The Vortex: An Environmental History of the Modern World

PART I

ESSENTIALS

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE STUFF.

As Europeans moved beyond the confines of their continent, a number of grand narratives came into play that bestowed the endeavor with a sense of glory. In these readings, Europeans sought to spread the Christian gospel, escape inhospitable conditions, learn about the world, liberate unfree people, or bring the achievements of Western modernity to those who seemed unable to develop them on their own. Historians continue to disagree on how to view the ideas that underpinned Europe’s global outreach, or whether to take them seriously at all, but they are generally unanimous that there was also something else: material benefits. Take the commodities out of the last five hundred years of world history, and it does not make sense anymore. It is unlikely that Europeans would have embarked on such a long and complicated foray beyond their ancestral homes if it had not been for stuff: food to store and eat, metals to make coins or weapons, timber and fibers for factories, and trinkets to show and impress. When all was said and done, there was always something to bring back home.

Some of the stuff was actually new, like corn and potatoes. Other stuff was probably known but unfamiliar in most of Europe, like sugar: some Mediterranean regions were cultivating sugar cane before the rise of transatlantic colonialism, but most people of medieval Europe satisfied their sweet tooth, to the extent that they had one, with honey. And then there was the stuff that everybody knew, like silver, where supplies suddenly exploded. The materials of modernity were not always new, but they were produced in new ways and available in unprecedented amounts, and a different world evolved as new modes of production took shape.

The following five chapters explore this transformation through two commodities (silver and sugar), one transport link (the Canal du Midi), one political doctrine (sustainable forestry), and one activity (shipbreaking in Chittagong). In other words, this section is about how the people of the modern era obtained metals, food, and timber, how they mobilized these commodities and some other things, and how they got rid of waste. People had done all these things for ages, but modernity offered new ways to deal with these issues, and these new ways were what today’s software developers call a killer application: the modern ways were never the only ones at hand, and certainly not the best ones for everyone involved, but sooner or later, people all over the world found these new ways irresistible. The transformation was, after all, about essentials: about how people eat, build, move around, and how they deal with leftovers. It’s not everything that life is about, but few people make it through life without these things.

The new ways drew on existing practices, but that should not nourish doubts about their novelty. Late medieval mining in Central Europe paved the way for Potosí, but in the same sense that the Inca roads paved the way for the autobahn. The new ways were of a different quality in their mode of operation and in their consequences for peoples and environments. More specifically, they were different in scope, scale, and speed, and had notable similarities as to when these differences came into play over the course of the modern era. By and large, it was scope that came first, then scale, then speed.

Potosí’s silver provides a case in point. The precious metal traveled between America, Europe, India, and China and turned a transcontinental exchange that had previously been a trickle into a defining current of the emerging world economy. Potosí’s Cerro Rico also produced far more silver than any mine in Europe. Economies of speed never really came to the Andean highlands, as the deposits were long past their prime when steam engines and other industrial technologies transformed mining and shifted the focus of primary resource extraction from precious metals to bulk commodities. These innovations also brought another shift in scale, and the mines of the age of industry had outputs that dwarfed even the rich veins of Potosí. They also produced toxic legacies, and they are not always buried in the ground: Po-tosí’s legacy shows in the background concentration of mercury in the global atmosphere. Containing toxic substances in abandoned mines is an ongoing challenge, and the material leftovers will almost certainly outlast cultural memory despite the best efforts of pertinent authorities. Potosí’s silver mountain survives in somewhat diminished form to this day and enjoys protection under the UNESCO World Heritage program. Mass destruction mining, a twentieth-century technology, would have literally eaten up the Cerro Rico.

It is no accident that it was the city rather than the mountain that became famous all over the world. Resource extraction hinged on urban hubs that provided technological and commercial services, plus services for men who did a tough and dangerous job. A good part of the new towns of the modern era owed their existence to primary resources. It could be anything from a shabby gold-rush town to a world-class city like Potosí. The town was oozing richness in its prime, but the splendor always had an air of fragility, and not just because the fate of mining towns was invariably tied to a finite mineral resource base. Order was a relative thing in bustling mining towns, and the sources of trouble ranged from perennial labor conflicts to illicit trade. An extra dose of testosterone did not help, though mining was not always the province of men: a good part of Potosí’s workforce was female.

Potosí produced a precious resource, but it also consumed resources like food and mercury for ore processing. The same held true for the sugar plantations in the Americas: they were nodes in multiple networks, or that is how the world economy categorized them, for one of the crucial resources, slaves, was arguably more than an economic unit. Just like Andean silver mining, sugar production drew on established practices from agricultural technologies to the use of unfree labor, but it catapulted them into a new orbit. Large technological artifacts for processing, division of labor, externalization of human and environmental costs, and the categorical need to make it all run as smoothly and quickly as possible—sugar plantations were harbingers of industrial production regimes. They were also ephemeral on the ground. For those who owned a plantation, sugar was about getting rich quickly, another novelty of modern production methods. Unlike other commodity chains before the dawn of modernity, the network of sugar was a centripetal system where wealth accumulated at certain points.

Sugar, initially a luxury item for European elites, turned into a mass-produced essential. More precisely, it was a commodity that changed the meaning of essentials: there was no tradition of sugar consumption in most of Europe, and yet people in many different countries fell for the sweet life—a transcultural convergence of tastes that critics of the global food system have targeted more than once. Consumers have replied with everything from low-carbohydrate diets to apathy, but few have embarked on a return to premodern modes where people drew a significant share of their food from working the land with their own hands. Most consumers rely on faceless food systems to provide them with their daily bread or whatever tastes and pockets demand. In the Western world, private gardens are usually hobbies rather than necessities. On Caribbean plantations, slave gardens were means of survival, and slaves were not alone in seeking food-ways that offered a buffer against disaster. The modern food system was a gamble, but those with money could act as if it did not matter to them.

