Nature's Evil

Powered by waterwheels and then steam engines, early factories were more productive than ‘cottage industries’. But the Industrial Revolution coexisted with this proto-industry for many decades. 19 Turning the island metropole into a huge factory which imported raw matter and exported goods was the very essence of mercantilism. The central link in this new system was a dynamic mechanism that I call the mercantile pump . This pump translated the requirements of long-distance trade into transformations inside the peasant family. It pumped the water out of commodities, drying them out so that trade turned from the local circulation of raw and perishable products, which could be consumed only on the spot, into the long-distance trade of dry goods. It sucked land and labour out of subsistence farming and pumped it into the production of goods ready for export. It used addictive colonial goods to incentivise rural workers and pump out their work, which was converted into cash crops and the products of cottage industry. Enclosures had deprived the peasants of the land that fed them, but their villages now had colonial stores in which a day’s wages could be exchanged for dry, sweet (or sometimes salty) foreign foods. The mercantile pump replaced the raw with the dry, the local with the imported, the home-made with the shop-bought. Exposing subsistence farming to internal and global markets, the mercantile pump sucked out labour, replacing it with addiction.

The mercantile pump worked like Robert Boyle’s air pump, one of the great achievements of the Royal Society in London in the mid-seventeenth century (see chapter 6 ). Robert Boyle’s father was Richard Boyle, the lord high treasurer of Ireland, who colonised a big part of the country for England. His own plantation in Munster was a model for other developments, and it made him fabulously rich; appointed to the highest office in Ireland, he lent money to the royal family. British plantations in the recently conquered Ireland were created by the same people who founded the colonies in Virginia. The Irish cattle herders drove huge herds of horned beasts from one pasture to another, a tradition that was not far from the transhumance of sheep in Spain. The English did not need this perishable meat – they wanted to cultivate wheat and experimented with tobacco. The planters forced the Irish to live a settled life, to sow wheat and to convert to Protestantism; they also financed a mass resettlement of Scots and English to Ireland. These plans of commodification would have been successful had they not been sabotaged by the humble potato. Having no trade value of its own, the potato supported the growth of the local population. Escaping the mercantile pump, the Irish peasants appeared lazy and indolent; but they were fruitful and multiplied. The wet, perishable potato helped them to avoid dry, tradable wheat.

Still, Richard Boyle made his fortune by leasing out his land to the newly arrived settlers. He lost everything during the Irish Rebellion of 1641, but his sons recuperated the plantations. Robert Boyle invested his funds – the converted labour of Irish peasants – in the Royal Society and in his own inventions. 20 Later, Thomas Newcomen built on Boyle’s experiment to create his steam machine. The encounter between the air pump and the mercantile pump engendered the Industrial Revolution. But the great question of labour’s relation to nature remained unresolved.

Having lost the war in America, the British Empire kept the jewels in its crown – the sugar islands in the Atlantic. The radicals were horrified by the military defeat and disappointed in the commercial profits from the colonies. 21 Free trade would allow England to receive the same raw materials without having to pay for an army and a navy. But ‘the new colonial system’ hardly differed from the mercantilist tradition. After the Treaty of Paris (1783), imperial interests transferred to India and Canada, although this didn’t prevent the empire acquiring new colonies in Australia and Africa. Then the bad news came: the sovereign states of America purchased Louisiana from France in 1801, allowing Napoleon to finance his preparations for war. The consequences of this development cost the mother country more dearly than all her colonies put together.

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