GLOBAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, .docx

GLOBAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA
2125 SSMS BLDG, SANTA BARBARA, CA. 93106-7065
Global Culture and Ethics
GLOBL 110
Fall Quarter 2019

Professor Anshu Malhotra
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Global Studies 110 – Fall 2019 – Course Reader
Peter Frankopan, “Preface,” “The Creation of the Silk Road,”
“The Road to Hell,” “The
Road of Death and Destruction,” “The Road of Gold,” from The
Silk Roads: A New
History of the World
...............................................................................................

....... #1
Catherine Hall, “Introduction,” “Transforming Capital,” from
Legacies of British Slave
Ownership
...............................................................................................
.................... #51
“Bengal Recipe for Making Mango Chutney,” from Mrs.
Beeton’s Book of Household
Management
...............................................................................................
................ #75
Erika Rappaport, “'Untruthful Advertisements': Tea and its
Discontents in Interwar-
India” from A Thirst for Empire
.................................................................................. #79
Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s The
Heart of Darkness” .... #89
Paul A. Cohen, “The Historically Reconstructed Past,” “The
Experienced Past,” “Magic
and Female Pollution,” “The Cultural Revolution and the
Boxers,” from History in Three
Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience and
Myth........................................................ #99
I, Rigoberta Menchu
...............................................................................................
... #131
Giles Gunn, “Global War in the Twentieth Century,” & Eric
Hobsbawm “The Age of
Total War,” from Global Studies: A Historical and

Contemporary Reader ................ #179
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses”
..................................... #187
1
The Silk 1pads
A New History of the World
PETER FRANKOPAN
ALFRED A. KNOPF NEW YORK 2016
2
3
4

86
87
88
Achebe, Chinua. "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's
'Heart of Darkness'"
Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977. Rpt. in Heart of Darkness, An
Authoritative Text,
background and Sources Criticism. 1961. 3rd ed. Ed. Robert
Kimbrough, London: W. W
Norton and Co., 1988, pp.251-261
In the fall of 1974 I was walking one day from the English
Department at the University of
Massachusetts to a parking lot. It was a fine autumn morning
such as encouraged friendliness
to passing strangers. Brisk youngsters were hurrying in all
directions, many of them obviously
freshmen in their first flush of enthusiasm. An older man going

the same way as I turned and
remarked to me how very young they came these days. I agreed.
Then he asked me if I was a
student too. I said no, I was a teacher. What did I teach?
African literature. Now that was
funny, he said, because he knew a fellow who taught the same
thing, or perhaps it was
African history, in a certain Community College not far from
here. It always surprised him, he
went on to say, because he never had thought of Africa as
having that kind of stuff, you know.
By this time I was walking much faster. "Oh well," I heard him
say finally, behind me: "I
guess I have to take your course to find out." A few weeks later
I received two very touching
letters from high school children in Yonkers, New York, who --
bless their teacher -- had just
read Things Fall Apart . One of them was particularly happy to
learn about the customs and
superstitions of an African tribe.
I propose to draw from these rather trivial encounters rather
heavy conclusions which at first
sight might seem somewhat out of proportion to them. But only,
I hope, at first sight.

The young fellow from Yonkers, perhaps partly on account of
his age but I believe also for
much deeper and more serious reasons, is obviously unaware
that the life of his own
tribesmen in Yonkers, New York, is full of odd customs and
superstitions and, like everybody
else in his culture, imagines that he needs a trip to Africa to
encounter those things.
The other person being fully my own age could not be excused
on the grounds of his years.
Ignorance might be a more likely reason; but here again I
believe that something more willful
than a mere lack of information was at work. For did not that
erudite British historian and
Regius Professor at Oxford, Hugh Trevor Roper, also pronounce
that African history did not
exist?
If there is something in these utterances more than youthful
inexperience, more than a lack of
factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire --
one might indeed say the need --
in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a
place of negations at once

remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's
own state of spiritual grace
will be manifest.
This need is not new; which should relieve us all of
considerable responsibility and perhaps
make us even willing to look at this phenomenon
dispassionately. I have neither the wish nor
the competence to embark on the exercise with the tools of the
social and biological sciences
but more simply in the manner of a novelist responding to one
famous book of European
fiction: Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness , which better than
any other work that I know
displays that Western desire and need which I have just referred
to. Of course there are whole
libraries of books devoted to the same purpose but most of them
are so obvious and so crude
that few people worry about them today. Conrad, on the other
hand, is undoubtedly one of the
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great stylists of modern fiction and a good storyteller into the
bargain. His contribution
therefore falls automatically into a different class -- permanent
literature -- read and taught
and constantly evaluated by serious academics. Heart of
Darkness is indeed so secure today
that a leading Conrad scholar has numbered it "among the half-
dozen greatest short novels in
the English language." I will return to this critical opinion in
due course because it may
seriously modify my earlier suppositions about who may or may
not be guilty in some of the
matters I will now raise.
Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as "the other
world," the antithesis of Europe
and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted
intelligence and refinement are
finally mocked by triumphant beastiality. The book opens on the
River Thames, tranquil,
resting, peacefully "at the decline of day after ages of good
service done to the race that
peopled its banks." But the actual story will take place on the
River Congo, the very antithesis
of the Thames. The River Congo is quite decidedly not a River

Emeritus. It has rendered no
service and enjoys no old-age pension. We are told that "Going
up that river was like
traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world."
Is Conrad saying then that these two rivers are very different,
one good, the other bad? Yes,
but that is not the real point. It is not the differentness that
worries Conrad but the lurking hint
of kinship, of common ancestry. For the Thames too "has been
one of the dark places of the
earth." It conquered its darkness, of course, and is now in
daylight and at peace. But if it were
to visit its primordial relative, the Congo, it would run the
terrible risk of hearing grotesque
echoes of its own forgotten darkness, and falling victim to an
avenging recrudescence of the
mindless frenzy of the first beginnings.
These suggestive echoes comprise Conrad's famed evocation of
the African atmosphere in
Heart of Darkness . In the final consideration his method
amounts to no more than a steady,
ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical
sentences, one about silence and the

other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on pages 36
and 37 of the present edition:
a) it was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an
inscrutable intention and b) The
steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and
incomprehensible frenzy. Of course
there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so
that instead of inscrutable, for
example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious,
etc., etc.
The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention long
ago to Conrad's "adjectival
insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery."
That insistence must not be
dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as
a mere stylistic flaw; for it
raises serious questions of artistic good faith. When a writer
while pretending to record
scenes, incidents and their impact is in reality engaged in
inducing hypnotic stupor in his
readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other
forms of trickery much more has
to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally normal readers
are well armed to detect and

resist such under-hand activity. But Conrad chose his subject
well -- one which was
guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological
predisposition of his readers or
raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose
the role of purveyor of
comforting myths.
The most interesting and revealing passages in Heart of
Darkness are, however, about people.
I must crave the indulgence of my reader to quote almost a
whole page from about the middle
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of the stop/when representatives of Europe in a steamer going
down the Congo encounter the
denizens of Africa.
We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore
the aspect of an unknown
planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking
possession of an accursed
inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and

of excessive toil. But suddenly
as we struggled round a bend there would be a glimpse of rush
walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a
burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping,
of feet stamping, of bodies
swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy and
motionless foliage. The steamer toiled
along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible
frenzy. The prehistoric man was
cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us -- who could tell? We
were cut off from the
comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like
phantoms, wondering and secretly
appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak
in a madhouse. We could not
understand because we were too far and could not remember,
because we were traveling in
the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving
hardly a sign -- and no memories.
The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon
the shackled form of a
conquered monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing
monstrous and free. It was
unearthly and the men were .... No they were not inhuman.

Well, you know that was the worst
of it -- this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come
slowly to one. They howled
and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled
you, was just the thought of their
humanity -- like yours -- the thought of your remote kinship
with this wild and passionate
uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough, but if you were man
enough you would admit to
yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a
response to the terrible frankness of
that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which
you -- you so remote from the
night of first ages -- could comprehend.
Herein lies the meaning of Heart of Darkness and the
fascination it holds over the Western
mind: "What thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity
-- like yours .... Ugly."
Having shown us Africa in the mass, Conrad then zeros in, half
a page later, on a specific
example, giving us one of his rare descriptions of an African
who is not just limbs or rolling
eyes:

And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was
fireman. He was an improved
specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below
me and, upon my word, to
look at him was as edifying as seeing a dog in a parody of
breeches and a feather hat walking
on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that
really fine chap. He squinted at
the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort
of intrepidity -- and he had
filed his teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate
shaved into queer patterns, and
three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have
been clapping his hands and
stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at
work, a thrall to strange
witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.
As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He
might not exactly admire savages
clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at
least the merit of being in their
place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad
things being in their place is of the
utmost importance.

91
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"Fine fellows -- cannibals --in their place," he tells us
pointedly. Tragedy begins when things
leave their accustomed place, like Europe leaving its safe
stronghold between the policeman
and the baker to like a peep into the heart of darkness.
Before the story likes us into the Congo basin proper we are
given this nice little vignette as
an example of things in their place:
Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary
contact with reality. It was
paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of
their eyeballs glistening. They
shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had
faces like grotesque masks --
these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an
intense energy of movement that
was as natural and hue as the surf along their coast. They
wanted no excuse for being there.