The Caribbean lost its pivotal place in the global sugar economy in the nineteenth century, as competition from beet sugar and substitutes like saccharine entered the market. Just like cane sugar, sugar beets brought an intensification of land use, and production of organic resources became increasingly concentrated in specific regions. Substitutes mirrored a growing role of scientific knowledge in food production. But there was more to the world of sugar. Protectionist policies and subsidies were also part of the picture, and they were intrinsically connected to the new production regime. It was about the new capital intensity of food production: advanced producers shouldered huge investments that called for safeguarding from whatever authority was willing to listen or get bribed. David Ricardo suggested that free trade would allow entrepreneurial people to exploit comparative advantages, but the new sugar economy was also breeding corporate interests that were more interested in profits than principles. The modern food system has the ability to feed an unprecedented number of mouths, but it has also created stark inequalities on different levels, and whether it is the best of all possible worlds is open to debate.

The globality of silver, sugar, and many other commodities relied on the transformation of world transport, but the corresponding infrastructures were more than mere service providers. The Canal du Midi was cutting-edge technology, seventeenth-century style, but it was also an act of state, an instrument of royal power that brought absolutist power more forcefully into a peripheral region, a military project, and a transformative agent for the Languedoc. Like many infrastructure projects, the canal brought a multitude of mobilizations from goods and information to political hierarchies and pathogens. The economics of transport projects depended strongly on the specific circumstances and on what counts as an economic benefit, but projects were more than tools of business. Connecting places could take place in many different forms and with many different results, and the outcomes of modern infrastructure projects range from Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to the state of Panama.

A tax farmer, Pierre-Paul Riquet, built the Canal du Midi, and his descendants ran it for profit until the French state took over in 1897. But construction was really a group project: Riquet’s success was due to support from vernacular knowledge and a loyal workforce that Riquet gained by treating workers exceptionally well. Construction was also ongoing. Vauban rebuilt major stretches of the Canal du Midi after Ri-quet’s death, and repairs have been a necessity ever since: infrastructures collapse in the absence of maintenance. Traffic arteries have their resilience, but like human arteries, they are not static, and the same holds true for their social, economic, and biological environments. Today’s boom in pleasure boating in the southwest of France is only the latest outcome of the perennial reinvention of the Canal du Midi.

Absolutism framed the Canal du Midi as evidence of human power over nature, but this was more about royal representation than the environment. The powers of early modern states held greater material significance in another realm: the doctrine of sustainable forestry turned woodlands from a habitat with a multitude of uses into assets that served the financial interests of the state and other owners. The ensuing conflicts over control of the woods raged for generations, and they only petered out—to the extent that they did—with growing urbanization. Forest conflicts continue to rage in the Global South, and the legacy of state control is an obstacle rather than an opportunity in regions such as the Sahel, but the fate of forestry in post-Socialist Eastern Europe also shows the fragility of state power closer to the place where sustainable forestry was born. Early modern states forged a deep connection between statehood and forestry, but the alliance also worked in reverse.

A growing profession of foresters underpinned the states’ power grab, but academic authority showed the same combination of ironclad authority and fragility. Sustainable forestry moved from control over forestry to managing and improving its biology, which created plenty of follow-up problems that disciplines like applied entomology tried to keep in check. To a significant extent, forest research was repair science, an attempt to manage problems that would never have emerged without human meddling. The reductionism of specialist expertise was invariably at odds with the biological complexity of woodlands, and academics did not fail to notice, but it was one thing to envision holistic expertise and another to actually foster it. The father of applied entomology in Germany, Karl Escherich, dreamed about mixed forestry, but when it came to appointing a successor for his chair, he was eager to recruit another specialist. The committee found one among Escherich’s assistants.

Monoculture was practice rather than dogma in the woods, and to the extent that academic expertise provided guidance, it offered improvised makeshifts rather than ultimate solutions. Hans Carl von Carlowitz did not mean to build an academic profession when he cited the wood scarcity trope, but the concept was crucial for the rise of modern forestry. It drew attention away from the significant cognitive and conceptual problems of academic expertise, and it galvanized attention in a most helpful way: Why quibble about details in the face of a horror scenario? Sustainable forestry was a shock doctrine (see chapter 25.2, Crisis Mode), except that it thrived on an enduring myth rather than a momentary disaster.

All modes of resource extraction entailed waste, as did subsequent stages of production, and that was a growing challenge in a supercharged global economy. There were plenty of preexisting routines concerning recycling and reuse, but they were overwhelmed by the sheer quantities of stuff that industrial societies spewed out since the nineteenth century. At the same time, the heft of materiality called for efforts to deal with the leftovers, and the final chapter traces the changing constellations of municipalities, war economies, and private entrepreneurship over the past 150 years. Shipbreaking in Chittagong is the latest, globalized stage in the perennial search for an ultimate sink, and surely not the last. Together with derelict mines, waste heaps may one day rank among the most enduring legacies of modern civilization.

But recycling and waste management were not just about materialities and technologies. They were also about people, which is important to stress in light of a long and transcultural tradition to marginalize the human dimension of the waste business. It would be an understatement to say that social and ethnic discrimination was a part of the business—it was crucial for how things worked. The dismal fate of migrant workers on the Bangladeshi coast is only the latest incarnation of an old phenomenon.

The chapter shows that shipbreaking is subject to ongoing national and international efforts at regulation, but it is crucial to recognize that these efforts are up against powerful tides of history. Wastes have their own rules, material and other, and political reform was rarely a match for the raw silent power of needs and technologies. If there is a tradition among the tremendous changes of practices and waste flows in modern times, it is about the transgression of limits in virtually every dimension: material, social, spatial, and temporal. We may never find that ultimate sink (at least that is what Joel Tarr told us in a landmark article), but the search has energized modern societies for generations—if energizing is a good word for the waste business. Few people have gotten excited about leftovers during the course of the modern age. They have dealt with it because they had to or were paid for it.

Shipbreaking in Chittagong has acquired a measure of fame due to dramatic visuals, but the true drama at play escapes the naked eye. Lives and livelihoods are fragile on the Bangladeshi coasts, as is the institutional scaffolding that underpins the business model, a topic that will be explored in greater depth in part II. It is no coincidence that the following chapters deal with illicit activities in many different forms: modern modes of production have defied political control more than once, and their global hegemony may not end anytime soon—and neither will the effects and costs that they have brought to people all over the world. Just like the scrap metal workers in Chittagong, we are stuck with our killer apps for the foreseeable future.

