Page: 3-4 pages

This essay must be a historical narrative and explanation of an environmental problem (ecosystem devastation, pollution or health problem, climate change concern, or something similar) that has affected you and/or your hometown in some way. Think specifically about something that has happened, or is happening now, in or near where you live or grew up. You will then use the course material and at least one outside academic source to do the following in this order:

1. Discuss the origins of the problem locally and within a national and/or global context.  

2. Discuss who has been affected most by the problem

3. Explain what kinds of efforts have been undertaken to address the problem and how effective these actions have been. Are/were the actions taken equitable? Are/were they sufficient?

The objective of this assignment is for you to deepen your comprehension of the course material up to this point and be able to bring together the material from the midterm with the most recent material on environmental ideas and environmentalisms. 

Engage with environmental ideas and understand better how recent history makes our contemporary moment. 

You will be expected to use course material (lecture and/or readings) to write this essay, but you are also expected to use at least one outside academic source that has not been assigned in this course. 

Jstor and Academic Search Complete are good databases for questions of environmental politics. 

This outside source needs to deal directly with or relate to your environmental problem. It might be that your source deals with the very specific local problem you chose, or its wider regional or global context. It always helps if the source specifically addresses the problem and how people have sought to resolve or mitigate it. Look for this kind of source(s) first. 

To cite lecture, course readings, and your outside source(s) in the text, you must use parenthetical references of author and page numbers. For example, (Guha, 123-5) or (Martinez Alier, 27). You do need to provide a full bibliography at the end for all outside sources you use. Please use MLA format

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/1569206X-12341279

Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 brill.com/hima

The Origins of Fossil Capital:

From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry*

Andreas Malm
Human Ecology Division/LUCID, Lund University

Andreas.Malm@lucid.lu.se

Abstract
The process commonly referred to as business-as-usual has given rise to dangerous climate
change, but its social history remains strangely unexplored. A key moment in its onset was the
transition to steam power as a source of rotary motion in commodity production, in Britain and,
first of all, in its cotton industry. This article tries to approach the dynamics of the fossil economy
by examining the causes of the transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry in the
second quarter of the nineteenth century. Common perceptions of the shift as driven by scarcity
are refuted, and it is shown that the choice of steam was motivated by a rather different concern:
power over labour. Turning away from standard interpretations of the role of energy in the
industrial revolution, this article opens a dialogue with Marx on matters of carbon and outlines a
theory of fossil capital, better suited for understanding the drivers of business-as-usual as it
continues to this day.

Keywords
Fossil fuels, steam power, water power, cotton industry, labour, space, time, carbon dioxide,
capital accumulation

In those spacious halls the benignant power of steam summons around him his
myriads of willing menials, and assigns to each the regulated task, substituting for
painful muscular effort on their part, the energies of his own gigantic arm, and
demanding in turn only attention and dexterity to correct such little aberrations
as casually occur in workmanship.
– Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures1

The chemical changes which thus take place are constantly increasing the
atmosphere by large quantities of carbonic acid [i.e. carbon dioxide] and other

* Many thanks to Alf Hornborg, Stefan Anderberg, Rikard Warlenius, Max Koch, Wim Carton,
Vasna Ramasar and other LUCID colleagues, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful
comments at various stages of this work.

1. Ure 1835, p. 18.

16 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

gases noxious to animal life. The means by which nature decomposes these
elements, or reconverts them into a solid form, are not sufficiently known.
– Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures2

Introduction
Global warming is the unintended by-product par excellence. A cotton
manufacturer of mid nineteenth-century Lancashire who decided to forgo his
old water wheel and, at long last, invest in a steam engine, erect a chimney
and order coal from a nearby pit did not, in all likelihood, entertain the
possibility that this act could have any kind of relationship to the extent of
Arctic sea ice, the salinity of the Nile Delta soil, the intensity of the Punjab
monsoon, the altitude of the Maldives, or the diversity of amphibian species in
Central American rainforests. Nonetheless, sporadic forebodings appear in the
literature of the time. One notable flash of apprehension about the atmospheric
consequences of employing steam power in factories can be found in the first
chapter of Charles Babbage’s classic treatise On the Economy of Machinery
and Manufactures. Babbage is credited with being the father of the modern
computer, and his book is considered the first to introduce ‘the factory into the
realm of economic analysis’.3 He made his fleeting remark, quoted above, some
two-and-a-half decades before John Tyndall explained the greenhouse effect,
and more than half a century before Svante Arrhenius first calculated the rise
in surface temperature of the Earth following an increase in the emissions of
carbon dioxide (called ‘carbonic acid’ by Arrhenius as well).4