They were a great comfort to look at.
Towards the end of the story Conrad lavishes a whole page
quite unexpectedly on an African
woman who has obviously been some kind of mistress to Mr.
Kurtz and now presides (if I
may be permitted a little liberty) like a formidable mystery over
the inexorable imminence of
his departure:
She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent ....She
stood looking at us without a
stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over
an inscrutable purpose.
This Amazon is drawn in considerable detail, albeit of a
predictable nature, for two reasons.
First, she is in her place and so can win Conrad's special brand
of approval and second, she
fulfills a structural requirement of the story: a savage
counterpart to the refined, European
woman who will step forth to end the story:
She came forward all in black with a pale head, floating toward
me in the dusk. She was in
mourning .... She took both my hands in hers and murmured, "I
had heard you were

coming."... She had a mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for
suffering.
The difference in the attitude of the novelist to these two
women is conveyed in too many
direct and subfile ways to need elaboration. But perhaps the
most significant difference is the
one implied in the author's bestowal of human expression to the
one and the withholding of it
from the other. It is clearly not part of Conrad's purpose to
confer language on the
"rudimentary souls" of Africa. In place of speech they made "a
violent babble of uncouth
sounds." They "exchanged short grunting phrases" even among
themselves. But most of the
time they were too busy with their frenzy. There are two
occasions in the book, however,
when Conrad departs somewhat from his practice and confers
speech, even English speech,
on the savages. The first occurs when cannibalism gets the
better of them:
"Catch 'im," he snapped with a bloodshot widening of his eyes
and a flash of sharp teeth --
"catch 'im. Give 'im to us." "To you, eh?" I asked; "what would
you do with them? "Eat 'im!"

he said curtly. . . .
The other occasion was the famous announcement:"Mistah
Kurtz -- he dead."
At first sight these instances might be mistaken for unexpected
acts of generosity from
Conrad. In reality they constitute some of his best assaults. In
the case of the cannibals the
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incomprehensible grunts that had thus far served them for
speech suddenly proved inadequate
for Conrad's purpose of letting the European glimpse the
unspeakable craving in their hearts.
Weighing the necessity for consistency in the portrayal of the
dumb brutes against the
sensational advantages of securing their conviction by clear,
unambiguous evidence issuing
out of their own mouth Conrad chose the latter. As for the
announcement of Mr. Kurtz's death
by the "insolent black head in the doorway" what better or more
appropriate finis could be

written to the horror story of that wayward child of civilization
who willfully had given his
soul to the powers of darkness and "taken a high seat amongst
the devils of the land" than the
proclamation of his physical death by the forces he had joined?
It might be contended, of course, that the attitude to the African
in Heart of Darkness is not
Conrad's but that of his fictional narrator, Marlow, and that far
from endorsing it Conrad
might indeed be holding it up to irony and criticism. Certainly
Conrad appears to go to
considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between
himself and the moral universe of his
history. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The
primary narrator is Marlow but
his account is given to us through the filter of a second,
shadowy person. But if Conrad's
intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the
moral and psychological
malaise of his narrator his care seems to me totally wasted
because he neglects to hint
however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of
reference by which we may judge the
actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been

beyond Conrad's power to
make that provision if he had thought it necessary. Marlow
seems to me to enjoy Conrad's
complete confidence -- a feeling reinforced by the close
similarities between their two careers.
Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of truth, but
one holding those advanced
and humane views appropriate to the English liberal tradition
which required all Englishmen
of decency to be deeply shocked by atrocities in Bulgaria or the
Congo of King Leopold of
the Belgians or wherever.
Thus Marlow is able to toss out such bleeding-heart sentiments
as these:
They were dying slowly -- it was very clear. They were not
enemies, they were not criminals,
they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of
disease and starvation lying
confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses
of the coast in all the legality
of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on
unfamiliar food, they sickened,
became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and
rest.

The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad
touched all the best minds of the age
in England, Europe and America. It took different forms in the
minds of different people but
almost always managed to sidestep the ultimate question of
equality between white people
and black people. That extraordinary missionary, Albert
Schweitzer, who sacrificed brilliant
careers in music and theology in Europe for a life of service to
Africans in much the same
area as Conrad writes about, epitomizes the ambivalence. In a
comment which has often been
quoted Schweitzer says: "The African is indeed my brother but
my junior brother." And so he
proceeded to build a hospital appropriate to the needs of junior
brothers with standards of
hygiene reminiscent of medical practice in the days before the
germ theory of disease came
into being. Naturally he became a sensation in Europe and
America. Pilgrims flocked, and I
believe still flock even after he has passed on, to witness the
prodigious miracle in
Lamberene, on the edge of the primeval forest.

93
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Conrad's liberalism would not take him quite as far as
Schweitzer's, though. He would not use
the word brother however qualified; the farthest he would go
was kinship. When Marlow's
African helmsman falls down with a spear in his heart he gives
his white master one final
disquieting look.
And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me when he
received his hurt remains to this
day in my memory -- like a claim of distant kinship affirmed in
a supreme moment.
It is important to note that Conrad, careful as ever with his
words, is concerned not so much
about distant kinship as about someone laying a claim on it. The
black man lays a claim on
the white man which is well-nigh intolerable. It is the laying of
this claim which frightens and
at the same time fascinates Conrad, "... the thought of their
humanity -- like yours .... Ugly."

The point of my observations should be quite clear by now,
namely that Joseph Conrad was a
thoroughgoing racist. That this simple truth is glossed over in
criticisms of his work is due to
the fact that white racism against Africa is such a normal way
of thinking that its
manifestations go completely unremarked. Students of Heart of
Darkness will often tell you
that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the
deterioration of one European
mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to
you that Conrad is, if anything,
less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the
natives, that the point of the story
is to ridicule Europe's civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad
student informed me in Scotland
that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind
of Mr. Kurtz.
Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which
eliminates the African as
human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all
recognizable humanity, into
which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody
see the preposterous and

perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props
for the break-up of one petty
European mind? But that is not even the point. The real
question is the dehumanization of
Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered
and continues to foster in the
world. And the question is whether a novel which celebrates
this dehumanization, which
depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a
great work of art. My answer is:
No, it cannot. I do not doubt Conrad's great talents. Even Heart
of Darkness has its
memorably good passages and moments:
The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest
had stepped leisurely across
tile water to bar the way for our return.
Its exploration of the minds of the European characters is often
penetrating and full of insight.
But all that has been more than fully discussed in the last fifty
years. His obvious racism has,
however, not been addressed. And it is high time it was!
Conrad was born in 1857, the very year in which the first
Anglican missionaries were arriving

among my own people in Nigeria. It was certainly not his fault
that he lived his life at a time
when the reputation of the black man was at a particularly low
level. But even after due
allowances have been made for all the influences of
contemporary prejudice on his sensibility
there remains still in Conrad's attitude a residue of antipathy to
black people which his
peculiar psychology alone can explain. His own account of his
first encounter with a black
man is very revealing:
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A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my
conception of blind, furious,
unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end
of my days. Of the nigger I
used to dream for years afterwards.
Certainly Conrad had a problem with niggers. His inordinate
love of that word itself should be
of interest to psychoanalysts. Sometimes his fixation on

blackness is equally interesting as
when he gives us this brief description:
A black figure stood up, strode on long black legs, waving long
black arms. . . .
as though we might expect a black figure striding along on
black legs to wave white arms!
But so unrelenting is Conrad's obsession. As a matter of interest
Conrad gives us in A
Personal Record what amounts to a companion piece to the buck
nigger of Haiti. At the age of
sixteen Conrad encountered his first Englishman in Europe. He
calls him "my unforgettable
Englishman" and describes him in the following manner:
"(his) calves exposed to the public gaze . . . dazzled the
beholder by the splendor of their
marble-like condition and their rich tone of young ivory. . . .
The light of a headlong, exalted
satisfaction with the world of men. . . illumined his face. . . and
triumphant eyes. In passing he
cast a glance of kindly curiosity and a friendly gleam of big,
sound, shiny teeth. . . his white
calves twinkled sturdily."
Irrational love and irrational hate jostling together in the heart

of that talented, tormented man.
But whereas irrational love may at worst engender foolish acts
of indiscretion, irrational hate
can endanger the life of the community. Naturally Conrad is a
dream for psychoanalytic
critics. Perhaps the most detailed study of him in this direction
is by Bernard C. Meyer, M.D.
In his lengthy book Dr. Meyer follows every conceivable lead
(and sometimes inconceivable
ones) to explain Conrad. As an example he gives us long
disquisitions on the significance of
hair and hair-cutting in Conrad. And yet not even one word is
spared for his attitude to black
people. Not even the discussion of Conrad's antisemitism was
enough to spark off in Dr.
Meyer's mind those other dark and explosive thoughts. Which
only leads one to surmise that
Western psychoanalysts must regard the kind of racism
displayed by Conrad absolutely
normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz
Fanon in the psychiatric
hospitals of French Algeria.
Whatever Conrad's problems were, you might say he is now
safely dead. Quite true.

