Nature's Evil

It was the thirty-third year of the new era, although nobody knew that then. Harvests failed throughout the empire; there was a financial crisis in the capital and unrest in the colonies. The emperor Tiberius gave the banks 100 million sesterces so that they could distribute loans to landowners. Prices continued to rise even faster. In the capital, ‘The high price of corn almost brought on an insurrection,’ wrote Tacitus. In Jerusalem, Jesus was put to death after he had started a revolt of the poor against the local moneymen – one of his followers, Matthew, was a tax collector. But in the same year the richest man in the empire, Sextus Marius, who owned silver and copper mines in Spain, was also struck by disaster. Sextus was ‘accused of incest with his daughter and thrown headlong from the Tarpeian rock.’ Tiberius ‘kept his gold-mines for himself, though they were forfeited to the State,’ commented Tacitus. 1 A few years later the new emperor, Caligula, faced another food crisis. The Praetorian Guard preferred to kill him rather than do battle with the enraged populace over the remaining supplies of corn. Decades passed, and another emperor, Vespasian, introduced a tax on latrines. ‘Money doesn’t stink,’ he said.

The leading characters in this book are unusual: peat and hemp, sugar and ore, cod and oil. Raw materials of different sorts are at once elements of nature, components of the economy and engines of culture. Civilised life is built out of them. Their specific characteristics explain the conduct and experience of societies through history. The state has a special relationship with them. This is the main subject of my book. As we follow the story of these commodities we will encounter many booms and even more busts. From earthly flints to lunar soil, people have learnt how to use many things that they they originally had no clue about; exchanging these products according to need and want, they have involved in this circulation more and more different sorts of matter. This is a general process of commodification , but it worked in vastly different ways, depending on the nature of the commodity. Every crisis in the supply of raw materials leads to the ruin of some and the enrichment of others. The state accumulates grain so that, in a time of famine, it can distribute it to the people; people hoard gold, hoping to hide their wealth from the state; and everybody counts on order and stability. But when a famine, epidemic or insurrection happens, resources are redistributed according to new rules which nobody could have predicted. When Tiberius killed the mine-owner in order to give loans to the landowners, he saved the property rights of some by destroying those of others. Rulers knew only too well what the money changers didn’t realise: that different sorts of capital aren’t equal even if their exchange value is the same.

The owner of a silver mine might have more sesterces than all the landowners in the empire. But an individual producer of silver can be declared an enemy, his mines can be occupied and his capital seized, while there are so many producers of grain that it would be suicidal to make enemies of them. Silver is a topical resource : it creates wealth from a particular point on the earth for a comparatively low input of labour. Grain, on the other hand, is a diffused resource , demanding much land and a big investment of labour. 2 The difference in space- and labour-intensity is huge, but the sums involved, calculated in monetary units, may be equivalent. Still, silver is no more equal to grain than it is equal to air. When there’s a shortage of silver, the rich suffer. When there’s a shortage of grain, the poor suffer. When there’s a shortage of air, we all suffer. Money changers think of money as if it were a universal equivalent; rulers rely on the qualitative differences between commodities. Different natural resources have different political characteristics. * It may well be that silver sesterces didn’t stink. But if you smell a dollar bill or a rouble close up, as if you were smelling a flower, you will catch a whiff of oil from both.