But the environmentally concerned enquiry of the pioneer economist
was truncated, due to sheer lack of knowledge. Babbage was verging on yet
uncharted territory. Instead, his book continued as one long encomium to the
wonders of machinery – first and foremost ‘the check which it affords against
the inattention, the idleness, or the dishonesty of human agents’.5 With that
turn of phrase, Babbage established a leitmotif for mid nineteenth-century
bourgeois thinking on the triumphant powers of the machine. It evolved on
the basis of the operating procedures of manufacturers, continuously checking
the idiosyncrasies of human agents with ever more machinery impelled by ever
more powerful steam engines, unsuspecting of any particular noxious effects.

As the world teeters on the brink of unimaginable catastrophe due to global
warming, it is about time we revisit the origins of our predicament. How, simply

2. Babbage 1835, p. 18.
3. Rosenberg 1994, p. 24. See also Schaffer 1994.
4. See Weart 2003; Arrhenius 1896.
5. Babbage 1835, p. 54.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 17

put, did we get caught up in this mess? Why were modern economies put on
the track of perpetually increasing consumption of fossil fuels? This is the
question of the emergence of the fossil economy: an economy characterised by
self-sustaining growth predicated on growing consumption of fossil fuels, and
therefore generating a sustained growth in emissions of carbon dioxide. Thus
defined, the concept refers to an expansion in the scale of material production
realised through expansion in the combustion of coal, oil and/or natural gas.

In the lexicon of climate change discourse, the term ‘business-as-usual’
is commonly employed as a stand-in for the fossil economy. As usual as this
business now appears, it is not a fact of nature, nor the product of geological
or biological history. The fundamental ontological insights of climate science
tell us as much, and moreover, fossil fuels should, by their very definition, be
understood as a social relation: no piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself
into fuel. No humans have yet engaged in systematic large-scale extraction of
either to satisfy subsistence needs. Rather, fossil fuels necessitate commodity
production and waged or forced labour as components of their very existence.
A primary scientific task should therefore be to write a social history of
business-as-usual or – synonymously – the fossil economy, and yet it is sorely
neglected, in a field awash with data on the disastrous effects of the process
but comparatively poor on insights into the drivers of the danger. Most climate
science still dwells in the noiseless atmosphere, where everything takes place
on the surface, rather than entering the hidden abode of production, where
fossil fuels are actually produced and consumed. What follows is a modest
contribution to the filling of this gap.

The birth of the fossil economy
The obvious birthplace of the fossil economy is Britain. As late as 1850, this single
country was responsible for more than 60 per cent of global CO2 emissions
from fossil fuel combustion. It raised three-and-a-half times more coal than the
US, France, Germany, Belgium and Austro-Hungary combined, the lion’s share
of it for combustion on the British Isles; per capita consumption was more than
ten times higher than in France and Germany.6 For quite some time, Britain
was the sole economy of its kind, the place of origin of business-as-usual, from
which it eventually spread to other advanced capitalist countries.