Unfortunately his heart of darkness plagues us still. Which is
why an offensive and deplorable
book can be described by a serious scholar as "among the half
dozen greatest short novels in
the English language." And why it is today the most commonly
prescribed novel in twentieth-
century literature courses in English Departments of American
universities.
There are two probable grounds on which what I have aid so far
may be contested. The first is
that it is no concern of fiction to please people about whom it is
written. I will go along with
that. But I am not talking about pleasing people. I am talking
about a book which parades in
the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a
section of mankind has suffered
untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so
in many ways and many places
today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of
black people is called in
question.
95

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Secondly, I may be challenged on the grounds of actuality.
Conrad, after all, did sail down the
Congo in 1890 when my own father was still a babe in arms.
How could I stand up more than
fifty years after his death and purport to contradict him? My
answer is that as a sensible man I
will not accept just any traveler's tales solely on the grounds
that I have not made the journey
myself. I will not trust the evidence even off man's very eyes
when I suspect them to be as
jaundiced as Conrad's. And we also happen to know that Conrad
was, in the words of his
biographer, Bernard C. Meyer, "notoriously inaccurate in the
rendering of his own history."
But more important by far is the abundant testimony about
Conrad's savages which we could
gather if we were so inclined from other sources and which
might lead us to think that these
people must have had other occupations besides merging into
the evil forest or materializing
out of it simply to plague Marlow and his dispirited band. For
as it happened, soon after

Conrad had written his book an event of far greater consequence
was taking place in the art
world of Europe. This is how Frank Willett, a British art
historian, describes it:
Gaugin had gone to Tahiti, the most extravagant individual act
of turning to a non-European
culture in the decades immediately before and after 1900, when
European artists were avid for
new artistic experiences, but it was only about 1904-5 that
African art began to make its
distinctive impact. One piece is still identifiable; it is a mask
that had been given to Maurice
Vlaminck in 1905. He records that Derain was 'speechless' and
'stunned' when he saw it,
bought it from Vlaminck and in turn showed it to Picasso and
Matisse, who were also greatly
affected by it. Ambroise Vollard then borrowed it and had it
cast in bronze. . . The revolution
of twentieth century art was under way!
The mask in question was made by other savages living just
north of Conrad's River Congo.
They have a name too: the Fang people, and are without a doubt
among the world's greatest

masters of the sculptured form. The event Frank Willett is
referring to marks the beginning of
cubism and the infusion of new life into European art, which
had run completely out of
strength.
The point of all this is to suggest that Conrad's picture of the
people of the Congo seems
grossly inadequate even at the height of their subjection to the
ravages of King Leopold's
lnternational Association for the Civilization of Central Africa.
Travelers with closed minds can tell us little except about
themselves. But even those not
blinkered, like Conrad with xenophobia, can be astonishing
blind. Let me digress a little here.
One of the greatest and most intrepid travelers of all time,
Marco Polo, journeyed to the Far
East from the Mediterranean in the thirteenth century and spent
twenty years in the court of
Kublai Khan in China. On his return to Venice he set down in
his book entitled Description of
the World his impressions of the peoples and places and
customs he had seen. But there were
at least two extraordinary omissions in his account. He said
nothing about the art of printing,

unknown as yet in Europe but in full flower in China. He either
did not notice it at all or if he
did, failed to see what use Europe could possibly have for it.
Whatever the reason, Europe had
to wait another hundred years for Gutenberg. But even more
spectacular was Marco Polo's
omission of any reference to the Great Wall of China nearly
4,000 miles long and already
more than 1,000 years old at the time of his visit. Again, he may
not have seen it; but the
Great Wall of China is the only structure built by man which is
visible from the moon! Indeed
travelers can be blind.
96
9
As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa
which we find in his book. It
was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western
imagination and Conrad merely
brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For
reasons which can certainly use

close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep
anxieties about the precariousness
of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by
comparison with Africa. If
Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance
periodically at Africa trapped
in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There
go I but for the grace of God.
Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier
onto whom the master unloads
his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward,
erect and immaculate.
Consequently Africa is something to be avoided just as the
picture has to be hidden away to
safeguard the man's jeopardous integrity. Keep away from
Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz of Heart
of Darkness should have heeded that warning and the prowling
horror in his heart would have
kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed
himself to the wild irresistible
allure of the jungle and lo! the darkness found him out.
In my original conception of this essay I had thought to
conclude it nicely on an appropriately

positive note in which I would suggest from my privileged
position in African and Western
cultures some advantages the West might derive from Africa
once it rid its mind of old
prejudices and began to look at Africa not through a haze of
distortions and cheap
mystifications but quite simply as a continent of people -- not
angels, but not rudimentary
souls either -- just people, often highly gifted people and often
strikingly successful in their
enterprise with life and society. But as I thought more about the
stereotype image, about its
grip and pervasiveness, about the willful tenacity with which
the West holds it to its heart;
when I thought of the West's television and cinema and
newspapers, about books read in its
schools and out of school, of churches preaching to empty pews
about the need to send help to
the heathen in Africa, I realized that no easy optimism was
possible. And there was, in any
case, something totally wrong in offering bribes to the West in
return for its good opinion of
Africa. Ultimately the abandonment of unwholesome thoughts
must be its own and only

reward. Although I have used the word willful a few times here
to characterize the West's
view of Africa, it may well be that what is happening at this
stage is more akin to reflex action
than calculated malice. Which does not make the situation more
but less hopeful.
The Christian Science Monitor, a paper more enlightened than
most, once carried an
interesting article written by its Education Editor on the serious
psychological and learning
problems faced by little children who speak one language at
home and then go to school
where something else is spoken. It was a wide-ranging article
taking in Spanish-speaking
children in America, the children of migrant Italian workers in
Germany, the quadrilingual
phenomenon in Malaysia, and so on. And all this while the
article speaks unequivocally about
language. But then out of the blue sky comes this:
In London there is an enormous immigration of children who
speak Indian or Nigerian
dialects, or some other native language.
I believe that the introduction of dialects which is technically
erroneous in the context is

almost a reflex action caused by an instinctive desire of the
writer to downgrade the
discussion to the level of Africa and India. And this is quite
comparable to Conrad's
withholding of language from his rudimentary souls. Language
is too grand for these chaps;
let's give them dialects!
97
10
In all this business a lot of violence is inevitably done not only
to the image of despised
peoples but even to words, the very tools of possible redress.
Look at the phrase native
language in the Science Monitor excerpt. Surely the only native
language possible in London
is Cockney English. But our writer means something else --
something appropriate to the
sounds Indians and Africans make!
Although the work of redressing which needs to be done may
appear too daunting, I believe it

is not one day too soon to begin. Conrad saw and condemned
the evil of imperial exploitation
but was strangely unaware of the racism on which it sharpened
its iron tooth. But the victims
of racist slander who for centuries have had to live with the
inhumanity it makes them heir to
have always known better than any casual visitor even when he
comes loaded with the gifts of
a Conrad.
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The Climate of History: Four Theses
Dipesh Chakrabarty
The current planetary crisis of climate change or global
warming elicits
a variety of responses in individuals, groups, and governments,
ranging
from denial, disconnect, and indifference to a spirit of
engagement and
activism of varying kinds and degrees. These responses saturate
our sense
of the now. Alan Weisman’s best-selling book The World
without Us sug-
gests a thought experiment as a way of experiencing our
present: “Suppose
that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait
accompli. . . .
Picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. . . . Might
we have
left some faint, enduring mark on the universe? . . . Is it
possible that,
instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world

without us
would miss us?”1 I am drawn to Weisman’s experiment as it
tellingly dem-
onstrates how the current crisis can precipitate a sense of the
present that
disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future
beyond the
grasp of historical sensibility. The discipline of history exists
on the as-
sumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a
certain
continuity of human experience. We normally envisage the
future with the
help of the same faculty that allows us to picture the past.
Weisman’s
thought experiment illustrates the historicist paradox that
inhabits con-
temporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of
humanity.
To go along with Weisman’s experiment, we have to insert
ourselves into
This essay is dedicated to the memory of Greg Dening.
Thanks are due to Lauren Berlant, James Chandler, Carlo
Ginzburg, Tom Mitchell, Sheldon
Pollock, Bill Brown, Françoise Meltzer, Debjani Ganguly, Ian
Hunter, Julia A. Thomas, and
Rochona Majumdar for critical comments on an earlier draft. I
wrote the first version of this
essay in Bengali for a journal in Calcutta and remain grateful to
its editor, Asok Sen, for
encouraging me to work on this topic.
1. Alan Weisman, The World without Us (New York, 2007), pp.
3–5.

Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009)
© 2008 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/09/3502-
0004$10.00. All rights reserved.
197 187
a future “without us” in order to be able to visualize it. Thus,
our usual
historical practices for visualizing times, past and future, times
inaccessible
to us personally—the exercise of historical understanding—are
thrown
into a deep contradiction and confusion. Weisman’s experiment
indicates
how such confusion follows from our contemporary sense of the
present
insofar as that present gives rise to concerns about our future.
Our histor-
ical sense of the present, in Weisman’s version, has thus
become deeply
destructive of our general sense of history.
I will return to Weisman’s experiment in the last part of this
essay.
There is much in the debate on climate change that should be of
interest to
those involved in contemporary discussions about history. For
as the idea
gains ground that the grave environmental risks of global
warming have to
do with excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of
greenhouse gases

produced mainly through the burning of fossil fuel and the
industrialized
use of animal stock by human beings, certain scientific
propositions have
come into circulation in the public domain that have profound,
even
transformative, implications for how we think about human
history or
about what the historian C. A. Bayly recently called “the birth
of the mod-
ern world.”2 Indeed, what scientists have said about climate
change chal-
lenges not only the ideas about the human that usually sustain
the
discipline of history but also the analytic strategies that
postcolonial and
postimperial historians have deployed in the last two decades in
response
to the postwar scenario of decolonization and globalization.
In what follows, I present some responses to the contemporary
crisis
from a historian’s point of view. However, a word about my
own relation-
ship to the literature on climate change—and indeed to the
crisis itself—
may be in order. I am a practicing historian with a strong
interest in the
nature of history as a form of knowledge, and my relationship to
the sci-
ence of global warming is derived, at some remove, from what
scientists
and other informed writers have written for the education of the
general
public. Scientific studies of global warming are often said to
have origi-

nated with the discoveries of the Swedish scientist Svante
Arrhenius in the
1890s, but self-conscious discussions of global warming in the
public realm
2. See C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780 –
1914: Global Connections and
Comparisons (Malden, Mass., 2004).
D I P E S H C H A K R A B A R T Y is the Lawrence A.
Kimpton Distinguished Service
Professor of History and South Asian Studies at the University
of Chicago and a
professorial fellow at the Research School of Humanities at the
Australian
National University.
198 Dipesh Chakrabarty / The Climate of History
188
began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the same period in
which social
scientists and humanists began to discuss globalization.3
However, these
discussions have so far run parallel to each other. While
globalization, once
recognized, was of immediate interest to humanists and social
scientists,
global warming, in spite of a good number of books published
in the 1990s,
did not become a public concern until the 2000s. The reasons
are not far to
seek. As early as 1988 James Hansen, the director of NASA’s

Goddard
Institute of Space Studies, told a Senate committee about global
warming
and later remarked to a group of reporters on the same day, “It’s
time to
stop waffling . . . and say that the greenhouse effect is here and
is affecting
our climate.”4 But governments, beholden to special interests
and wary of
political costs, would not listen. George H. W. Bush, then the
president of
the United States, famously quipped that he was going to fight
the green-
house effect with the “White House effect.”5 The situation
changed in the
2000s when the warnings became dire, and the signs of the
crisis—such as
the drought in Australia, frequent cyclones and brush fires, crop
fail-
ures in many parts of the world, the melting of Himalayan and
other
mountain glaciers and of the polar ice caps, and the increasing
acidity
of the seas and the damage to the food chain— became
politically and
economically inescapable. Added to this were growing
concerns,
voiced by many, about the rapid destruction of other species and
about
the global footprint of a human population poised to pass the
nine
billion mark by 2050.6
As the crisis gathered momentum in the last few years, I
realized that all
my readings in theories of globalization, Marxist analysis of

capital, sub-
altern studies, and postcolonial criticism over the last twenty-
five years,
while enormously useful in studying globalization, had not
really prepared
me for making sense of this planetary conjuncture within which
humanity
finds itself today. The change of mood in globalization analysis
may be
seen by comparing Giovanni Arrighi’s masterful history of
world capital-
ism, The Long Twentieth Century (1994), with his more recent
Adam Smith
3. The prehistory of the science of global warming going back
to nineteenth-century
European scientists like Joseph Fourier, Louis Agassiz, and
Arrhenius is recounted in many
popular publications. See, for example, the book by Bert Bolin,
the chairman of the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (1988 –1997), A
History of the Science and Politics of
Climate Change: The Role of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (Cambridge, 2007),
pt. 1.
4. Quoted in Mark Bowen, Censoring Science: Inside the
Political Attack on Dr. James
Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming (New York, 2008), p.
1.
5. Quoted in ibid., p. 228. See also “Too Hot to Handle: Recent
Efforts to Censor Jim
Hansen,” Boston Globe, 5 Feb. 2006, p. E1.
6. See, for example, Walter K. Dodds, Humanity’s Footprint:

Momentum, Impact, and Our
Global Environment (New York, 2008), pp. 11– 62.
Critical Inquiry / Winter 2009 199
189
in Beijing (2007), which, among other things, seeks to
understand the im-
plications of the economic rise of China. The first book, a long
meditation
on the chaos internal to capitalist economies, ends with the
thought of
capitalism burning up humanity “in the horrors (or glories) of
the esca-
lating violence that has accompanied the liquidation of the Cold
War
world order.” It is clear that the heat that burns the world in
Arrighi’s
narrative comes from the engine of capitalism and not from
global warm-
ing. By the time Arrighi comes to write Adam Smith in Beijing,
however, he
is much more concerned with the question of ecological limits
to capital-
ism. That theme provides the concluding note of the book,
suggesting the
distance that a critic such as Arrighi has traveled in the thirteen
years that
separate the publication of the two books.7 If, indeed,
globalization and
global warming are born of overlapping processes, the question
is, How do
we bring them together in our understanding of the world?

Not being a scientist myself, I also make a fundamental
assumption
about the science of climate change. I assume the science to be
right in its
broad outlines. I thus assume that the views expressed
particularly in the
2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel
on Cli-
mate Change of the United Nations, in the Stern Review, and in
the many
books that have been published recently by scientists and
scholars seeking
to explain the science of global warming leave me with enough
rational
ground for accepting, unless the scientific consensus shifts in a
major way,
that there is a large measure of truth to anthropogenic theories
of climate
change.8 For this position, I depend on observations such as the
following
one reported by Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at the
University of
California, San Diego. Upon examining the abstracts of 928
papers on
global warming published in specialized peer-reviewed
scientific journals
7. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money,
Power, and the Origins of Our
Times (1994; London, 2006), p. 356; see Arrighi, Adam Smith
in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-
First Century (London, 2007), pp. 227–389.
8. An indication of the growing popularity of the topic is the
number of books published in

the last four years with the aim of educating the general reading
public about the nature of the
crisis. Here is a random list of some of the most recent titles
that inform this essay: Mark
Maslin, Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford,
2004); Tim Flannery, The Weather
Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change
(Melbourne, 2005); David Archer,
Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast (Malden, Mass.,
2007); Global Warming, ed. Kelly
Knauer (New York, 2007); Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our
Future on a Hotter Planet
(Washington, D.C., 2008); William H. Calvin, Global Fever:
How to Treat Climate Change
(Chicago, 2008); James Hansen, “Climate Catastrophe,” New
Scientist, 28 July–3 Aug. 2007, pp.
30 –34; Hansen et al., “Dangerous Human-Made Interference
with Climate: A GISS ModelE
Study,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 7, no. 9 (2007):
2287–2312; and Hansen et al.,
“Climate Change and Trace Gases,” Philosophical Transactions
of the Royal Society, 15 July 2007,
pp. 1925–54. See also Nicholas Stern, The Economics of
Climate Change: The “Stern Review”
(Cambridge, 2007).
190
between 1993 and 2003, Oreskes found that not a single one
sought to
refute the “consensus” among scientists “over the reality of
human-

induced climate change.” There is disagreement over the
amount and di-
rection of change. But “virtually all professional climate
scientists,” writes
Oreskes, “agree on the reality of human-induced climate
change, but de-
bate continues on tempo and mode.”9 Indeed, in what I have
read so far, I
have not seen any reason yet for remaining a global-warming
skeptic.
The scientific consensus around the proposition that the present
crisis
of climate change is man-made forms the basis of what I have to
say here.
In the interest of clarity and focus, I present my propositions in
the form of
four theses. The last three theses follow from the first one. I
begin with the
proposition that anthropogenic explanations of climate change
spell the
collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural
history and
human history and end by returning to the question I opened
with: How
does the crisis of climate change appeal to our sense of human
universals
while challenging at the same time our capacity for historical
understand-
ing?
Thesis 1: Anthropogenic Explanations of Climate Change Spell
the Collapse of the Age-old Humanist Distinction between
Natural History and Human History
Philosophers and students of history have often displayed a
conscious

tendency to separate human history— or the story of human
affairs, as
R. G. Collingwood put it—from natural history, sometimes
proceeding
even to deny that nature could ever have history quite in the
same way
humans have it. This practice itself has a long and rich past of
which, for
reasons of space and personal limitations, I can only provide a
very provi-
sional, thumbnail, and somewhat arbitrary sketch.10
We could begin with the old Viconian-Hobbesian idea that we,
hu-
mans, could have proper knowledge of only civil and political
institutions
because we made them, while nature remains God’s work and
ultimately
inscrutable to man. “The true is identical with the created:
verum ipsum
factum” is how Croce summarized Vico’s famous dictum.11
Vico scholars
have sometimes protested that Vico did not make such a drastic
separation
9. Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate
Change: How Do We Know
We’re Not Wrong?” in Climate Change: What It Means for Us,
Our Children, and Our
Grandchildren, ed. Joseph F. C. Dimento and Pamela Doughman
(Cambridge, Mass., 2007), pp.
73, 74.
10. A long history of this distinction is traced in Paolo Rossi,
The Dark Abyss of Time: The