1

POTOSÍ

RICH IN METALS

1. GOING UNDERGROUND

Local histories typically display a sense of pride. The exuberance of the baroque period did not encourage understatement either. And so we are told that the mountain to the south of Potosí was really a perfect and permanent marvel of the world, a singular work of the power of God, the emperor of mountains and a clarion that resonates in the whole wide world.¹ For Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, the author of the Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí, no words were too great when it came to his hometown, and he opened his book with lavish praise along these lines. It seemed like a long shot for an author who had never left the Andean highlands, but Arzáns, who lived from 1676 to 1736, was not all that exceptional. Potosí and its silver had triggered enthusiasm since the earliest days of colonial mining. The Habsburg emperor Charles V bestowed it with a widely cited phrase for its coat of arms: I am rich Potosí, the treasure of the world, and the envy of kings.² Adam Smith mentioned Potosí’s mines as the most fertile in all America in The Wealth of Nations.³ Potosí lingered as a synonym for riches even when its mines were long in decline. Reflecting on real estate and capitalist accumulation in Das Kapital, Karl Marx wrote that the mines of misery are exploited by house speculators with more profit or less cost than ever were the mines of Potosi.⁴ To this day, the Spanish phrase vale un Potosí, literally worth a Potosí, translates as priceless.

When the Spanish conquistadores learned about Potosi’s silver deposits in 1545, mining had been flourishing in central Europe for a full century. New technologies, new modes of corporate organization, and the discovery of new deposits underpinned a long boom that changed geographies and economies.⁵ Thanks to its silver mines, a sleepy Tyro-lian village, Schwaz, turned into Austria’s second-largest urban agglomeration after Vienna.⁶ The copper mines of Falun in Sweden, the Wieliczka salt mine near Kraków and the tin mines of Cornwall gained a reputation far beyond their respective regions for centuries.⁷ Around 1520, the Bohemian town of Joachimsthal began to strike a heavy silver coin that is remembered to this day because the Joachimsthaler became the etymological ancestor of the word dollar.⁸ Joachimsthal’s town physician, Georg Agricola, wrote a monumental treatise on mining technology, De Re Metallica, that summarized the age’s technological achievements. It was published posthumously in 1556.⁹

Mining was a technology unlike any other in the late medieval world. Large mines embraced the division of labor long before it became a hallmark of industrialism: a successful mine hinged on axes and sledgehammers as well as cutting-edge chemical knowledge. Turning solid rock into gravel was barely half the job. Fresh air had to find its way into the mine while ore and water had to get out. Roadways and shafts needed timber frames. Humans and draft animals had to be fed. Waterwheels needed enlightened operators, maintenance, and a reliable supply of water. No other production regime of the late medieval period had a similar size and complexity, and no occupation offered such a broad range of mortal threats. In his Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford pointed out that the mine was the first completely inorganic environment to be created and lived in by man.¹⁰ But for all its challenges, mining also brought tremendous wealth and, in the case of Habsburg’s Charles V, the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. It was the silver of Schwaz in combination with the deep pockets of the House of Fugger that got him elected in 1519.¹¹

In short, silver mining was well established as a source of economic and political power by 1545, but Potosí brought it all to a new level. The name of its mountain, Cerro Rico (Spanish for rich mountain), said it all: the spot had wealth written all over it. When output peaked in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Potosí alone produced half of all silver in the Americas, the world’s dominant producer for centu-ries.¹² Around 1600, the transatlantic flow of silver exceeded Europe’s domestic production by a factor of eight.¹³ Potosí was the motor of the Spanish economy between the first strike in 1545 and the 1660s, and the repercussions were ultimately global.¹⁴ Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez have argued that the singular product most responsible for the birth of world trade was silver.¹⁵

1.1 View of the Cerro Rico and Potosí by Bernard Lens, in Herman Moll, Map of South America (London, 1715). Image, Wikimedia Commons.

A booming commodity needs grateful buyers. As the economist Erich Zimmermann declared, "Natural resources are not, they become."¹⁶ European elites embraced silver to show off their wealth, the silver peso entered monetary vocabularies across Europe, India consumed a significant amount, but China was the most important buyer.¹⁷ Domestic production in China had fallen in the late fifteen and early sixteenth centuries, and a growing population with a silver-based currency generated almost insatiable demand.¹⁸ It did not save the late Ming dynasty from collapsing and maybe even hastened its demise, but the complementary interests, helped by a direct shipping link from Mexico’s Acapulco to Manila on the Philippines, made for a thriving business. The combination of low supply-side production costs in Spanish America and Chinese-led demand-side elevation in silver’s value in Asia generated probably the most spectacular mining boom in human history.¹⁹

Resource flows also depend on a robust institutional framework. While Central European mines organized themselves along comprehensive Bergordnungen, business in Potosí went down a more disorderly path, as hundreds of corporations worked on the Cerro Rico at the same time.²⁰ When they sold their silver, institutions from the local mint to the traders came into play, and a combination of contracts, transport networks, and the momentum of ingrained routines channeled resources along certain ways. Immanuel Wallerstein made resource flows a cornerstone of his commanding synthesis of the modern world-system and put the mines of Hispanic America on his map as one of two key peripheral areas in the sixteenth century, but the general direction of resource flows allowed different paths within and beyond the letters of the law.²¹ Smuggling was a part of Andean mining from its inception, as some of the output bypassed the Potosí mint and went to French, English, and Dutch smugglers along the Pacific coast and to the Portuguese in Brazil.²² Illicit trade was always part of the resource business (see Interlude, Opium), and its exact share remains anyone’s guess.