By the mid-nineteenth century, however, coal had been regularly utilised as
a source of heat in Britain for almost two millennia. Stumbling upon outcrops
of the black stone, the Romans began to burn it for heating military garrisons
and villas, working iron in smitheries, and keeping the perpetual fire alive at the

6. Boden, Marland and Andres 2011; Church 1986, p. 773; Cameron 1985, p. 12.

18 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

temple in Bath.7 Coal fell into disuse with their departure, only to reappear in
the thirteenth century – primarily in the smitheries – and experienced a surge
in the late sixteenth, when it spread rapidly as a fuel for domestic heating. By
1800, most people in towns probably bought coal to heat their homes and cook
their meals.8 The household continued to be the chief hearth for combustion.
It could not give rise to a fossil economy: as long as coal was mostly used in the
domestic production of heat, fossil fuels remained unattached to an engine of
self-sustaining economic growth. No matter how much coal British households
burnt, consumption levels were constrained by the slow march of population
growth, rather than boosted by the exponential expansion in the scale of
material production we associate with business-as-usual. It would be absurd
to date its onset to the Roman occupation or the thirteenth century.

But long before 1850, coal had also made inroads into manufacturing, as a
fuel in the production of salt and soap, lime and ale, bricks and glass, copper
and pottery and a range of other commodities. Most importantly, the owners of
blast furnaces shifted from charcoal to coke in the last quarter of the eighteenth
century, ushering in a boom in iron production. By 1800, the iron sector took
some 10–15 per cent of all coal – a rapidly rising share, though still rather small
in relation to that of domestic heating (somewhere between a half and two
thirds).9 In furnaces, kilns and breweries, coal served the same purpose as in
cottage stoves: it provided heat for smelting, boiling or distilling the matters in
hand. A substitute for wood, it was confined to the processing of substances
whose properties required heating. For coal to be universalised as a fuel for all
sorts of commodity production, it had to be turned into a source of mechanical
energy – and, more precisely, of rotary motion.

Only by coupling the combustion of coal to the rotation of a wheel could
fossil fuels be made to fire the general process of growth: increased production –
and transportation – of all kinds of commodities. This is why James Watt’s
steam engine is widely identified as the fatal breakthrough into a warmer
world.10 Newcomen’s engine had managed to force a piston up and down, up
and down, in a vertical motion well suited for the pumping of water in mines,
but not for driving machinery. That was the feat of the device patented by Watt
in 1784, when he finally ‘adapted the motion of the piston to produce continuous
circular motion, and thereby made his engine applicable to all purposes of

7. Dearne and Branigan 1995.
8. Nef 1966; Flinn 1984; Hatcher 1993.
9. Nef 1966; Flinn 1984; Hatcher 1993; Buxton 1978; Hyde 1977; Humphrey and Stanislaw 1979.
10. See, for example, Crutzen 2002; Crutzen and Steffen 2003; Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill

2007; Zalasiewicz, Williams, Smith, Barry, Coe, Bown, Brenchley, Cantrill, Gale, Gibbard, Gregory,
Hounslow, Kerr, Pearson, Knox, Powell, Waters, Marshall, Oates, Rawson and Stone 2008.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 19

manufacture.’11 But a patent cannot by itself spark off something like a fossil
economy. The mere existence of a steam engine as certified in the legal rights
of the inventor tells us nothing about the extent to which such engines were
actually installed, their function in the economy, or the propensity to emit
carbon dioxide. History is replete with inventions petrified into objects of
exhibitions or fantasies da Vinci-style, including in the annals of steam power,
the basic principles of which were known long before Watt, including in
China.12 The question of the steam engine is therefore the question of why it
was adopted and diffused – in Britain, and, first of all, in the cotton industry.

The most advanced branch of industrial production, following Richard
Arkwright’s establishment of the factory system, the cotton industry was eyed
by Watt as the natural outlet for his product. The assembling of machines under
one roof demanded a regular, smooth and dependable propulsive force, posing
the technical challenge Watt wrestled with, and promising a vast market for him
and his business partner Matthew Boulton once he succeeded. And indeed, the
promise was eventually realised. The steam engine owed its coming position as
the defining prime mover of industrial production to its success in the cotton
mills.13 But that was by no means an automatic or predetermined affair. In fact,
as we shall see, cotton manufacturers preferred another prime mover for at
least four decades after Watt’s patent: the water wheel.