History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to
Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane
(1979; Chicago, 1984).
11. Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico,
trans. R. G. Collingwood (1913;
191
between the natural and the human sciences as Croce and others
read into
his writings, but even they admit that such a reading is
widespread.12
This Viconian understanding was to become a part of the
historian’s
common sense in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It made
its way
into Marx’s famous utterance that “men make their own history,
but they
do not make it just as they please” and into the title of the
Marxist archae-
ologist V. Gordon Childe’s well-known book, Man Makes
Himself.13 Croce
seems to have been a major source of this distinction in the
second half of
the twentieth century through his influence on “the lonely
Oxford histor-
icist” Collingwood who, in turn, deeply influenced E. H. Carr’s
1961 book,
What Is History? which is still perhaps one of the best-selling
books on the

historian’s craft.14 Croce’s thoughts, one could say, unbeknown
to his leg-
atees and with unforeseeable modifications, have triumphed in
our under-
standing of history in the postcolonial age. Behind Croce and
his
adaptations of Hegel and hidden in Croce’s creative misreading
of his
predecessors stands the more distant and foundational figure of
Vico.15
The connections here, again, are many and complex. Suffice it
to say for
now that Croce’s 1911 book, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico,
dedicated,
significantly, to Wilhelm Windelband, was translated into
English in 1913
by none other than Collingwood, who was an admirer, if not a
follower, of
the Italian master.
However, Collingwood’s own argument for separating natural
history
from human ones developed its own inflections, while running,
one might
say, still on broadly Viconian lines as interpreted by Croce.
Nature, Col-
lingwood remarked, has no “inside.” “In the case of nature, this
distinction
between the outside and the inside of an event does not arise.
The events of
New Brunswick, N.J., 2002), p. 5. Carlo Ginzburg has alerted
me to problems with
Collingwood’s translation.

12. See the discussion in Perez Zagorin, “Vico’s Theory of
Knowledge: A Critique,”
Philosophical Quarterly 34 (Jan. 1984): 15–30.
13. Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,”
in Marx and Frederick
Engels, Selected Works, trans. pub., 3 vols. (Moscow, 1969),
1:398. See V. Gordon Childe, Man
Makes Himself (London, 1941). Indeed, Althusser’s revolt in
the 1960s against humanism in
Marx was in part a jihad against the remnants of Vico in the
savant’s texts; see Étienne Balibar,
personal communication to author, 1 Dec. 2007. I am grateful to
Ian Bedford for drawing my
attention to complexities in Marx’s connections to Vico.
14. David Roberts describes Collingwood as “the lonely Oxford
historicist. . . , in important
respects a follower of Croce’s” (David D. Roberts, Benedetto
Croce and the Uses of Historicism
[Berkeley, 1987], p. 325).
15. On Croce’s misreading of Vico, see the discussion in
general in Cecilia Miller,
Giambattista Vico: Imagination and Historical Knowledge
(Basingstoke, 1993), and James C.
Morrison, “Vico’s Principle of Verum is Factum and the
Problem of Historicism,” Journal of the
History of Ideas 39 (Oct.–Dec. 1978): 579 –95.
192

nature are mere events, not the acts of agents whose thought the
scientist
endeavours to trace.” Hence, “all history properly so called is
the history of
human affairs.” The historian’s job is “to think himself into [an]
action, to
discern the thought of its agent.” A distinction, therefore, has
“to be made
between historical and non-historical human actions. . . . So far
as man’s
conduct is determined by what may be called his animal nature,
his im-
pulses and appetites, it is non-historical; the process of those
activities is a
natural process.” Thus, says Collingwood, “the historian is not
interested
in the fact that men eat and sleep and make love and thus satisfy
their
natural appetites; but he is interested in the social customs
which they
create by their thought as a framework within which these
appetites find
satisfaction in ways sanctioned by convention and morality.”
Only the
history of the social construction of the body, not the history of
the body as
such, can be studied. By splitting the human into the natural and
the social
or cultural, Collingwood saw no need to bring the two
together.16
In discussing Croce’s 1893 essay “History Subsumed under the
Concept
of Art,” Collingwood wrote, “Croce, by denying [the German
idea] that
history was a science at all, cut himself at one blow loose from

naturalism,
and set his face towards an idea of history as something
radically different
from nature.”17 David Roberts gives a fuller account of the
more mature
position in Croce. Croce drew on the writings of Ernst Mach
and Henri
Poincaré to argue that “the concepts of the natural sciences are
human
constructs elaborated for human purposes.” “When we peer into
nature,”
he said, “we find only ourselves.” We do not “understand
ourselves best as
part of the natural world.” So, as Roberts puts it, “Croce
proclaimed that
there is no world but the human world, then took over the
central doctrine
of Vico that we can know the human world because we have
made it.” For
Croce, then, all material objects were subsumed into human
thought. No
rocks, for example, existed in themselves. Croce’s idealism,
Roberts ex-
plains, “does not mean that rocks, for example, ‘don’t exist’
without hu-
man beings to think them. Apart from human concern and
language, they
neither exist nor do not exist, since ‘exist’ is a human concept
that has
meaning only within a context of human concerns and
purposes.”18 Both
Croce and Collingwood would thus enfold human history and
nature, to
the extent that the latter could be said to have history, into
purposive
human action. What exists beyond that does not “exist” because

it does not
exist for humans in any meaningful sense.
16. Collingwood, The Idea of History (1946; New York, 1976),
pp. 214, 212, 213, 216.
17. Ibid., p. 193.
18. Roberts, Benedetto Croce and the Uses of Historicism, pp.
59, 60, 62.
193
In the twentieth century, however, other arguments, more
sociological
or materialist, have existed alongside the Viconian one. They
too have
continued to justify the separation of human from natural
history. One
influential though perhaps infamous example would be the
booklet on the
Marxist philosophy of history that Stalin published in 1938,
Dialectical and
Historical Materialism. This is how Stalin put the problem:
Geographical environment is unquestionably one of the constant
and
indispensable conditions of development of society and, of
course, . . .
[it] accelerates or retards its development. But its influence is
not the
determining influence, inasmuch as the changes and
development of
society proceed at an incomparably faster rate than the changes

and
development of geographical environment. In the space of 3000
years
three different social systems have been successfully superseded
in
Europe: the primitive communal system, the slave system and
the
feudal system. . . . Yet during this period geographical
conditions in
Europe have either not changed at all, or have changed so
slightly that
geography takes no note of them. And that is quite natural.
Changes
in geographical environment of any importance require millions
of
years, whereas a few hundred or a couple of thousand years are
enough for even very important changes in the system of human
soci-
ety.19
For all its dogmatic and formulaic tone, Stalin’s passage
captures an as-
sumption perhaps common to historians of the mid-twentieth
century:
man’s environment did change but changed so slowly as to
make the his-
tory of man’s relation to his environment almost timeless and
thus not a
subject of historiography at all. Even when Fernand Braudel
rebelled
against the state of the discipline of history as he found it in the
late 1930s
and proclaimed his rebellion later in 1949 through his great
book The
Mediterranean, it was clear that he rebelled mainly against
historians who

treated the environment simply as a silent and passive backdrop
to their
historical narratives, something dealt with in the introductory
chapter but
forgotten thereafter, as if, as Braudel put it, “the flowers did not
come back
every spring, the flocks of sheep migrate every year, or the
ships sail on a
real sea that changes with the seasons.” In composing The
Mediterranean,
Braudel wanted to write a history in which the seasons—“a
history of
constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles”—and other
recurrences in
19. Joseph Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism
(1938), www.marxists.org/
reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm
194
nature played an active role in molding human actions.20 The
environ-
ment, in that sense, had an agentive presence in Braudel’s
pages, but the
idea that nature was mainly repetitive had a long and ancient
history in
European thought, as Gadamer showed in his discussion of
Johann Gustav
Droysen.21 Braudel’s position was no doubt a great advance
over the kind
of nature-as-a-backdrop argument that Stalin developed. But it

shared a
fundamental assumption, too, with the stance adopted by Stalin:
the his-
tory of “man’s relationship to the environment” was so slow as
to be “al-
most timeless.”22 In today’s climatologists’ terms, we could
say that Stalin
and Braudel and others who thought thus did not have available
to them
the idea, now widespread in the literature on global warming,
that the
climate, and hence the overall environment, can sometimes
reach a tipping
point at which this slow and apparently timeless backdrop for
human
actions transforms itself with a speed that can only spell
disaster for human
beings.
If Braudel, to some degree, made a breach in the binary of
natural/
human history, one could say that the rise of environmental
history in the
late twentieth century made the breach wider. It could even be
argued that
environmental historians have sometimes indeed progressed
towards pro-
ducing what could be called natural histories of man. But there
is a very
important difference between the understanding of the human
being that
these histories have been based on and the agency of the human
now being
proposed by scientists writing on climate change. Simply put,
environ-
mental history, where it was not straightforwardly cultural,

social, or eco-
nomic history, looked upon human beings as biological agents.
Alfred
Crosby, Jr., whose book The Columbian Exchange did much to
pioneer the
“new” environmental histories in the early 1970s, put the point
thus in his
original preface: “Man is a biological entity before he is a
Roman Catholic
or a capitalist or anything else.”23 The recent book by Daniel
Lord Smail,
On Deep History and the Brain, is adventurous in attempting to
connect
knowledge gained from evolutionary and neurosciences with
human his-
20. Fernand Braudel, “Preface to the First Edition,” The
Mediterranean and the
Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. Siân
Reynolds, 2 vols. (1949; London, 1972),
1:20. See also Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution:
The “Annales” School, 1929 – 89
(Stanford, Calif., 1990), pp. 32–64.
21. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2d ed., trans.
Joel Weinsheimer and
Donald G. Marshall (1975, 1979; London, 1988), pp. 214 –18.
See also Bonnie G. Smith, “Gender
and the Practices of Scientific History: The Seminar and
Archival Research in the Nineteenth
Century,” American Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995): 1150 –
76.
22. Braudel, “Preface to the First Edition,” p. 20.
23. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological
and Cultural Consequences of

