Periodizing the Capitalocene as Polemocene
Militarized Ecologies of Accumulation in the Long Sixteenth Century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2021.1045Keywords:
History of Capitalism, Military History, Capitalocene, New World, world- ecologyAbstract
Lewis and Maslin explore geological markers for the beginning of the “Anthropocene”-beginning, in their periodization, in either 1492 (naming the birth of capitalism as the cause of planetary crisis) or 1945 (naming elite-driven militarization as its cause). In this essay, I argue for a synthesis of these two dynamics, locating both the birth of capitalism and a transformation of elite-driven militarization in the conquest of the New World during the Long Sixteenth Century. As such, I propose narrating planetary history through a “capitalocene as polemocene,” “the age of capital as an age of war” framework.
References
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. 1989. Before European Hegemony: The World System A. D. 1250-1350. Oxford, UK. Oxford University Press.
Balter, Michael. 2013. “Archaeologists Say ‘The Anthropocene’ is Here-But it Began Long Ago” in Science. 340(6130): 261-262.
Baronsky, Anthony D. et al. 2011. “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?” in Nature. 471: 51-57.
Barrett, Ward. 1990. “World Bullion Flows, 1450-1800” in The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750.” edited by James D. Tracey. New York, NY. Cambridge University Press.
Bentancor, Orlando. 2017. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. Pittsburg, PA. University of Pittsburg Press.
Black, Jeremy. 1991. A Military Revolution?: Military Change and European Society, 1550-1800. London, UK. MacMillan Press.
_____. 2002. European Warfare, 1494-1660. New York, NY. Routledge.
Bonneuil, Christophe and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2017. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London, UK. Verso.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production. New York, NY. Columbia University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Loïc J. D. Waquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago, IL. University of Chicago Press.
Chwałczyk, Franciszek. 2020. “Around the Anthropocene in Eighty Names: Considering the Urbanocene Proposition” in Sustainability. 12(11): 44-58.
Cipolla, Carlo M. 1965. Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700. London, UK. Minerva Press.
Clendinnen, Inga. “‘Fierce and Unnatural Cruelty:’ Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico” in Representations. 33(Special Issue: The New World): 65-100.
Cook Jr., Weston F. 1993. “The Cannon Conquest of Nasrid Spain and the End of the Reconquista” in The Journal of Military History. 57(1):43-70.
Crevecoeur, Isabelle, Marie-Hélène Dias-Meirinho, Antoine Zazzo, Daniel Antoine & François Bon. 2021. “New Insights on Interpersonal Violence in the Late Pleistocene Based on the Nile Valley Cemetery of Jebel Sahaba” in Scientific Reports. 11(9991).
Crosby, Alfred W. 1989. “A Renaissance Change in European Cognition” in Environmental History. 14(1/2): 19-32.
Crutzen, Paul J. and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “The Anthropocene” in IGBP Global Change News. 41: 17-18.
De Bruijn, Niels. 2012. Global Effects of the Military Revolution in the New World?: A Study of Military Innovation and Spanish Warfare in the Sixteenth Century. MA Thesis. Medieval and Early Modern History, Leiden University.
Del Valle, Ivonne. 2019. “A New Moses: Vasco de Quiroga’s Hospitals and the Transformation of ‘Indians’ from ‘Bárbaros’ to ‘Pobres’” in Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization. edited by I. del Valle, A. More, and R. S. O’Toole. Nashville, TN. Vanderbilt University Press.
Fagan, Brian. 2019. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300-1850. New York, NY. Basic Books.
Federici, Silvia. 2004. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Brooklyn, NY. Autonomedia.
Foley, Stephen F. et al. 2013. “The Paleoanthropocene-The Beginnings of Anthropogenic Environmental Change” in Anthropocene. 3: 83-88.
Foster, John Bellamy. 2009. The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet. New York, NY. Monthly Review Press.
Gould, Kenneth A. 2007. “The Ecological Costs of Militarization” in Peace Review. 19(3): 331-334.
Gradstein, Felix M., J. G. Ogg, Mark D. Schmidt, and Gabi M. Ogg eds. 2012. The Geologic Time Scale 2012. Elsevier.
Grove, Richard. 2005. “Revolutionary Weather: The Climatic and Economic Crisis of 1788-1795 and the Discovery of El Niño” in Sustainability or Collapse?: An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth, edited by R. Costanza, L. J. Graumlich, and W. Steffen. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press.