A traditional source of mechanical energy, leaving no traces of CO2 behind –
‘carbon-neutral’, in today’s parlance – water was the foundation of the early cotton
industry.14 Water, not steam, carried the first generations of cotton manufacturers
to their super-profits, even as Boulton & Watt did everything to advertise the
advantages of their engine. The water wheel proved extraordinarily resilient to
the challenge of steam, and when it finally gave way, the shift was contingent
upon developments in which neither Watt nor Boulton played any role.

Water power was a barrier that had to be knocked down for the fossil
economy to emerge. The British cotton industry was the historical gateway,
on the other side of which the steam engine spread to other major industries,
other countries, completely different applications – such as on the seas – and

11.  Farey 1827, p. 13; emphasis in original.
12. On steam engines in China, see Pomeranz 2000, pp. 61–2.
13. See, for example, von Tunzelmann 1978; Lord 1965; Hills 1970; Hills 1989; Briggs 1982.
14. See, for example, Aspin 2003; Fitton and Wadsworth 1958; Chapman 1972; Chapman

1992; Tann 1970; Cooke 2010; Ingle 1997. Insofar as the wheels were built using iron, which they
increasingly were in the first half of the nineteenth century, they were not completely carbon-
neutral or independent of fossil fuels – compare a bicycle, a windmill or a solar panel today.
However, since depreciation rates were extremely low for water wheels made of iron, the
embedded carbon element in every horsepower delivered must have been all but negligible.

20 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

thereby suffused the process of self-sustaining growth with fossil energy.15
The adoption of steam power in the British cotton industry was, so to speak,
a rite de passage for coal, a qualitative leap into the spiral of ever expanding
commodity production. Had the cotton industry – the very spearhead of
industrial capitalism – stayed with water, the fossil economy would not have
come about the way it did (and the first task for history-writing is to account
for what actually transpired). A central question in the writing of the social
history of business-as-usual will therefore be: why did the British cotton industry
switch from water to steam?

False starts in energy studies
While global warming accords novel significance to the energy aspects of the
industrial revolution, interest in them is not, of course, entirely new.16 The doyen
of modern research in the field is E.A. Wrigley. In a path-breaking article in 1962,
he first broached ideas later developed into a grand narrative of the industrial
revolution and, more generally, of modern economic growth.17 In what he
would come to call an ‘organic economy’, all forms of material production are
based on the land. Raw materials, as well as thermal and mechanical energy –
human and animal bodies used to put things in motion – are all drawn from
the yield of present photosynthesis. But that yield is restricted. There is no way
to enlarge it beyond the constant supply of land. A growing organic economy
will inevitably get trapped in fierce competition for scarce resources, making
‘a permanent, radical increase of industrial raw material supply’ – a necessary
condition for modern economic growth – ‘very difficult to obtain.’18 The
dependency on the land puts a low ceiling on industrial production. Fossil
fuels shatter that ceiling.

In a series of subsequent articles and books, culminating in the 2010 magnum
opus Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, Wrigley elaborated on these
theses, whose influence on the study of energy in the industrial revolution
now deserves the epithet of a paradigm.19 That paradigm, however, has deeper
sources than Wrigley himself, as he developed it in continuous engagement

15. For some aspects of the transition to steam power in the British imperial navy, see Malm
2012a.

16. For an excellent overview, see Barca 2011.
17. Wrigley 1962.
18. Wrigley 1962, p. 1. See further Wrigley 1972; Wrigley 1988; Wrigley 1990; Wrigley 2000;

Wrigley 2004; Wrigley 2010.
19. For applications of Wrigley’s theories, see for example Thomas 1985; Mayumi 1991;

Malanima 2001; Malanima 2006; Sieferle 2001; Andrews 2008; Jones 2010. On Wrigley’s centrality
and influence, compare Barca 2011.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 21

with two of the classical political economists: David Ricardo and Thomas
Malthus. For Ricardo, a growing economy would lay claim to more land. Inferior
soils would have to be taken into cultivation: wetlands, steep slopes, fields in
the mountains hitherto left untouched because of their natural infertility.
Higher inputs of capital and labour into such land would inescapably produce
diminishing returns, decreasing profits, falling wages, and an end to growth;
in a Ricardian formulation repeatedly quoted by Wrigley, a state of stagnation
will ‘necessarily be rendered permanent by the laws of nature, which have
limited the productive powers of the land.’20 But coal offers a ‘chance of
escaping the Ricardian curse’.21 At the end of the eighteenth century, the
British economy emancipated itself from the land constraint. Digging into the
stores of past photosynthesis, bypassing the restricted surface area of inflowing
solar radiation, it finally broke the spell of stagnation.