The stream of silver was only one of several resource flows that intersected in the Andean highlands. Processing Potosí’s ores depended on an amalgamation process since the 1570s, and the mines bought copious amounts of mercury from Huancavelica in Peru, Almadén in Spain, and Idrija in Slovenia.²³ Mines needed firewood to heat the mixture of ore and mercury and timber to shore up shafts and seams.²⁴ Feeding an urban population at an altitude of four thousand meters was another challenge, all the more as workers needed calories (see chapter 7.2, Numbers Games) as well as stimulants in the form of coca leaves (see Interlude, Opium). Potosí was not the only place where hungry miners transformed agricultural systems. When copper mining brought a quarter of a million migrant workers into the sparsely populated Yunnan Province in southwest China between 1750 and 1800, rice production flourished in neighboring Burma.²⁵

Spanish colonial mining built on technological achievements from late medieval Europe. A group of German miners even made the trip across the Atlantic and brought new smelting techniques to New Spain in the 1530s.²⁶ However, David Brading and Harry Cross have argued that the transatlantic parallels are weaker than the similarities with another production regime of the New World: American silver mining offers fewer comparisons with its German antecedents than with that other great colonial industry, the manufacture of sugar (see chapter 2, Sugar).²⁷ Just like sugar plantations, silver mining produced a high-value commodity for distant consumers in a specific geographic realm of limited size, and the prospect of huge profits seemed to justify extreme conditions for workers and environments. Potosí even had an equivalent to plantation slavery in the mita, a forced labor regime inherited from the Inca that became just as infamous as the transatlantic slave trade.²⁸ "The mita labor system was a machine for crushing Indians," Eduardo Galeano wrote in Open Veins of Latin America, a classic in the vein of dependency theory (see chapter 30, Rice-Eating Rubber Tree).²⁹ And just as the Georgian houses in Bristol failed to reveal the conditions on the sugar plantations that provided the money for their construction, it was easy to forget about the miners’ hardships in the streets of Potosí.

2. BOOMTOWNS

Arzáns’s Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí was an expansive work. It ran to some 1,500 large folio pages, each of them filled with close handwriting.³⁰ But capturing the city’s splendor was truly a challenge, as countless buildings and lavish ceremonies were clamoring for the author’s attention, and Potosí was not the only resource town that had a lot to show. Incorporated as a mining camp in 1881, Aspen had electric light after four years, piped water (see chapter 17, Water Closet) after five, and the third-largest opera house in the state of Colorado after eight.³¹ There was also an opera house in the Brazilian city of Manaus, some nine hundred miles upstream from the mouth of the Amazon River. Built from imported materials between 1891 and 1896, it provided a sphere for high culture in the middle of the rain forest, paid for by rubber revenues during the heydays of tapping (see chapter 30, Rice-Eating Rubber Tree). The gold-domed structure was not the only extravaganza that Manaus granted to itself. Manaus also had piped gas and water, electric light and a telephone network, an artificial harbor, and the first electric streetcar line in South America.³²

But mining cities did not always show the wealth that they generated. The architectural magnificence of Latin American mining cities, like Guanajuato, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí, Ouro Preto and Potosí where the magnates vied with each other in their magnificent patronage of church building, could not provide a greater contrast to the makeshift, sleazy air of the mining towns of California, the Canadian Northwest, Victoria and New South Wales, the Warwick professor Alistair Hennessy wrote.³³ Gold-rush towns were notorious for the various manifestations of uninhibited masculinity, and, when the frenzy flamed out, the biggest money was often with those who handled the supplies. It could be the start of a global career. Levi Strauss made a fortune selling denim pants in the wake of the California gold rush, and one of the giants of beer brewing, SABMiller, grew out of a company that sold Castle beer to thirsty gold miners in South Africa.³⁴

Gold rushes thrived on the mobility of independent men, but many of them ended up joining a workforce. California had crushing mills with large workforces within four years of the first discovery of gold.³⁵ The nineteenth century was when industrialism came of age, and a good part of the proletariat was sweating underground, particularly in the coal mines that fed the new hunger of Western societies for fossil fuels (see chapter 16, London Smog). While up to a third of Po-tosí’s workers were female, the miners of the industrial age were an eminently male community, and tender souls were well advised to keep their distance.³⁶ When Arzáns went down the shafts of the Cerro Rico, the trip left him traumatized for life. The lights of his party went out underground, and they sat in the dark for hours until another miner happened to pass by. He also was not into chewing coca leaves.³⁷

The miners of the industrial age won a special place in labor history. As a recent handbook article declared, In the twentieth century miners were at the forefront of radical movements and policies in many countries.³⁸ They offered a charismatic combination of numbers and symbolic power, and when they went for industrial action, it sent shockwaves through societies. More than one miners’ strike entered national histories: the US anthracite coal strikes of 1877 and 1902, the strikes of German coal miners along the Ruhr in 1889 and 1905, Britain’s general strike of 1926, and the National Union of Mine-workers strike in South Africa in 1987.³⁹ And then there was the blood that was spilled. The 1914 Ludlow massacre and the ensuing ten-day war in the southern Colorado coalfields hold a key place in the mar-tyrology of the American labor movement.⁴⁰

The mythology of labor suggested a united army of miners, an argument that lingers in some recent publications.⁴¹ But in reality, differences in age, status, and skill level ran through the workforce, and clever capitalists exploited these divisions as best they could. Potosí’s mita certainly did not create a homogeneous group, and not only because some workers ran away or paid for relief from service. The colonial workforce was a hybrid of forced and nominally free labor.⁴² Even when the Bolivian government formed a new state-owned corporation, the Corporación Minera de Bolivia (COMIBOL), after the revolution of 1952, only a fraction of the workforce had access to the benefits of nationalization. COMIBOL’s labor pyramid included a salaried labor aristocracy, workers in cooperatives who were paid by the pound, peasants who leased tailings for reworking, peasant women scouring rock dumps, and destitute marginals whom COMIBOL officials allowed into the tunnels at night for a fee.⁴³

Working in a mine was always a danger to limbs and lungs, and conditions in Potosí amplified the risks: silicosis was a peculiar challenge at an altitude of four thousand meters. In line with modernity’s trust in numbers (see chapter 7.2, Numbers Games), writers have offered staggering estimates of the human toll. It remains open to debate whether the Cerro Rico really consumed 8 million lives over three centuries, as Galeano has claimed, but only because of a brutal fact: nobody was counting.⁴⁴ The precise fate of most workers remains a mystery for lack of sources, but nobody doubts that Potosí’s mines produced plenty of misery and dislocation along with the silver. Work was terrible, and so was the outlook for life after the mine. As the anthropologist Michael Taussig wrote, The mines spewed forth a class of homeless and masterless people—a colonial lumpenproletariat—whose presence and energy were to become very noticeable in swelling the mass of discontent and rebellion, particularly in the great Tupac Amaru Indian nationalist uprising of 1780.⁴⁵

The splendor of Potosí looked more ambiguous with knowledge of the workers’ plight, and that is not just the wisdom of hindsight. Arzáns was fully aware that the glitter was tied to a lot of Indian sweat and blood, and he wrote about it in his history. He did not make his remarks in a revolutionary mood. He was a traditionalist in the days before the Enlightenment, a timid, retiring scholar who wrote with a sense of resignation and shared that peculiar Baroque quality of disenchantment with the world.⁴⁶ And if you were living in Potosí in the early eighteenth century, melancholia was a perfectly appropriate state of mind.

