity may involve workers producing more
average commodities for the same wages (or even, for a few, rising wages, as during the Fordist “productivity-wages”
pact). Alternatively, it may involve workers producing the same number of average commodities for lower wages, a
movement expressed in the language of unit labor costs. To some degree, this is captured in Marx’s distinction between
absolute and relative surplus value. But this distinction is too often hardened into categorical difference. At a minimum,
I would suggest that early capitalism mobilized not technical innovation in production and coercive and symbolic inno-
vation in lengthening the working day, but also pursued ingenious strategies of appropriating cheap natures, at little or
no cost, in such a way as to reduce de facto unit labor costs (value composition). In such situations – here I think of Nor-
wegian forests or Polish grain or even African slaves at the end of the sixteenth century – the appropriation of “natural
fertility” (Marx) may act like an increase in relative surplus value.
Finally, the problem of labor productivity – especially in early modern capitalism – is thorny. One problem is empir-
ical: much of our best evidence is for physical labor productivity, which only indirectly corresponds to the production of
surplus value. Another is the sectoral- and nationalist-bias to labor productivity studies, which do not add up to a sys-
temwide labor productivity estimate. Thus, if one includes the Americas, the direct and indirect implications for labor
productivity growth are gigantic. A third difficult is the study of labor productivity absent the conceptualization of the

20
commodification was rendered possible by a revolution in the technics of global appropriation –
including appropriation within Europe.27 This was manifested not only in the immediate practices and
structures of European imperialism. More fundamentally, the “new” imperialism of early modernity
was impossible without a new way of seeing and ordering reality. One could conquer the globe only
if one could see it (Ingold, 1993; Pratt, 1992). Here the early forms of external nature, abstract space,
and abstract time enabled capitalists and empires to construct global webs of exploitation and ap-
propriation, calculation and credit, property and profit, on an unprecedented scale (Merchant, 1980;
Lefebvre, 1991; Postone, 1993; Crosby, 1997; Pickles, 2004; Sombart, 1915; Chaunu, 1979). The
early modern labor productivity revolution turned, in short, on the Great Frontier (Webb, 1964),
understood simultaneously in land/labor and symbolic registers. The fact that early capitalism relied
on global expansion as the principal means of advancing labor productivity and facilitating world
accumulation reveals the remarkable precocity of early capitalism, not its premodern character. This
precocity allowed early capitalism to defy the premodern pattern of boom and bust (Brenner, 1985;
Goldstone, 2002): there would be no systemwide reversal of commodification after 1450, not even
during the “crisis” of the 17th century.28 Why? In sum, because early capitalism’s technics – its crystalli-
zation of tools and power, knowledge and production – were specifically organized to treat the appro-
priation of global space as the basis for the accumulation of wealth in its specifically modern form:
capital, the substance of which is abstract social labor.

This takes us to a second proposition, which turns on our interpretive frame. The three revolutions
we have identified – of landscape transformation, of labor productivity, of the technics of global ap-
propriation – suggest a revision of thinking the law of value in ways both orthodox and revolution-
ary. Crudely put, I think Marxists have understated the significance of value relations in the modern
world-system. First, a vast but weak law of value crystallized during the long 16th century. I would
begin with a certain mis-recognition of the law of value. In this, value-relations have been defined as
a phenomenon reducible to the “economic” form of abstract social labor. But such an interpretation
significantly understates the epoch-making influence of value relations. The law of value – under-
stood as a gravitational field exerting durable influence over the long-run and large-scale patterns of
the capitalist world-ecology – is not an economic phenomenon alone, but a systemic process with a piv-
otal and decisive economic moment (abstract social labor). Second, the moment of value accumula-
tion (as abstract labor) is historically materialized through the development of scientific and symbol-
ic regimes necessary to identify, quantify, survey, and otherwise enable not only the advance of
commodity production but also the ever-more expansive appropriation of cheap natures.

“Cheap nature” in the modern sense encompasses the diversity of human and extra-human activity
necessary to capitalist development but not directly valorized (“paid”) through the money economy.

reproduction of labor-power – largely uncommodified in this period – and the appropriation of uncommodified extra-
human natures.
27
But “Europe” is easily reified (Wallerstein, 1974: 51); its geography in the “first” sixteenth century comprised western
and central Europe as far north as the Danish Sound, scarcely reaching much beyond the Elbe except for scattered
German colonies in the old Hanseatic zone (e.g. Danzig, Konigsberg, Reval).
28
One of the great fetishes of economic history is the primacy of the category of “economic growth,” which may not be
the most useful approach for comprehending the nexus capital accumulation/systemwide commodification in the early
modern era. This is the trap into which Pomeranz (2000) falls in charting the “Great Divergence,” which may be read as
a very broad accounting of a very broad notion of “productive forces” between East and West around 1800. In my view,
this misses the point entirely. Europe may well have fared poorly relative to China in this accounting, but the new con-
figuration of wealth, power, and production around a globalizing technics in the Atlantic world entailed a qualitative
shift, such that capital accumulation, and the production of surplus value (labor productivity), proceeded much more
vigorously than the twentieth century models of economic growth would have it.