One method used by Wrigley and his followers to illustrate this logic is
to convert coal into acres of land required to generate the same amount of
energy. In 1750, all coal produced in England would have equalled 4.3 million
acres of woodland, or 13% of the national territory. In 1800, substituting wood
for all coal would have required 11.2 million acres, or 35% of the British land
surface; for 1850, the figures rise to 48.1 million acres and 150% respectively.
A hypothetical total conversion from coal to wood in the British economy
would thus, even in the year 1750, have ‘represented a significant proportion
of the land surface for which there were many other competing uses’; in 1800,
it would have been ‘quite impractical’, while in 1850 it was ‘self-evidently an
impossibility’.22 In a similar computation inspired by Wrigley, Rolf Pieter
Sieferle, in his aptly titled The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the
Industrial Revolution, concludes that ‘British coal production freed an area
that was equivalent to the total surface of Britain’ already in the 1820s, while
Paola Malanima, likewise standing on the shoulders of Wrigley, estimates that
without fossil fuels, Europe would have needed a land area more than 2.7 times
its entire continental surface in 1900, rising to more than 20 times in 2000.23

But the pressures undone by coal were not only Ricardian in character.
They emanated from reproduction as much as from production. According
to Wrigley, Malthus’s theorem of geometrically growing population and
arithmetically growing food supplies, generating a tendency for output per
head to fall with population growth, is indeed valid in an organic economy. As
long as all material production derives from land, living standards will decline

20. Ricardo quoted in Wrigley 2010, pp. 10–11. The quotation also appears in Wrigley 1988, p. 36;
Wrigley 1990, pp. 49–50; Wrigley 2000, pp. 128–9; twice in Wrigley 2004, pp. 55, 72.

21.  Wrigley 2010, p. 174.
22. Wrigley 2010, p. 99.
23. Sieferle 2001, pp. 102–3; Malanima 2006, p. 104.

22 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

when more people divide the fixed supplies into smaller pieces. Perpetual
stagnation is ensured – until coal blazes a new trail, allowing population and
economy to grow hand in hand.24

The Malthusian component of the paradigm has received its most articulate
expression in a study by Richard G. Wilkinson. In Poverty and Progress: An
Ecological Model of Economic Development, appearing in 1973, Wilkinson –
fortunately now better known for his work on the unhealthy impacts of social
inequality – constructed a model of technological and economic development
in general, and of the industrial revolution in particular. People do not invent
new methods of procurement because they are affluent, but because – and
only when – they are poor. Poverty is a symptom of resource scarcity. Such
a condition comes about when a human population succumbs to its innate
tendency, common to ‘every animal population’, to reproduce beyond the
bounds of its resource base.25 This is, Wilkinson argued, what happened on
the eve of the industrial revolution: the self-restraint of English couples broke
down, fertility rose sharply, hitherto existing ecological equilibria collapsed
and gave way to acute scarcity.

The growing population initially resorted to the ‘available slack in the
resource-base’.26 But by the eighteenth century, the combined Ricardian-
Malthusian curse had, according to Wilkinson, reached intolerable levels,
forcing England into ‘the substitution of mineral resources for landbased
ones.’27 The stimulus to the industrial revolution came ‘directly from resource
shortages and other ecological effects of an economic system expanding to meet
the needs of a population growing within a limited area.’28 Coal was the natural
resolution of the crisis, taking the place of wood in cottages and smitheries
under the dictates of ‘population growth and the consequent extension of the
economic system’.29 Like every other change the industrial revolution brought
about, the turn to fossil fuels was the outcome of ‘a valiant struggle of a society
with its back to the ecological wall’, a decision ‘made under duress’.30