Guilmartin, John F. 1974. Gunpowder and Galleys. Cambridge. UK. Cambridge University Press.
Gunder Frank, Andre. 1998. ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley, CA. University of California Press.
Haraway, D. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene. Durham, NC. Duke University Press.
Hassig, Ross. 1988. Aztec Warfare. Norman, OK. University of Oklahoma Press.
Jones, David S. 2016. “Death, Uncertainty, and Rhetoric” Pp. 16-49 in Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, edited by Catherine M. Cameron, Paul Kelton, and Alan C. Swedlund. Tucson, AZ. University of Arizona Press.
Kicza, John E. 1992. “Patterns of Overseas Spanish Expansion” in The William and Mary Quarterly. 49(2): 229-253.
Koch, Alexander, Chris Brierly, Mark M. Maslin, Simon L. Lewis. 2019. “Earth-Systems Impacts of the European Arrival and the Great Dying in the Americas After 1492” in Quaternary Science Reviews. 207: 13-36.
Laakkonen, Simo, Richard Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo, eds. 2017. The Long Shadows: An Environmental History of the Second World War. Corvallis, OR. The University of Oregon Press.
Lewis, Simon L. and Mark A. Maslin. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene” in Nature. 519: 171-180.
Lewontin, Richard and Richard Levins. 1997. “Organism and Environment” in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 8(2): 95-98.
_____.1998. “How Different Are the Natural and Social Sciences?” in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 9(1): 85-89.
Linebaugh, Peter and Marcus Rediker. 2013. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, and Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston, MA. Beacon Press.
Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London, UK. Verso.
Mann, Michael E. 2002. “Little Ice Age” in The Earth System: Physical and Chemical Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, edited by MacCracken and Perry. Hoboken, NJ. John Wiley and Sons.
Mao Tse Tung. 1938. “Problems of War and Strategy” in Selected Works: Volume II. Marxist Internet Archive.
“Mapas de las villas de San Miguel y San Filipe de los Chichimecas y el pueblo de San Francisco Chamacuero.” 1580. From Biblioteca Digital Real Academia de las Historia. Retrieved 23 January 2021. (https://bibliotecadigital.rah.es/es/catalogo_imagenes/descargar_imprimir_form.do?path=1022580&posicion=1&interno=S&destino=..%2Fcatalogo_imagenes%2Fgrupo.do%3Fpath%3D1022580%26amp%3Binterno%3DS%26amp%3Bpresentacion%3Dpagina%26amp%3Bposicion%3D1%26amp%3Bregistrardownload%3D0)
Marx, Karl and Fredrich Engels. 1932/ 1970. The German Ideology. New York, NY. International Publishers.
Marx, Karl. [1867] 1990. Capital: Volume I. New York, NY. Penguin.
_____. [1894] 1993. Capital: Volume III. New York, NY. Penguin.
McBrien, Justin. 2016. “Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene” in. Anthropocene or Capitalocene: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by J. W. Moore. Oakland, CA. PM Press.
McMichael, Phillip. 1990. “Incorporating Comparison Within a World-Historical Perspective: An Alternative Comparative Method” in American Sociological Review. 55(3):385-397.
McNally, David. 1993. Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism, and the Marxist Critique. London, UK. Verso.
Miller, Joseph A. 1988. “The Demography of Slaving” in The Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730-1830. Madison, WI. University of Wisconsin Press.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London, UK. Verso.
Moore, Jason W. 2000. “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy: Commodity Frontiers, Ecological Transformation, and Industrialization.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center). 23(3): 409-433.
_____. 2009. “‘Amsterdam is Standing on Norway’ Part I: The Alchemy of Capital, Empire and Nature in the Diaspora of Silver, 1545-1648” in Journal of Agrarian Change. 10(1):33-68.
_____. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London, UK. Verso.
_____. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA. PM Press.
_____. 2017a. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis” in The Journal of Peasant Studies. 44(3): 594-630.
_____. 2017b. “The Capitalocene, Part II: Accumulation by Appropriation and the Centrality of Unpaid Work/ Energy.” The Journal of Peasant Studies. 45(2): 237-279.
_____. 2018. “Slaveship Earth & the World-Historical Imagination in the Age of Climate Crisis.” PEWS News: Newsletter of the American Sociological Association’s Political Economy of the World-Systems Section. Spring 2018: 1-4.
_____. 2019. “Capitalocene and Planetary Justice” in Maize. 49-54.
Mukerji, Chandra. 1984. “Visual Language in Science and the Exercise of Power: The Case of Cartography in Early Modern Europe.” Studies in Visual Communication 10(3): 30-45.
Mumford, Lewis. [1934] 2010. Technics and Civilization. Chicago, IL. University of Chicago Press.
O’Connell, Robert L. 1989. Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression. Oxford, UK. Oxford University Press.
Parenti, Christian. 2016. “Environment-Making in the Capitalocene: Political Ecology of the State.” In Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, edited by J. W. Moore. Oakland, CA. PM Press.
_____. 2020. Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder. London, UK. Verso.
Parker, Geoffrey. 1976. “The ‘Military Revolution’ 1560-1660-A Myth?” The Journal of Modern History. 48(2): 196-214.
_____. [1988] 1996. The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press.
—. 1991. “Europe and the Wider World, 1500-1700: The Military Balance” in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: States Power and World Trade, 1350-1750 edited by James D. Tracey. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press.
Prescott Webb, Walter. 1954. “The Great Frontier: A Disappearing Boom” The Georgia Review. 8(1):17-28.
Rai, Milan. 1993. “Columbus in Ireland” Race and Class. 34(4): 25-34.
Raudzens, George. 1995. “So Why Were the Aztecs Conquered, and What Were the Wider Implications?: Testing Military Superiority as a Cause of Europe’s Pre-Industrial Colonial Conquests” War in History. 2(1): 87-104.
Rediker, Marcus. 2008. The Slave Ship: A Human History. New York, NY. Penguin.
Roberts, Michael.1995 (1956 Original). “The Military Revolution, 1560-1660” in The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Transformation of Early Modern Europe, edited by Clifford J. Rogers. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Rogers, Clifford J. 1995. “The Military Revolution in History and Historiography” in The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Transformation of Early Modern Europe, edited by Clifford J. Rogers. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Ruddiman, William F. 2013. “The Anthropocene.” Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences. 41: 45-68.
Russell, Edmund. 2001. War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press.
Santiago-Valles, Kelvin. 2006. “‘Bloody Legislations,’ ‘Entombment,’ and Race Making in the Spanish Atlantic: Differentiated Spaces of General(ized) Confinement in Spain and Puerto Rico, 1750-1840.” Radical History Review. 96: 33-57.
_____.2016. “Forced Labor in Colonial Penal Institutions Across the Spanish, U.S., British, French Atlantic, 1860s-1920s” in On Coerced Labor: Work and Compulsion After Chattel Slavery, edited by M. van Der Linden and M. Rodríguez García. Brill.
Satia, Priya. 2018. Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution. Stanford, CA. Stanford University Press.
Silver, Beverly J. and Eric Slater. 1999. “The Social Origins of World Hegemonies” in Chaos and Governance in the World System. Minneapolis, MN. University of Minnesota Press.
Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken and David Schecter. 2010. “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to 1810.” Environmental History. 15: 94-119.
Tenace, Edward. 2012. “Chichimecas War (1540-1590)” in The Encyclopedia of War, edited by Gordon Martel. London, UK: Blackwell.
Teschke, Benno. 2003. The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations. London, UK. Verso.
Tilly, Charles. 1992. Coercion, Capital, and European States: AD 900-1992. London, UK. Blackwell.
Toscano, Alberto. 2008. “The Open Secret of the Real Abstraction.” Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture, and Society. 20(2): 273-287.
Tucker, Richard P. and Edmund Russell. 2004. Natural Enemy, Natural Ally: Towards an Environmental History of War. Corvallis, OR. University of Oregon Press.
Tucker, Richard P., Tait Keller, J. R. McNeill, and Martin Schmid, eds. 2018. Environmental Histories of the First World War. Cambridge, UK. Cambridge University Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. [1974] 2011. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Berkeley, CA. University of California Press.
_____. 1980. The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750. Berkeley, CA. University of California Press.
_____. [1983] 2011. Historical Capitalism. London, UK. Verso.
Wayne Powell, Phillip. 1944. “Spanish Warfare Against the Chichimecas in the 1570’s.” The Hispanic American Historical Review. 24(4): 580-604.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
- Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
- The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
- Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
- The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
- Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
- The Author represents and warrants that:
- the Work is the Author’s original work;
- the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
- the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
- the Work has not previously been published;
- the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
- the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
- The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.
Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link.