21
The decisive historical expression of Cheap Nature in the modern era is the Four Cheaps of labor-
power, food, energy, and raw materials. These Four Cheaps are the major way that capital prevents
the mass of capital from rising too fast in relation to the mass of appropriated cheap nature – when
the delivery of such cheap natures approaches the average value composition of world commodity
production, the world-ecological surplus falls and the pace of accumulation slackens. The centrality of
cheap nature in the endless of capital can, then, be adequately interpreted only through a post-
Cartesian frame that understands value as a way of organizing nature. In this, the law of value is co-
produced through the web of life. We cannot make sense of value through a Cartesian sorting of
“labor and nature” – commonplace in left green thought (e.g. Clark and York, 2005). Rather, be-
cause value relations encompass a contradictory unity of exploitation and appropriation heedless of
a Cartesian divide, only an analysis that proceeds from essential unity of humanity-in-nature can
move us forward. The present argument, then, is a brief for such a post-Cartesian – I would call it
world-ecological – reading of value. The goal is to focus our attention on the relations of the oikeios
that form and re-form capitalism’s successive contradictory unities of the exploitation of labor-
power (paid work) and the appropriation of a global zone of reproduction (unpaid work) from the
family to the biosphere.

This line of thinking and investigation led me to an unexpected argument. I cannot help but see a
new law of value in formation in these centuries, expressed by two epoch-making movements.29 One
was the proliferation of knowledges and symbolic regimes that constructed nature as external, space
as flat and geometrical, and time as linear (the field of abstract social nature). The other was a new
configuration of exploitation (within commodification) and appropriation (outside commodification
but in servitude to it). In this latter (the production and accumulation of value), we have the para-
dox; in the former (abstract social nature) we have clues to how this paradox has been resolved his-
torically. On the one hand, capitalism is a civilization that turns on the zone of commodification and
the exploitation of labor-power within it. On the other hand, strategies of commodification and ex-
ploitation can work only to the extent that uncommodified natures are somehow put to work, for
free or very low cost. In sum, capitalism must commodify life/work but depends upon the “free
ride” of uncommodified life/work to do so. Hence, the centrality of the frontier. Historically, this
paradox has been resolved partly through brute force, gunboat diplomacy, shock doctrines, and all
the rest. But force is an expensive proposition. However necessary, brute force has been insufficient
on its own to unlock and to mobilize the wealth of nature for the long-run accumulation of capital.
Beginning with the Iberians clear through to the long 20th century, one of the first things great em-
pires and states do is establish new ways of mapping, categorizing, and surveying the world

29
Of course every civilization is cohered by one of another way of configuring human and extra-human relations. We
may debate the best language for the relational core that coheres this or that civilization, which I take to be relatively
durable pattern of power and production over long-time and large space. My understanding of “law” aligns with Marx’s
Hegelian reading: law as a general historical tendency that exerts a long-run influence over the historical development of
modes of production and reproduction in a given civilization. As with Marx’s other “laws,” these are broad historical
tendencies that operate not in spite of countervailing tendencies, but because of these. (This is what distinguishes a historical-
relational method from an ideo-typical one.) For this reason, I have likened capitalism’s law of value to a gravitational field,
drawing in all manner of external phenomena in contingent fashion. Thus historical capitalism is indeed “structurally
variant” (Arrighi, 2004) but relationally invariant, insofar as the logic of capital encourages the remaking of the world
into interchangeable units – not only economic but also political and otherwise (e.g. Scott, 1998; Foucault, 2003) – ame-
nable to facilitating the endless accumulation of capital. The exhaustion of that logic of capital as historical strategy is of
course not only a matter of biophysical breakdown, or accumulation crisis, but also of class struggles that challenge the
praxis of endless commodification.

22
(Cañizares-Esguerra, 2004; Barnes and Farish, 2006).30 These are strategic expressions of the produc-
tion of abstract social nature – to which we turn in the latter half of this essay – and they have been
crucial because they allow for the frontier-led appropriations of cheap nature that make possible an
otherwise self-consuming strategy: commodification. Coercively-enforced, to be sure, the world-
praxis of appropriating cheap natures (humans included) so that some other natures (only some hu-
mans included) could be exploited has provided the decisive condition for advancing labor produc-
tivity within the commodity system (the field of abstract social labor). I do not think these two
movements of abstract social labor and abstract social nature exhaust the possibilities; but I cannot
escape the conclusion that they provide at once a minimal and indispensable basis for unpacking the
history of capitalism as a way of organizing nature.

It is to the question of abstract social nature and the limits of capitalism that we turn in Part II.

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