Nature's Evil

1   Beer, An Inquiry into Physiocracy ; Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy ; Martin, Dairy Queens ; Whatmore, Republicanism and the French Revolution . 2   Røge, Economistes and the Reinvention of Empire ; Popkin, ‘Saint-Domingue, slavery, and the origins of the French Revolution’. 3   Radishchev, A Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow , p. 157; emphasis added. 4   Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe , p. 223; Røge, ‘Legal despotism and enlightened reform in the Îles du Vent’; Herencia, ‘Le séjour du physiocrate Lemercier de La Rivière en Russie’. 5   Albertone, National Identity and the Agrarian Republic ; Albertone, ‘Physiocracy in the eighteenth-century America’. 6   Keynes, ‘Thomas Robert Malthus’, in Collected Writings , Vol. 10, pp. 71–108, at p. 86. 7   Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population , pp. 68, 114. 8   Bashford and Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus . 9   Said, ‘Jane Austen and empire’. 10  Malthus, Principles of Political Economy , pp. 348–9. 11 Ibid., 349–50. 12  Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa , pp. 101–4. 13  Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population , p. 373. 14  Keynes, ‘Thomas Robert Malthus’, pp. 86, 88, 100. 15  Jevons, The Coal Question , pp. 178–9. 16 Ibid., p. 174. 17  Keynes, ‘William Stanley Jevons’, in Collected Writings , Vol. 10, pp. 109–60, at p. 109. 18  Keynes, ‘Thomas Robert Malthus’, p. 86. 19  Keynes, ‘Commodity policy’, in Collected Writings , Vol. 27, pp. 105–200. 20 Snyder, Black Earth .

PART 3

HISTORY OF ENERGY

Political economists argued about the relations between labour and capital, about consumption and accumulation, about property rights and the role of the state. They did not prepare us for the paradoxical effect of the resource economy – the vicious circle in which the state monopolises trade, regulates consumption and expands extraction. Ignoring economic theories, a resource-dependent state reinterprets the sphere of political action for its own benefit. What constitutes sovereign politics for this state goes well beyond disciplining its subjects and differentiating between friends and enemies. Its politics is about the relations between natural resources and human capital – shortage and surplus, exhaustion and renewal, nationalisation and sterilisation, geographical variability and platform shifts. Like a medieval king, such a country has two bodies, one corporeal and the other sacred: the first body is made up of its people, the second of commodities taken from nature. Merging and dividing these two bodies at will, the state develops its divine powers .

ELEVEN

Peat

Human appropriation of energy began with technologies that used the sun for nourishment and the wind for movement. Sailing ships were far superior to ox carts, sleigh routes or camel caravans. Windmills crushed grain, and waterwheels turned the shafts of industrial machines. The renewable energy of water helped to master the Old World, the renewable energy of the wind enabled the discovery of the New World. But then the technologies of Northern Europe – the draining of marshland and the construction of canals – first revealed to the world the decisive significance of fossil energy.

Holland had a rather cold climate. In the celebrated canvases of the Dutch masters we see snowy, frozen canals: this was the Little Ice Age. These same canals brought warmth to the Dutch people. The country was densely populated, and there was no commercial timber left by the middle of the seventeenth century. In the process of draining fields and digging canals, millions of tons of peat were extracted, delivered to houses and factories, and burnt in stoves. This process led to a dramatic transformation of the natural environment.