1492 (1972; London, 2003), p. xxv.
195
tories. Smail’s book pursues possible connections between
biology and
culture— between the history of the human brain and cultural
history, in
particular—while being always sensitive to the limits of
biological reason-
ing. But it is the history of human biology and not any recent
theses about
the newly acquired geological agency of humans that concerns
Smail.24
Scholars writing on the current climate-change crisis are indeed
saying
something significantly different from what environmental
historians
have said so far. In unwittingly destroying the artificial but
time-honored
distinction between natural and human histories, climate
scientists posit
that the human being has become something much larger than
the simple
biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now
wield a
geological force. As Oreskes puts it: “To deny that global
warming is real is
precisely to deny that humans have become geological agents,
changing

the most basic physical processes of the earth.”
For centuries, [she continues,] scientists thought that earth
processes
were so large and powerful that nothing we could do could
change
them. This was a basic tenet of geological science: that human
chro-
nologies were insignificant compared with the vastness of
geological
time; that human activities were insignificant compared with the
force of geological processes. And once they were. But no
more. There
are now so many of us cutting down so many trees and burning
so
many billions of tons of fossil fuels that we have indeed become
geo-
logical agents. We have changed the chemistry of our
atmosphere,
causing sea level to rise, ice to melt, and climate to change.
There is
no reason to think otherwise.25
Biological agents, geological agents—two different names with
very differ-
ent consequences. Environmental history, to go by Crosby’s
masterful sur-
vey of the origins and the state of the field in 1995, has much to
do with
biology and geography but hardly ever imagined human impact
on the
planet on a geological scale. It was still a vision of man “as a
prisoner of
climate,” as Crosby put it quoting Braudel, and not of man as
the maker of
it.26 To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our

imagination
of the human. Humans are biological agents, both collectively
and as in-
dividuals. They have always been so. There was no point in
human history
when humans were not biological agents. But we can become
geological
agents only historically and collectively, that is, when we have
reached
24. See Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain
(Berkeley, 2008), pp. 74 –189.
25. Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus,” p. 93.
26. Crosby Jr., “The Past and Present of Environmental
History,” American Historical
Review 100 (Oct. 1995): 1185.
196
numbers and invented technologies that are on a scale large
enough to
have an impact on the planet itself. To call ourselves geological
agents is to
attribute to us a force on the same scale as that released at other
times when
there has been a mass extinction of species. We seem to be
currently going
through that kind of a period. The current “rate in the loss of
species
diversity,” specialists argue, “is similar in intensity to the event
around 65

million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs.”27 Our
footprint was not
always that large. Humans began to acquire this agency only
since the
Industrial Revolution, but the process really picked up in the
second half of
the twentieth century. Humans have become geological agents
very re-
cently in human history. In that sense, we can say that it is only
very
recently that the distinction between human and natural
histories—much
of which had been preserved even in environmental histories
that saw the
two entities in interaction— has begun to collapse. For it is no
longer a
question simply of man having an interactive relation with
nature. This
humans have always had, or at least that is how man has been
imagined in
a large part of what is generally called the Western tradition.28
Now it is
being claimed that humans are a force of nature in the
geological sense. A
fundamental assumption of Western (and now universal)
political
thought has come undone in this crisis.29
Thesis 2: The Idea of the Anthropocene, the New Geological
Epoch When Humans Exist as a Geological Force, Severely
Qualifies Humanist Histories of Modernity/Globalization
How to combine human cultural and historical diversity with
human
freedom has formed one of the key underlying questions of
human histo-

ries written of the period from 1750 to the years of present-day
globaliza-
tion. Diversity, as Gadamer pointed out with reference to
Leopold von
Ranke, was itself a figure of freedom in the historian’s
imagination of the
27. Will Steffen, director of the Centre for Resource and
Environmental Studies at the
Australian National University, quoted in “Humans Creating
New ‘Geological Age,’” The
Australian, 31 Mar. 2008,
www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,,23458148-
5006787,00.html.
Steffen’s reference was the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
Report of 2005. See also Neil
Shubin, “The Disappearance of Species,” Bulletin of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
61 (Spring 2008): 17–19.
28. Bill McKibben’s argument about the “end of nature” implied
the end of nature as “a
separate realm that had always served to make us feel smaller”
(Bill McKibben, The End of
Nature [1989; New York, 2006], p. xxii).
29. Bruno Latour’s Politics of Nature: How to Bring the
Sciences into Democracy, trans.
Catherine Porter (1999; Cambridge, Mass., 2004), written
before the intensification of the
debate on global warming, calls into question the entire
tradition of organizing the idea of
politics around the assumption of a separate realm of nature and
points to the problems that
this assumption poses for contemporary questions of democracy.

197
historical process.30 Freedom has, of course, meant different
things at dif-
ferent times, ranging from ideas of human and citizens’ rights to
those of
decolonization and self-rule. Freedom, one could say, is a
blanket category
for diverse imaginations of human autonomy and sovereignty.
Looking at
the works of Kant, Hegel, or Marx; nineteenth-century ideas of
progress
and class struggle; the struggle against slavery; the Russian and
Chinese
revolutions; the resistance to Nazism and Fascism; the
decolonization
movements of the 1950s and 1960s and the revolutions in Cuba
and Viet-
nam; the evolution and explosion of the rights discourse; the
fight for civil
rights for African Americans, indigenous peoples, Indian Dalits,
and other
minorities; down to the kind of arguments that, say, Amartya
Sen put
forward in his book Development as Freedom, one could say
that freedom
has been the most important motif of written accounts of human
history
of these two hundred and fifty years. Of course, as I have
already noted,
freedom has not always carried the same meaning for everyone.
Francis

Fukuyama’s understanding of freedom would be significantly
different
from that of Sen. But this semantic capaciousness of the word
only speaks
to its rhetorical power.
In no discussion of freedom in the period since the
Enlightenment was
there ever any awareness of the geological agency that human
beings were
acquiring at the same time as and through processes closely
linked to their
acquisition of freedom. Philosophers of freedom were mainly,
and under-
standably, concerned with how humans would escape the
injustice, op-
pression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by
other humans
or human-made systems. Geological time and the chronology of
human
histories remained unrelated. This distance between the two
calendars, as
we have seen, is what climate scientists now claim has
collapsed. The pe-
riod I have mentioned, from 1750 to now, is also the time when
human
beings switched from wood and other renewable fuels to large-
scale use of
fossil fuel—first coal and then oil and gas. The mansion of
modern free-
doms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use. Most
of our
freedoms so far have been energy-intensive. The period of
human history
usually associated with what we today think of as the
institutions of civi-

lization—the beginnings of agriculture, the founding of cities,
the rise of
the religions we know, the invention of writing— began about
ten thou-
sand years ago, as the planet moved from one geological period,
the last ice
age or the Pleistocene, to the more recent and warmer Holocene.
The
Holocene is the period we are supposed to be in; but the
possibility of
30. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 206: The historian “knows
that everything could have
been different, and every acting individual could have acted
differently.”
198
anthropogenic climate change has raised the question of its
termination.
Now that humans—thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil
fuel, and
other related activities— have become a geological agent on the
planet,
some scientists have proposed that we recognize the beginning
of a new
geological era, one in which humans act as a main determinant
of the
environment of the planet. The name they have coined for this
new geo-
logical age is Anthropocene. The proposal was first made by the
Nobel-

winning chemist Paul J. Crutzen and his collaborator, a marine
science
specialist, Eugene F. Stoermer. In a short statement published in
2000, they
said, “Considering . . . [the] major and still growing impacts of
human
activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global,
scales, it
seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role
of man-
kind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term
‘anthropocene’
for the current geological epoch.”31 Crutzen elaborated on the
proposal in
a short piece published in Nature in 2002:
For the past three centuries, the effects of humans on the global
envi-
ronment have escalated. Because of these anthropogenic
emissions of
carbon dioxide, global climate may depart significantly from
natural
behaviour for many millennia to come. It seems appropriate to
assign
the term “Anthropocene” to the present, . . . human-dominated,
geo-
logical epoch, supplementing the Holocene—the warm period of
the
past 10 –12 millennia. The Anthropocene could be said to have
started
in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when analyses of air
trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of growing global
concen-
trations of carbon dioxide and methane. This date also happens
to
coincide with James Watt’s design of the steam engine in