3. ABANDONMENT

The opera house in Manaus closed its doors when the Amazon rubber boom ran out. For all their splendor, resource boomtowns inevitably declined when the material flows that underpinned their existence dried up, and while there were many paths toward insignificance, they were all painful. In the case of Potosí, it was a long decline rather than sudden collapse. Mining continued throughout the colonial period, but the town was long past its prime when Arzáns was writing his voluminous chronicle in the early eighteenth century: Potosí’s all-time record year was 1592.⁴⁷ Simón Bolívar climbed the Cerro Rico and planted the flags of Colombia, Peru, and Argentina on the summit in the fall of 1825 when Latin American independence was all but secure, but hopes for a postindependence boom fell apart when a London-based Potosí, La Paz and Peruvian Mining Association collapsed in a stock market crash later that year.⁴⁸

Conditions within newly independent Bolivia did not look more favorable. As Paul Gootenberg has argued, Latin America was saddled with a hamstrung economic elite, a free-trade ‘lumpenbourgeoisie’ of entrepreneurs that had never stood up for themselves.⁴⁹ With a bow to the dependency school (see chapter 30.2, In Their Theories), Gootenberg noted that, as nationless appendages of world economic currents, unfit for nation-building, Latin American elites followed up on what they had learned over centuries on the periphery of the modern world-system: It was the region’s peculiar ‘colonial’ role in the world economy—as purveyors of exports—that truncated the historic role played by nationalist entrepreneurial elites elsewhere.⁵⁰ Mining in Potosí has been sputtering on in Bolivia ever since independence, too strong to die and too weak to create the wealth of a nation.

Mining in Potosí shifted from silver to tin in the late nineteenth century, and the transition was about the quality of the remaining ores as well as the changing preferences of the global economy. The precious metals lost their former preeminence in mining as industrial societies showed a growing hunger for bulkier commodities: iron, copper, tin, bauxite, and coal. The new mines of the nineteenth century were bigger in every respect, and they featured the latest in contemporary engineering from steam engines, originally invented to keep British mines dry, to electric light. By the early twentieth century, technological progress also changed mining as it had been known for ages when a young American engineer named Daniel Jackling invented opencast copper mining. Instead of following the richest veins into the underground, miners dug up all the ore indiscrimately and then used chemical means to extract the precious metals. It was an expensive technology because it required giant shovels and huge facilities for processing, but by the end of 1905, Jackling had convinced the Guggenheim Exploration Company to pay for a trial run at the Bingham Canyon Pit in northern Utah.⁵¹ It became a watershed in the global history of mining. Instead of moving miners into the mountain, mass destruction mining moved mountains into the factory.

The new mines were larger than anything from the days of Potosí, but that did not raise their profile in collective memory. Few people know about opencast copper mines in Chile or iron-ore mining in the Australian outback nowadays, and they do not have to know. Today’s resource flows are anonymous, or rather made anonymous. Not only do modern science and technology backed by wants and needs create resources; they also destroy them and reconvert them into ‘neutral stuff,’ Erich Zimmermann wrote.⁵² Only insiders are familiar with the geography of commodities, and company names no longer reveal places of origin: the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954.⁵³ Even precarious types of mining fly under the radar. Niger, Gabon, Madagascar, and Namibia were all producing uranium ore, but they barely figured on the mental map of nuclear power (see chapter 37, Lucky Dragon No. 5) until concerns over proliferation emerged in the post–9/11 world.⁵⁴

Bingham Canyon Pit has been a National Historic Landmark since 1966, but it is also one of America’s worst sources of toxic waste according to an assessment of the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1994.⁵⁵ Mining waste may be among the most enduring legacies of the age of industries, to be outlasted only by the holes themselves. In his best-selling book The World Without Us, Alan Weisman credited coal mining in Appalachia with creating scars in the land that are good to endure a few more million years.⁵⁶ Lead, cadmium, arsenic, and other metals are well-known toxics, and modern mining has dislodged them in tremendous amounts. In Canada’s Northwest Territories, the Yellowknife gold mine blew 237,000 tons of arsenic trioxide dust, a waste product (see chapter 5, Shipbreaking in Chittagong) from ore processing, into underground chambers, enough to kill each human on planet earth one hundred times. The company went bankrupt in 1999, and taxpayer-funded cleanup efforts include refrigeration technology to freeze the dust in its place.⁵⁷

Abandoned mines are not the only places where the ravages of colonial resource use are etched into the land. Writing on the Caribbean sugar island of Nevis (see chapter 2, Sugar), Marco Meniketti observed that the sugar plantation landscape is . . . similar to relic mining districts once resource extraction ends.⁵⁸ But leftovers from mining can spread in insidious and largely unrecognized ways. Arsenic contamination of drinking water has been labeled one of the worst and most widespread environmental problems currently facing humanity.⁵⁹ Mining is not the single culprit, as some of the pollution has natural causes, and yet few people know that more than 100 million people may be at risk from utilizing arsenic-contaminated groundwater.⁶⁰ Latin American silver has left a permanent mark in the environment through the mercury that went into the amalgamation process. Cumulative losses in South and Central America are estimated at 196,000 tons, and very little is currently known about the fate and effects of the unprecedented quantities of mercury discharged in the silver and gold mining areas.⁶¹ What we do know is that mine wastes can exhale mercury into the atmosphere, and the residents of Potosí continue to breathe toxic air, ingest mercury-laced dust, and are otherwise exposed to the myriad risks of mercury intoxication.⁶²

Mercury can stay in the air for months, which makes it a double-edged pollution problem: it combines high exposure in former or active mining regions with lower but pervasive exposure for everyone living on this planet (see chapter 37.1, Global Pollution). In other words, the legacy of Potosí lives on in a significant contribution to the background concentration of mercury in the global atmosphere. The other part of the legacy is a cluster of old buildings in the Andean highlands. Potosí had no raison d’être apart from silver, Alistair Hen-nessy wrote, and what once was one of the largest cities in the world is now a museum town set in a forbidding treeless landscape.⁶³ (The absence of trees triggered an aforestation campaign with thousands of eucalyptus trees [see chapter 27, Eucalyptus] in the 1990s.⁶⁴) Potosí has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1987 and on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2014.⁶⁵ Restoration work is ongoing in the city and on the Cerro Rico, where a government project is filling sinkholes to keep the summit from collapsing, all while mining continues on that very mountain.⁶⁶ Protected areas have always been places of compromise (see chapter 26, Kruger National Park), and yet one can read a deep symbolism into a project that pours cement, polyethylene, and sand into a mountain that humans have honeycombed for almost half a millennium. It seems as if, in a horribly belated act of repentance, humans are now going out of their way to provide stability in a town that has never had any.

2

SUGAR

THE NEW ORGANIC

1. SMALL ISLANDS, GLOBAL NETWORKS

In 1759 British forces occupied the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. As the Seven Years’ War continued during the following four years, Britain had a lively discussion over the island’s value. More precisely, it had a discussion over its value as compared to another territory that France and Great Britain were fighting over at the time: Canada. Sure enough, Canada was much bigger and made more of an impression on a world map, particularly when mapmakers used the Mercator projection that inflates countries far away from the equator. But size was not everything when it came to the business of conquest. Small islands were easier to defend, and this island was very much worth defending because it offered prime conditions for the production of sugar. Could Canada offer anything similar by way of export products? The citizens of London fought a veritable pamphlet war over the question, and they were not alone in their infatuation with Caribbean sugar islands. When France signed the Treaty of Paris in 1763, it gave up its claim to Canada in return for Guadeloupe and neighboring Martinique.¹

Booming commodities were a key part of modernity, but few careers were as spectacular as sugar.² While medieval Europeans had satisfied their sweet tooth through honey and tree saps, cane sugar claimed the market in the early modern era. Like many other commodities, sugar was originally a luxury item that turned into a mass product with growing volume and declining costs. It was about prestige: sugar was an object of what Thorstein Veblen has called conspicuous consumption, not least because it mixed well with other luxury products like tea, coffee, and chocolate.³ And it was about the energy boost: sugar offered plenty of calories (see chapter 7.2, Numbers Games) that went straight into the blood, a perfect match for the bodily needs of factory workers in the age of industry. As Sidney Mintz has argued in his seminal Sweetness and Power, calories from Caribbean sugar underpinned the Industrial Revolution in England. By 1900, sugar provided almost a fifth of the calories in the English diet.⁴

Sugarcane was not native to the Caribbean, nor did the region pioneer its agricultural use. Humans first began to squeeze a sweet juice from cane in southern Asia several thousand years ago, and sugar production remained in the hands of peasants in India and China into the twentieth century.⁵ Sugarcane spread in the Mediterranean between 700 and 1100 as part of what Andrew Watson has called the Arab Agricultural Revolution.⁶ Its journey across the Atlantic followed the path of Portuguese and Spanish overseas expansion, and as Madeira, the Canaries, Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Brazil all fell for the new crop, planters grew accustomed to using African slaves on sugar estates.⁷ The combination of sugarcane, long-distance trade, and unfree labor was well established before it moved to the Caribbean, and yet it was here, starting in the 1640s, that its transformative power played out in its most dramatic form. Largely depopulated after the genocidal Hispanic conquest, the islands were devoid of customs and traditions, agricultural or otherwise, that could stand in the way of a new type of agribusiness with global connections and scant regard for the needs of the place. In his synthesis of the modern world-system, Wallerstein argued that sugar transformed the Caribbean, barely under European control by 1600, into a part of the European world-economy.⁸

Barbados is commonly credited as the first Caribbean island that experienced a sugar revolution, and other islands of the eastern Caribbean followed swiftly: Guadeloupe in the 1650s, Martinique in the 1660s, and St Kitts, Nevis, Antigua, and Montserrat in the 1670s.⁹ It was a type of farming that differed enormously from European traditions, a bonanza agriculture wherein planters could make a fortune within a few frantic years.¹⁰ But for all the wealth that sugar produced, its distribution along the commodity chain was highly unequal, quite in line with what Wallerstein suggests in his world-systems theory, whose inspirations include dependency theory (see chapter 30.2, In Their Theories).¹¹ Sugar was not the only commodity where scholars have observed a difference between modern and non-European patterns in the distribution of benefits. Giorgio Riello found a crucial difference between cotton production in Asia and Europe. While the Asian system, operating at its peak from around 1000 to 1500, was a centrifugal system based on the diffusion of resources, technologies, knowledge and the sharing of profits, the European system (dated 1750–2000) was a centripetal system, one based on the capacity of the centre to ‘exploit’ resources and profits towards its productive and commercial core.¹²

However, the resilience of the European world-economy must not distract from the enormous volatility in what Wallerstein has called the periphery. Supply lines changed enormously in the greater Caribbean, and so did the relative importance of individual producers. Barbados, Jamaica, Saint-Domingue, and Cuba were all at sometime the leading sugar island. Labor became a particular source of unrest. In addition to a warm climate and plenty of water, sugarcane needed a lot of helping hands, and people were scarce in the Caribbean. Even more, sugarcane called for a tightly organized labor regime. The sugar content declines from the moment when cane is cut, and that forced plantation managers to coordinate harvesting and processing in sugar mills in ways reminiscent of the industrial factory. Barbados, which was planned as a settlement for white immigrant labor in the 1620s, went for African slaves when the mainstay of the colony shifted from tobacco to sugar, and the island was what Philip Curtin has called a mature plantation colony by the 1680s: it had three Black people for every white one and one slave for every two acres of arable land.¹³

Resistance runs through the history of African slavery in the New World, and it took many forms from the refusal to eat breadfruit (see chapter 7, Breadfruit) to large revolts. In Jamaica, the struggle between planters and Maroon communities of runaway slaves escalated in a prolonged war that ended with a treaty in 1739. In exchange for liberty and 1,500 acres of land, the Maroons pledged to return future runaways to their masters.¹⁴ Half a century later, the French Revolution triggered an uprising on Saint-Domingue, by far the largest sugar island at the time. When the guns fell silent after thirteen years of atrocious war, the survivors formed Haiti, the first nonwhite republic in the Americas. It was a milestone in the abolition of slavery, a powerful symbol for Black people, and a shock to plantation owners in the rest of the Atlantic world.¹⁵

Over the course of the nineteenth century, labor regimes grew more diverse. Some countries tried to stick to the old ways, and the prime Caribbean sugar producer, Cuba, was Latin America’s next to last country to abolish slavery in 1886.¹⁶ Peru stuck to slavery until the windfall from guano sales (see chapter 8, Guano) allowed the country to pay off slave-owning planters in 1854.¹⁷ In the Dutch East Indies, sugar factories without plantations flourished on Java, supplied by mandatory cultivation of sugarcane in neighboring villages and a forced labor regime.¹⁸ In Queensland, a self-governing British colony that would later merge into the Commonwealth of Australia, sugar production began with plantations in the 1860s, but small-scale European farmers and cooperative central mills took over after the government imposed a ban on the recruitment of Melanesian workers in 1885.¹⁹ Around the same time, a Melanesian archipelago, Fiji, had the Australia-based Colonial Sugar Refining Company build its sugarcane industry with indentured labor from India.²⁰ In the early 1900s, vertically integrated US-based corporations (see chapter 10, United Fruit) drove the expansion of sugar production in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic.²¹ All the while, European sugar beets were growing into a formidable competitor to cane over the course of the nineteenth century.

However, sugar regions were far from homogeneous. Slave populations, often portrayed as faceless in traditional histories, were remarkably diverse in terms of background and status, and the same held true for the producers.²² Commodities had their requirements, but they did not dictate modes of production. When it came to sugar, Caribbean estates were competing with European peasants, and other commodities showed similar diversity. In spite of the name, the banana republics of Central America were actually quite diverse. United Fruit (see chapter 10, United Fruit) controlled banana production in Guatemala, competed with other multinationals in Honduras and Nicaragua, failed in Ecuador due to a government policy favoring independent farmers, and El Salvador focused on coffee rather than bananas.²³ Some regions could even accommodate several modes of production, though coexistence bore the seeds of conflict. In 1937, Mauritius saw the worst riots in its history when the sugar factories, which were controlled by estate owners, decided to cut the purchasing price by 15 percent for Uba cane, a variety with a lower sucrose content that was favored among the island’s small farmers.²⁴

The natural environment provided another set of complications. The introduction of new plants produced what John McNeill has called a creole ecology: sugarcane, bananas, and citrus fruits stood at the center of a motley assemblage of indigenous and invading species, jostling one another in unstable ecosystems.²⁵ Caribbean ecologies experienced another round of biological shocks when the introduction of new cane varieties from other parts of the world resulted in the unintended transfer of new pathogens, and planters have been struggling with transnational epidemics ever since.²⁶ And then there were the effects on soil fertility that commonly resulted from an excessive reliance on a single plant. Planters did recognize the perils of monoculture. Barbados introduced cattle in order to recycle nutrients back into the soil and developed cane-hole agriculture, where sugarcane grew up surrounded by a protective circle of traditional food crops like yams, corn, and peas, and Saint-Domingue was also exporting indigo, cotton, cocoa, and coffee, but at the end of the day, it was sugar that ran the show.²⁷ On St. Kitts, sugar and rum claimed no less than 97 percent of exports to the British Isles on the eve of the American Revolution, indicating the extent to which monoculture had been pushed.²⁸ And then, environmental learning was not a one-way street. Caribbean sugar planters had learned a lot about the benefits of forests, the combustion of cane pulp, intercropping, and crop rotations by the nineteenth century, and yet much of the acquired wisdom was lost on Cuba, where sugarcane thrived on the use of virgin land and fuelwood from shrinking forests.²⁹

While Britain was pushing monoculture in its Caribbean colonies, it pursued a different approach back home. The result was another agricultural revolution. While the traditional European three-field system left the land to lie fallow for a third of the time, the introduction of turnips and clover allowed for the construction of elaborate crop rotations such as the Norfolk four-course system.³⁰ The interplay of different plants and the combination of livestock and crop husbandry provided an effective way to boost soil fertility before the age of commercial fertilizers (see chapter 8, Guano), and yet the difference to Caribbean monoculture was one of technology rather than principle: both aimed for a more intensive use of the land. Subsistence production gave way to the sale of commodities on distant markets, and homegrown food from garden plots and marginal land was merely a kind of insurance against bad times. Innovations such as hybrid seeds (see chapter 28, Hybrid Corn) and battery cages (see chapter 36, Battery Chicken) were matters of commercial prospects, and the traditional ways ended up in museums if they no longer brought a decent return on investment. When synthetic nitrogen (see chapter 19, Synthetic Nitrogen), DDT (see chapter 38, DDT), and other little helpers allowed European farmers to work with narrower crop rotations down to monocultures in the postwar years, they abandoned their textbook ideas of proper farming and never looked back.³¹

In the new world of organic production, crop rotations and monocultures were negotiable, but the quest for profit was not. It was money, rather than homegrown food, that kept the modern farmer alive, and if market access hinged on a transcontinental commodity chain with all its inherent uncertainties, that was just a matter of transaction costs. The global exchange of agricultural commodities was standing practice long before David Ricardo penned the corresponding theory of comparative advantage. Ricardo argued that in a world of free trade, countries could maximize the wealth of nations by focusing on what they could produce with the lowest relative costs.³² It was a brilliant idea that earned Ricardo a place in the pantheon of modern economics, and yet there was one fundamental problem: for people on the ground, the wealth of nations was a pretty abstract idea.

