Nature's Evil

1   Goody, Metals, Culture and Capitalism . 2   Needleman and Needleman, ‘Lead poisoning and the decline of the Roman aristocracy’. 3   Childe, Man Makes Himself ; Drews, The End of the Bronze Age . 4   Graeber, Debt . 5   Muhly et al., ‘Iron in Anatolia and the nature of the Hittite iron industry’; Pense, ‘Iron through the ages’; Hedeager, Iron Age Myth and Materiality . 6   Collins, ‘Mineral enterprise in China’; Hartwell, ‘A cycle of economic change in imperial China’; Lynch, Mining in World History . 7   Steinmetz, The Richest Man Who Ever Lived . 8   Fors, The Limits of Matter . 9   Jardine, Worldy Goods . 10  Roper, Martin Luther ; Schilling and Johnston, Martin Luther . 11  Cole, The Potosí Mita ; Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty ; Lane, Potosí ; Barragán, ‘Extractive economy and institutions’. 12  Nriagu, ‘Mercury pollution’; Lynch, Mining in World History ; Lane, Potosí . 13  De Vries, The Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis ; Fagan, The Little Ice Age ; Parker and Smith, The General Crisis of the 17th Century ; Koch et al., ‘Earth system impacts of the European arrival’; Blom, Nature’s Mutiny . 14  Koch et al., ‘Earth system impacts of the European arrival’. 15  Principe, ‘Alchemy restored’; Smith, The Business of Alchemy ; Bauer, The Alchemy of Conquest ; Fors, The Limits of Matter . 16  Cressy, Salpeter ; Buchanan, Gunpowder, Explosives and the State ; Robertson, ‘Reworking seventeenth-century saltpetre’. 17  Robertson, ‘A gunpowder controversy in the early Royal Society’; Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump . 18  McCune, ‘Mining the connections’; Heckscher, An Economic History of Sweden , pp. 85–7. 19  Fors, The Limits of Matter , pp. 84–90. 20  Bartlett, ‘Cameralism in Russia’. 21 Tribe, ‘Baltic cameralism?’. 22  Small, The Cameralists ; Wakefield, The Disordered Police State ; Raskov, ‘Kameralizm knig’; Zubkov, ‘Kameralizm kak model’’. 23  Ziolkowski, German Romanticism and its Institutions , p. 18. 24  Adam, The Political Economy of J. H. G. Justi ; Wakefield, The Disordered Police State . 25  Kolchin, ‘Obrabotka zheleza’; Serbina, Krest’y anskaia zhelezodelatel’naya promyshlennost’ . 26  Boterbloem, Moderniser of Russia ; Yurkin, Andrei Andreevich Vinius . 27  Ogarkov, Demidovy ; Hudson, The Rise of the Demidov Family . 28  Pashkov, ‘Inostrannye spetsialisty’; Yurkin, ‘Genrikh Butenant’; Kiselev, ‘State metallurgy factories’. 29  ‘Sozdanie pervoi v mire universalnoi parovoi mashiny’.

PART TWO

HISTORY OF IDEAS

From Adam Smith to contemporary ‘neoclassicists’, the main thrust of economic theory has focused on the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, which raised both the haves and the have-nots to a new level of prosperity. From Richard Cantillon to Immanuel Wallerstein, the alternative tradition of social sciences has asserted that this imperial exchange has ruined the suppliers of raw materials and enriched the organisers of labour. In the twenty-first century all these contradictory but equally plausible certainties suddenly look obsolete. Throughout the century of oil, wealth had been increasingly connected to resources – moreover, they themselves have become wealth. But, at a time when the human world is running short of air, civilisation is again changing its resource platform.