1784.32
It is, of course, true that Crutzen’s saying so does not make the
Anthropo-
cene an officially accepted geologic period. As Mike Davis
comments, “in
geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex,
controversial
art,” involving, always, vigorous debates and contestation.33
The name
Holocene for “the post-glacial geological epoch of the past ten
to twelve
thousand years” (“A,” p. 17), for example, gained no immediate
acceptance
when proposed—apparently by Sir Charles Lyell—in 1833. The
Interna-
tional Geological Congress officially adopted the name at their
meeting in
31. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The
Anthropocene,” IGBP [International
Geosphere-Biosphere Programme] Newsletter 41 (2000): 17;
hereafter abbreviated “A.”
32. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature, 3 Jan. 2002, p. 23.
33. Mike Davis, “Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity’s
Meltdown,” 26 June 2008,
tomdispatch.com/post/174949; hereafter abbreviated “LIS.” I
am grateful to Lauren Berlant for
bringing this essay to my attention.
199

Bologna after about fifty years in 1885 (see “A,” p. 17). The
same goes for
Anthropocene. Scientists have engaged Crutzen and his
colleagues on the
question of when exactly the Anthropocene may have begun.
But the Feb-
ruary 2008 newsletter of the Geological Society of America,
GSA Today,
opens with a statement signed by the members of the
Stratigraphy Com-
mission of the Geological Society of London accepting
Crutzen’s defini-
tion and dating of the Anthropocene.34 Adopting a
“conservative”
approach, they conclude: “Sufficient evidence has emerged of
stratigraph-
ically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for
recognition of
the Anthropocene— currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of
global en-
vironmental change—as a new geological epoch to be
considered for for-
malization by international discussion.”35 There is increasing
evidence that
the term is gradually winning acceptance among social
scientists as well.36
So, has the period from 1750 to now been one of freedom or
that of the
Anthropocene? Is the Anthropocene a critique of the narratives
of free-
dom? Is the geological agency of humans the price we pay for
the pursuit of
freedom? In some ways, yes. As Edward O. Wilson said in his

The Future of
Life: “Humanity has so far played the role of planetary killer,
concerned
only with its own short-term survival. We have cut much of the
heart out
of biodiversity. . . . If Emi, the Sumatran rhino could speak, she
might tell
us that the twenty-first century is thus far no exception.”37 But
the relation
between Enlightenment themes of freedom and the collapsing of
human
and geological chronologies seems more complicated and
contradictory
than a simple binary would allow. It is true that human beings
have tum-
bled into being a geological agent through our own decisions.
The Anthro-
pocene, one might say, has been an unintended consequence of
human
choices. But it is also clear that for humans any thought of the
way out of
our current predicament cannot but refer to the idea of
deploying reason
in global, collective life. As Wilson put it: “We know more
about the prob-
34. See William F. Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse
Era Began Thousands of
Years Ago,” Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (2003): 261–93; Crutzen
and Steffen, “How Long Have
We Been in the Anthropocene Era?” Climatic Change 61, no. 3
(2003): 251–57; and Jan
Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?”
GSA Today 18 (Feb. 2008): 4 – 8. I
am grateful to Neptune Srimal for this reference.

35. Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in the
Anthropocene?” p. 7. Davis described the
London Society as “the world’s oldest association of Earth
scientists, founded in 1807” (“LIS”).
36. See, for instance, Libby Robin and Steffen, “History for the
Anthropocene,” History
Compass 5, no. 5 (2007): 1694 –1719, and Jeffrey D. Sachs,
“The Anthropocene,” Common
Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (New York, 2008), pp.
57– 82. Thanks to Debjani
Ganguly for drawing my attention to the essay by Robin and
Steffen, and to Robin for sharing it
with me.
37. Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York, 2002), p.
102; hereafter abbreviated
FL.
200
lem now. . . . We know what to do” (FL, p. 102). Or, to quote
Crutzen and
Stoermer again:
Mankind will remain a major geological force for many
millennia,
maybe millions of years, to come. To develop a world-wide
accepted
strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human-
in-
duced stresses will be one of the great future tasks of mankind,

requir-
ing intensive research efforts and wise application of knowledge
thus
acquired. . . . An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task
lies
ahead of the global research and engineering community to
guide
mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental
management.
[“A,” p. 18]
Logically, then, in the era of the Anthropocene, we need the
Enlighten-
ment (that is, reason) even more than in the past. There is one
consider-
ation though that qualifies this optimism about the role of
reason and that
has to do with the most common shape that freedom takes in
human
societies: politics. Politics has never been based on reason
alone. And pol-
itics in the age of the masses and in a world already
complicated by sharp
inequalities between and inside nations is something no one can
control.
“Sheer demographic momentum,” writes Davis, “will increase
the world’s
urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years
(90% of them
in poor cities), and no one—absolutely no one [including, one
might say,
scholars on the Left]— has a clue how a planet of slums, with
growing food
and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival,
much less
their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity”

(“LIS”).
It is not surprising then that the crisis of climate change should
produce
anxieties precisely around futures that we cannot visualize.
Scientists’ hope
that reason will guide us out of the present predicament is
reminiscent of
the social opposition between the myth of Science and the
actual politics of
the sciences that Bruno Latour discusses in his Politics of
Nature.38 Bereft of
any sense of politics, Wilson can only articulate his sense of
practicality as
a philosopher’s hope mixed with anxiety: “Perhaps we will act
in time” (FL,
p. 102). Yet the very science of global warming produces of
necessity po-
litical imperatives. Tim Flannery’s book, for instance, raises the
dark pros-
pects of an “Orwellian nightmare” in a chapter entitled “2084:
The Carbon
Dictatorship?”39 Mark Maslin concludes his book with some
gloomy
thoughts: “It is unlikely that global politics will solve global
warming.
Technofixes are dangerous or cause problems as bad as the ones
they are
38. See Latour, Politics of Nature.
39. Flannery, The Weather Makers, p. xiv.
201

aimed at fixing. . . . [Global warming] requires nations and
regions to plan
for the next 50 years, something that most societies are unable
to do be-
cause of the very short-term nature of politics.” His
recommendation, “we
must prepare for the worst and adapt,” coupled with Davis’s
observations
about the coming “planet of slums” places the question of
human freedom
under the cloud of the Anthropocene.40
Thesis 3: The Geological Hypothesis Regarding the
Anthropocene Requires Us to Put Global Histories of Capital in
Conversation with the Species History of Humans
Analytic frameworks engaging questions of freedom by way of
critiques
of capitalist globalization have not, in any way, become
obsolete in the age
of climate change. If anything, as Davis shows, climate change
may well
end up accentuating all the inequities of the capitalist world
order if the
interests of the poor and vulnerable are neglected (see “LIS”).
Capitalist
globalization exists; so should its critiques. But these critiques
do not give
us an adequate hold on human history once we accept that the
crisis of
climate change is here with us and may exist as part of this
planet for much
longer than capitalism or long after capitalism has undergone
many more

historic mutations. The problematic of globalization allows us
to read
climate change only as a crisis of capitalist management. While
there is no
denying that climate change has profoundly to do with the
history of cap-
ital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient
for address-
ing questions relating to human history once the crisis of
climate change
has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to
loom on the
horizon of our present. The geologic now of the Anthropocene
has become
entangled with the now of human history.
Scholars who study human beings in relation to the crisis of
climate
change and other ecological problems emerging on a world
scale make a
distinction between the recorded history of human beings and
their deep
history. Recorded history refers, very broadly, to the ten
thousand years
that have passed since the invention of agriculture but more
usually to the
last four thousand years or so for which written records exist.
Historians of
modernity and “early modernity” usually move in the archives
of the last
four hundred years. The history of humans that goes beyond
these years of
written records constitutes what other students of human pasts—
not pro-
fessional historians— call deep history. As Wilson, one of the
main pro-