We may designate this the Ricardian-Malthusian paradigm for studying
the role of energy in the industrial revolution.31 Another Wrigley-inspired

24. For example, Wrigley 2010.
25. Wilkinson 1973, pp. 4–5, 19–52. ‘Every animal population’: Wilkinson 1973, p. 20.
26. Wilkinson 1973, p. 76.
27. Wilkinson 1973, p. 101.
28. Wilkinson 1973, p. 112.
29. Wilkinson 1973, p. 115.
30. Wilkinson 1973, pp. 126, 134.
31.  Robert Brenner speaks of a ‘Malthusian-Ricardian model’ in the closely related context of

the debate on the origins of capitalism (see Brenner 2007). The terms have been swapped here,
since the Ricardian component appears determinant, primarily in Wrigley. An ironic illustration

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 23

scholar, Brinley Thomas, sums up its basic tenets: ‘The industrial revolution
was Britain’s response to an energy shortage which afflicted its economy in the
second half of the eighteenth century. A population explosion intensified the
need to change its energy base from wood fuel to fossilized fuel.’32

How, then, does the Ricardian-Malthusian paradigm account for the rise of
the steam engine? In his original 1962 piece, Wrigley noted the delay between
Watt’s invention and its diffusion in the cotton industry, concluding that ‘only
after a generation of expansion had caused the need for power to outstrip
the capabilities of the human arm and the water wheel was the steam engine
brought into use’.33 The great advantage of the engine was its independence
from ‘the annual round of plant photosynthesis’, as hitherto embodied in
human or animal muscle.34 According to Wilkinson, ‘the use of water power
was limited by the number of streams with suitable sites for mills: new sites
became scarce in many parts of the country during the seventeenth century.’ By
the time of the late eighteenth, the rise in British fertility had created a situation
where ‘good mill sites were no longer available’, whereas ‘coal to fuel the steam
engine was plentiful – especially at the pit head. The spread of steam power
was ecologically favoured.’35 For Kenneth Pomeranz, whose magisterial and
extremely influential The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of
the Modern World Economy is based on Ricardian-Malthusian – and Smithian –
conceptions of growth, ‘water power, no matter how much the wheels were
improved, simply did not have the same potential to provide energy inputs that
would significantly outpace a rapidly growing population’.36 In this version of
events, water wheels and other traditional prime movers were discarded in
favour of the steam engine because they could not deliver the requisite absolute
quantities of energy.

Critique of the paradigm
The Ricardian-Malthusian paradigm has a number of conspicuous short-
comings. Wrigley’s terminology is imprecise, to begin with: fossil fuels are
no less organic than wood or people, which is why their combustion releases
carbon dioxide. Denoting our current economy ‘inorganic’ or ‘mineral-based’ –

of the power of the Ricardian-Malthusian paradigm is the apparently thoughtless recent
endorsement of it by Timothy Mitchell, who is, of course, sharply anti-Malthusian. Mitchell 2011,
pp. 12–15; compare p. 238; Mitchell 2002.

32. Thomas 1985, p. 729; emphasis added.
33. Wrigley 1962, p. 12.
34. Wrigley 2010, p. 100.
35. Wilkinson 1973, p. 120; emphases added.
36. Pomeranz 2000, p. 61.

24 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

Wrigley’s antitheses to ‘the organic economy’ – makes little sense; both terms
would encompass the Bronze Age as well as the Iron Age.

Semantic pedantry aside, the paradigm fits ill with the transition we are
concerned with here. Prime movers derived from photosynthesis – animal and
human bodies – were never capable of delivering mechanical energy to large-
scale industry. In eighteenth-century British factories, they were certainly
experimented with, but quickly abandoned as useless.37 Not land but water
was the element on which Britain’s industries, cotton foremost among them,
first developed. Products of present photosynthesis are eminently suitable
for the generation of thermal energy, human beings having burnt wood for
heat since time immemorial, but not for powering machinery: coal was never
an alternative to wood, humans or animals as fuels for rotary motion. Thus
a Ricardian exigency could not possibly have triggered the one transition
we have identified as epoch-making. Ironically, