And So It Is
The ruthless exploitation of Nature - and large segments of the human population that inhabited it - constitute, for the environmental historian, Jason W. Moore, the key factor in the development of capitalism. From the fifteenth century on, he notes, “capitalism was built on excluding most humans from Humanity – Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and even many white skinned men - Slavs, Jews, and the Irish.” They were excluded from Humanity, but included in Nature, which made them, like the colonial landscapes in which most lived, vulnerable to the centuries of exploitation that are the foundation of the modern world. Moore also points out that nearly all women were (and are) mobilized to provide unpaid labor - cleaning, cooking, and laundering - and are engulfed in the processes of social reproduction - birthing, nurturing, and the socializing of the young - essential to an economic system that has but one purpose: the endless accumulation of capital.
It was within modernity, an age initially rationalized and enabled by the scientific revolution, that a novel approach to the amassing of wealth developed. What came to be known as capitalism favored productive investment over the ownership of land mired in the social obligations of feudalism. This new economy was built on the backs of slave or low wage laborers, who produced commodities such as timber, grain, gold, silver, sugar, cotton, coal, oil, and steel. It was metastasized by the consumption of what Moore calls ‘Cheap Nature’ – which represents a devaluing of all that is not explicitly human centered, and which permits the gross exploitation of the natural world and the oppression of its mostly non-white human populations.
Modernity is coincident with the long march towards a ‘global racial empire’ – a term coined by Olufemi Taiwo, a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Georgetown. He believes that it represents not just the historical artifact of a planetary social and economic system constructed by the imperial conquests of European powers organized in terms of racial hierarchies, but also our present reality: where skin-tone determines those who have rights, property, and wealth, and those who do not.
The concept of using extra-territorial lands to procure staples for homeland consumption or world trade began in Portugal when agents of the state colonized Madeira. In 1420, Europe’s first commodity frontier was established on this remote island in the North Atlantic. The initial harvest was the timber for which the island was named, then the newly cleared lands were used for grazing, then grain, and finally, around mid-century, they were planted with the ultimate cash-crop of its time, sugar. Financed by international bankers through the auspices of the crown, and populated with slaves from the Canary Islands, by century’s end the island had become the world’s leading producer of sugar. The slave driven plantation system pioneered on the island was then exported to the Americas, Asia, and Africa where it underpinned the development of global capitalism.
On Madeira, the great boilers used in processing the cane were fueled by locally sourced wood. The prodigious amounts of timber required led to the almost total deforestation of the island’s accessible land and the eventual collapse of the island’s sugar boom in the 1520’s. Like the refining of sugar, many industrial processes required heat to convert the raw materials extracted from an ever-widening commodity frontier into commercial products. In this were planted the first seeds of global warming, as carbon-based fuels such as wood, charcoal, coal, and oil were successively used to power the industrial revolutions that transformed the production of goods.
Modernity provided the frame for the emergence of the global racial empire which, in turn, relied on the wealth building properties of capitalism. But there have been, within this same period, alternative social and economic models –notably in communist and socialist states – but also in various experiments in cooperative living or communes that thrived in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These ideas were revived in the 1960’s, at a time when there was a growing awareness of the great injustices inherent within Western society. It was the great political and social upheavals of the 1970’s that initiated a shift to the right, and it was then that the West was gulled into the false prosperity promised by neoliberalism, as Reagan and Thatcher established the ideology, originally espoused by Friedrich Hayek, on both sides of the Atlantic.
America de-industrialized, sending its blue-collar jobs to Asia, and amidst growing unemployment either enlisted or incarcerated many of its minority population. The global racial empire then found its highest purpose in attempting to coopt the rest of the world into a neoliberalism based on the ruthless enrichment of a tiny minority of the excessively rich, whilst undercutting the most basic services provided to its citizens. Nations across the West, but most egregiously in the U.S.A., continue to support this malignant system with specious promises of democracy, the tawdry trappings of nationalism, and a testosterone-laced militarism.
Beginning in the 1990’s, the issue of climate change began to emerge in most Western countries. Increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere had begun with the spike in the consumption of coal during Britain’s nineteenth century industrial revolution. But it is the ‘Great Acceleration,’ customarily dated from the mid-twentieth century into the present, a period characterized by surging population levels, expanded energy use, and an extraordinary surge in CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere, that has most alarmed scientists and citizens around the world. This is a phenomenon directly connected both to the legacy of the global racial empire and its ongoing predations.
Olufemi Taiwo has proposed that reparations for these egregious acts might also be instrumental in ameliorating the climate crisis - which now has its greatest impact on the global poor and people of color. Like an echo of the original colonial oppression, the violence of extreme weather now falls most heavily on the global south and the precariat sacrificed in the deregulated market economies of the West.
These reparations, which will likely remain a theoretical remedy, smack of Western noblesse oblige and may, in any case, be irrelevant at a time when the world is being remade along terms dictated by the great Eurasian powers of Russia and China. Both nations have embraced modernity with their own takes on capitalism and have established, along with their allies in the global south, a viable counterbalance to the West. As this region confirms its economic supremacy, several powerful nations within it will likely establish a multi-polar array of global political and military might.
The World is experiencing a new era of global, multi-modal transport and trade networks. Over the last two decades, pioneering trade and political alliances are establishing roads, rail lines, pipelines, ports, and sea routes that span Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and Russia. Major initiatives are being developed through the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) which contains 57 states throughout the Arab, Asian, and African regions. Member countries are developing the Transport Corridor Europe – Caucasus – Asia (TRACECA), the Trans-African Highway 1 (TAH1), and the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), that connects Russia – Azerbaijan – Iran – India. A freight railway link between Vienna and the Chinese goods hub of Chengdu in Sichuan, connects Europe to the New Silk Road, a part of China’s massive Belt and Road Initiative. This web of post-colonial trade routes is collectively designed to stand in opposition to those forged by the global racial empire.
China, in an overt example of neo-colonialism, has revived its historic links to East Africa, and is steadily improving infrastructure within the continent. Chinese built railways reach deep into the continent’s sub-Saharan interior; oil and gas pipelines run down its eastern seaboard from China’s primary port of entry, Mombasa; and 200,000 Chinese nationals are currently employed in the joint development of Africa’s abundant resources. Its investments in infrastructure and personnel are clearly a geo-political project designed to advance China’s global strategy, yet advantages now redound to African nations in ways unlikely under the global racial empire’s old colonial model.
As China achieves parity with the U.S. in military strength, Western hegemony, instantiated as USNATO, will be at an end, and the Atlantic alliance’s preoccupations will inevitably become parochial rather than global. The West may then shrink to the boundaries of the old classical world that huddled for so long around the Mediterranean and extend only to sundry islands in the North Sea, the ancient Norse archipelago in Russia’s shadow, and across the Atlantic, to a beleaguered North America. Seven hundred and fifty U.S. military bases spread around the globe will be surplus to requirements, while the West’s remote outposts such as Japan and Australasia are geographically destined to come increasingly under China’s thrall.
And so it is, that a West that has oppressed and exploited so much of the world, will become, in turn, oppressed and the exploited - its ill-gotten wealth, now concentrated in the grasping hands of the so very few, will slowly, over many generations, be traded away to the global south.
You could think of it as reparations.