40. Maslin, Global Warming, p. 147. For a discussion of how
fossil fuels created both the
possibilities for and the limits of democracy in the twentieth
century, see Timothy Mitchell,
“Carbon Democracy,” forthcoming in Economy and Society. I
am grateful to Mitchell for letting
me cite this unpublished paper.
202
ponents of this distinction, writes: “Human behavior is seen as
the product
not just of recorded history, ten thousand years recent, but of
deep history,
the combined genetic and cultural changes that created
humanity over
hundreds of [thousands of] years.”41 It, of course, goes to the
credit of
Smail that he has attempted to explain to professional historians
the intel-
lectual appeal of deep history.42
Without such knowledge of the deep history of humanity it
would be
difficult to arrive at a secular understanding of why climate
change con-
stitutes a crisis for humans. Geologists and climate scientists
may explain
why the current phase of global warming—as distinct from the
warming of
the planet that has happened before—is anthropogenic in nature,

but the
ensuing crisis for humans is not understandable unless one
works out the
consequences of that warming. The consequences make sense
only if we
think of humans as a form of life and look on human history as
part of the
history of life on this planet. For, ultimately, what the warming
of the
planet threatens is not the geological planet itself but the very
conditions,
both biological and geological, on which the survival of human
life as
developed in the Holocene period depends.
The word that scholars such as Wilson or Crutzen use to
designate life
in the human form—and in other living forms—is species. They
speak of
the human being as a species and find that category useful in
thinking
about the nature of the current crisis. It is a word that will never
occur in
any standard history or political-economic analysis of
globalization by
scholars on the Left, for the analysis of globalization refers, for
good rea-
sons, only to the recent and recorded history of humans. Species
thinking,
on the other hand, is connected to the enterprise of deep history.
Further,
Wilson and Crutzen actually find such thinking essential to
visualizing
human well-being. As Wilson writes: “We need this longer view
. . . not
only to understand our species but more firmly to secure its

future” (SN, p.
x). The task of placing, historically, the crisis of climate change
thus re-
quires us to bring together intellectual formations that are
somewhat in
tension with each other: the planetary and the global; deep and
recorded
histories; species thinking and critiques of capital.
In saying this, I work somewhat against the grain of historians’
thinking
on globalization and world history. In a landmark essay
published in 1995
and entitled “World History in a Global Age,” Michael Geyer
and Charles
Bright wrote, “At the end of the twentieth century, we
encounter, not a
41. Wilson, In Search of Nature (Washington, D.C., 1996), pp.
ix–x; hereafter abbreviated
SN.
42. See Smail, On Deep History and the Brain.
203
universalizing and single modernity but an integrated world of
multiple
and multiplying modernities.” “As far as world history is
concerned,” they
said, “there is no universalizing spirit. . . . There are, instead,
many very

specific, very material and pragmatic practices that await
critical reflection
and historical study.” Yet, thanks to global connections forged
by trade,
empires, and capitalism, “we confront a startling new condition:
human-
ity, which has been the subject of world history for many
centuries and
civilizations, has now come into the purview of all human
beings. This
humanity is extremely polarized into rich and poor.”43 This
humanity,
Geyer and Bright imply in the spirit of the philosophies of
difference, is not
one. It does not, they write, “form a single homogenous
civilization.”
“Neither is this humanity any longer a mere species or a natural
condition.
For the first time,” they say, with some existentialist flourish,
“we as hu-
man beings collectively constitute ourselves and, hence, are
responsible for
ourselves” (“WH,” p. 1059). Clearly, the scientists who
advocate the idea of
the Anthropocene are saying something quite the contrary. They
argue
that because humans constitute a particular kind of species they
can, in the
process of dominating other species, acquire the status of a
geologic force.
Humans, in other words, have become a natural condition, at
least today.
How do we create a conversation between these two positions?
It is understandable that the biological-sounding talk of species
should

worry historians. They feel concerned about their finely honed
sense of
contingency and freedom in human affairs having to cede
ground to a
more deterministic view of the world. Besides, there are always,
as Smail
recognizes, dangerous historical examples of the political use of
biology.44
The idea of species, it is feared, in addition, may introduce a
powerful
degree of essentialism in our understanding of humans. I will
return to the
question of contingency later in this section, but, on the issue of
essential-
ism, Smail helpfully points out why species cannot be thought
of in essen-
tialist terms:
Species, according to Darwin, are not fixed entities with natural
es-
sences imbued in them by the Creator. . . . Natural selection
does not
homogenize the individuals of a species. . . . Given this state of
affairs,
the search for a normal . . . nature and body type [of any
particular
species] is futile. And so it goes for the equally futile quest to
identify
43. Michael Geyer and Charles Bright, “World History in a
Global Age,” American
Historical Review 100 (Oct. 1995): 1058 –59; hereafter
abbreviated “WH.”
44. See Smail, On Deep History and the Brain, p. 124.

204
“human nature.” Here, as in so many areas, biology and cultural
studies are fundamentally congruent.45
It is clear that different academic disciplines position their
practitioners
differently with regard to the question of how to view the
human being. All
disciplines have to create their objects of study. If medicine or
biology
reduces the human to a certain specific understanding of him or
her, hu-
manist historians often do not realize that the protagonists of
their sto-
ries—persons—are reductions, too. Absent personhood, there is
no
human subject of history. That is why Derrida earned the wrath
of Fou-
cault by pointing out that any desire to enable or allow madness
itself to
speak in a history of madness would be “the maddest aspect” of
the
project.46 An object of critical importance to humanists of all
traditions,
personhood is nevertheless no less of a reduction of or an
abstraction from
the embodied and whole human being than, say, the human
skeleton dis-
cussed in an anatomy class.

The crisis of climate change calls on academics to rise above
their dis-
ciplinary prejudices, for it is a crisis of many dimensions. In
that context, it
is interesting to observe the role that the category of species has
begun to
play among scholars, including economists, who have already
gone further
than historians in investigating and explaining the nature of this
crisis. The
economist Jeffrey Sachs’s book, Common Wealth, meant for the
educated
but lay public, uses the idea of species as central to its
argument and de-
votes a whole chapter to the Anthropocene.47 In fact, the
scholar from
whom Sachs solicited a foreword for his book was none other
than Edward
Wilson. The concept of species plays a quasi-Hegelian role in
Wilson’s
foreword in the same way as the multitude or the masses in
Marxist writ-
ings. If Marxists of various hues have at different times thought
that the
good of humanity lay in the prospect of the oppressed or the
multitude
realizing their own global unity through a process of coming
into self-
consciousness, Wilson pins his hope on the unity possible
through our
collective self-recognition as a species: “Humanity has
consumed or trans-
formed enough of Earth’s irreplaceable resources to be in better
shape than
ever before. We are smart enough and now, one hopes, well
informed

enough to achieve self-understanding as a unified species. . . .
We will be
wise to look on ourselves as a species.”48
45. Ibid. pp. 124 –25.
46. Jacques Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,”
Writing and Difference, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago, 1978), p. 34.
47. See Sachs, Common Wealth, pp. 57– 82.
48. Wilson, foreword to Sachs, Common Wealth, p. xii.
Students of Marx may be reminded
here of the use of the category “species being” by the young
Marx.
205
Yet doubts linger about the use of the idea of species in the
context of
climate change, and it would be good to deal with one that can
easily arise
among critics on the Left. One could object, for instance, that
all the an-
thropogenic factors contributing to global warming—the
burning of fossil
fuel, industrialization of animal stock, the clearing of tropical
and other
forests, and so on—are after all part of a larger story: the
unfolding of
capitalism in the West and the imperial or quasi-imperial
domination by

the West of the rest of the world. It is from that recent history
of the West
that the elite of China, Japan, India, Russia, and Brazil have
drawn inspi-
ration in attempting to develop their own trajectories toward
superpower
politics and global domination through capitalist economic,
technologi-
cal, and military might. If this is broadly true, then does not the
talk of
species or mankind simply serve to hide the reality of capitalist
production
and the logic of imperial—formal, informal, or machinic in a
Deleuzian
sense— domination that it fosters? Why should one include the
poor of the
world—whose carbon footprint is small anyway— by use of
such all-
inclusive terms as species or mankind when the blame for the
current crisis
should be squarely laid at the door of the rich nations in the
first place and
of the richer classes in the poorer ones?
We need to stay with this question a little longer; otherwise the
differ-
ence between the present historiography of globalization and
the histori-
ography demanded by anthropogenic theories of climate change
will not
be clear to us. Though some scientists would want to date the
Anthropo-
cene from the time agriculture was invented, my readings
mostly suggest
that our falling into the Anthropocene was neither an ancient
nor an in-

evitable happening. Human civilization surely did not begin on
condition
that, one day in his history, man would have to shift from wood
to coal and
from coal to petroleum and gas. That there was much historical
contin-
gency in the transition from wood to coal as the main source of
energy has
been demonstrated powerfully by Kenneth Pomeranz in his
pathbreaking
book The Great Divergence.49 Coincidences and historical
accidents simi-
larly litter the stories of the “discovery” of oil, of the oil
tycoons, and of the
automobile industry as they do any other histories.50 Capitalist
societies
themselves have not remained the same since the beginning of
capitalism.51
49. See Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe,
China, and the Making of the
Modern World Economy (Princeton, N.J., 2000).
50. See Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy.” See also Edwin Black,
Internal Combustion: How
Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and
Derailed the Alternatives (New
York, 2006).
51. Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century is a good guide to
these fluctuations in the
fortunes of capitalism.
206

Human population, too, has dramatically increased since the
Second
World War. India alone is now more than three times more
populous than
at independence in 1947. Clearly, nobody is in a position to
claim that there
is something inherent to the human species that has pushed us
finally into
the Anthropocene. We have stumbled into it. The way to it was
no doubt
through industrial civilization. (I do not make a distinction here
between
the capitalist and socialist societies we have had so far, for
there was never
any principled difference in their use of fossil fuel.)
If the industrial way of life was what got us into this crisis, then
the
question is, Why think in terms of species, surely a category
that belongs to
a much longer history? Why could not the narrative of
capitalism—and
hence its critique— be sufficient as a framework for
interrogating the his-
tory of climate change and understanding its consequences? It
seems true
that the crisis of climate change has been necessitated by the
high-energy-
consuming models of society that capitalist industrialization has
created
and promoted, but the current crisis has brought into view
certain other
conditions for the existence of life in the human form that have

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