2. POWER GAMES

In September 1913 a funeral procession was approaching the Swiss border to Germany. The customs officials on duty had seen a number of these processions recently, and as common decency commanded, they had let them pass quietly. However, the growing incidence of these processions looked suspicious. Why did people from Switzerland suddenly seek to get buried in German soil? The officials felt that it was time to take a closer look. They stopped the people in mourning, took a deep breath, opened the coffin, and found plenty of white powder instead of a corpse. The procession’s real purpose was smuggling saccharin, an artificial sweetener that was produced in Switzerland and illegal in Germany. The funeral party ended up under arrest.³³

As the twentieth century progressed, smuggling white powder became a global business model, and color is not the only thing that connects saccharin smuggling along the Swiss–German border with the worldwide trade in illicit drugs (see Interlude, Opium). Like heroin, originally a trademark of Bayer, saccharin was a product of industrial chemistry. Constantin Fahlberg, a Baltic German with a doctorate in chemistry, discovered saccharin during a stint as a research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1878. Saccharin was much cheaper than sugar and filled a market niche as the sweetener of the poor. With low production costs and a high value density, it invited smuggling after Germany imposed its ban in 1903. Authorities estimated that more than one thousand people were living from the illicit saccharin trade in Zurich alone. And like the ban on narcotics, the rationale for banning saccharin appeared dubious when one took a closer look. After coming to market in 1887, saccharin had triggered a brief medical debate in France, but concerns had long subsided by the time German parliamentarians were casting their votes. The ban on saccharin had very little do with health and consumer protection—apart from tobacco, perhaps no other food product has been studied as intensively as saccharin—and everything with the power of big sugar.³⁴

While the origins of sugarcane are lost in the fog of prehistory, sugar beets were a project of science from the beginning. Andreas Sigismund Marggraf, a chemist with the Berlin Academy of Sciences, discovered in 1747 that some beets contain sugar, and his successor in that post, Franz Karl Achard, set up the world’s first beet-sugar factory in 1801.³⁵ France’s continental blockade helped the nascent industry, all the more as the French state continued to protect it after Napoleon’s fall.³⁶ Systematic breeding (see chapter 28, Hybrid Corn) increased the sugar content, which stood at between 2 and 3 percent in 1800, to 14 percent around 1900 while the demanding plant taught peasants the merits of better farming skills.³⁷ No other crop offered German farmers a higher return per acre, and while production remained confined to regions with excellent soils, farmers in these regions could make a killing with sugar beets. The boom turned into a frenzy after 1880, and beet sugar surpassed cane sugar on the world market around 1890.³⁸ Sugar became Germany’s most important export product for a while, and the country was even the world’s leading sugar exporter from 1895 to 1900.³⁹ Sugar beets are one of the great success stories of nineteenth-century European agriculture, and yet it all hinged on governments that supported sugar beets generously and unwaveringly over decades. Banning an artificial sweetener was just one of many favors.

After launching the modern agribusiness, sugar blazed the way for another feature of modern agriculture: subsidies. To be sure, sugar was never a textbook case for functioning markets. David Ricardo complained in 1817 about the monopoly price for sugar, where market prices had lost all connexion with the original costs.⁴⁰ But during the nineteenth century, price manipulation became a matter of government policy. When Germany asked the agricultural experts at its embassies about the state of sugar production in selected countries toward the end of the nineteenth century, the reports showed that lavish government support was firmly entrenched around the globe. The German emissary in Buenos Aires wrote that Argentina had the world’s highest production costs and the lowest yield of sugar per acre, and yet sugar producers would only need to point to their enormous outlay of capital to win another round of export subsidies. It seems almost unthinkable that any government or parliament would ever consider sacrificing this industry for the love of the Manchester doctrine [of free trade].⁴¹ Writing on Bulgaria, another German expert found a sugar industry akin to a greenhouse plant: near Sofia a Belgium consortium had built a sugar factory whose fate was completely dependent on subsidies.⁴² In Mexico, sugar production was in the hands of a syndicate that just about satisfied domestic demand, but the German emissary saw overproduction on the horizon, and generous export support would be likely: the sugar producers were very influential people that included the son-in-law of Porfirio Díaz, Mexico’s president of thirty years.⁴³ And it was not just governments who were paying the price. Commenting on the recent expansion of Russian sugar production, the German emissary in Saint Petersburg found that sugar beets were bound to become a threat to the health of the soil (see chapter 13, Little Grand Canyon).⁴⁴

The report on Bulgaria blamed the penchant for sugar beets on national vanity, a quest for autarky and agricultural advancement, and the magic word industry.⁴⁵ But subsidies were ultimately about corporate power: sugar producers had powerful lobbies, formal or otherwise, and it took a particularly courageous government to put a thriving business sector at risk. Sugar production had become a capital-intensive business over the course of the nineteenth century, and the shiny factories with expensive equipment and many well-paid jobs were bound to collapse if the government did not contribute its share.⁴⁶ With that, sugar foreshadowed what would become a powerful rationale for agricultural subsidies in the twentieth century: the most advanced producers were usually the ones with the highest capital investments, which also made them the producers who were the most exposed to price fluctuation and thus most deserving of government support. And then, sugar subsidies were not just about farmers. When the United States went for protectionism in the Great Depression, Coca-Cola, the world’s largest industrial sugar consumer since the mid-1910s, launched a massive lobbying effort against sugar tariffs.⁴⁷

Subsidies were fought over perennially throughout the twentieth century, and sugar producers were not always the winners. In fact, sugar was subject to a landmark free-trade agreement, the Brussels Convention of 1902 that banned cartels, tariff walls, and export supports. The Brussels Convention on sugar even had an unprecedented Permanent Commission for arbitration and enforcement.⁴⁸ Unlike what neoliberal mythology suggests, free trade is not a state of nature that miraculously materializes in the absence of government interventions. Quite the contrary, open markets are the creations of effective nation-states. The Brussels Convention collapsed during World War I, and for all its merits, it was never a complete success. After all, there were other ways to give domestic sugar industries a helping hand. The ban on saccharin was a direct response to the Brussels Convention that German sugar producers saw as a mortal threat.⁴⁹ A few years later, sugar producers launched an association that sought to boost domestic sugar consumption through the elimination of lingering sentiments that sugar is a luxury product.⁵⁰ In the twenty-first century, the World Bank argued that sugar was the second-most-protected commodity after rice.⁵¹

Farmers and corporations had bargaining power. The situation was more complicated with a view to the workers. When the Western powers abolished slavery in the Caribbean, they expected the former slaves to morph into a proper working class, with liberals extolling the virtues of wage labor.⁵² However, the rural proletariat became a wildly heterogeneous mix of ethnicities and contractual obligations, and not just in Latin America. Sometimes rural workers came together in powerful movements. César Chávez and the United Farm Workers fought for better wages and working conditions in California’s agribusiness.⁵³ Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement occupied sugar estates in a push for land reform (see chapter 6, Land Title) from below.⁵⁴ But more often than not, plantations offered miserable jobs, and the plight of the workers was at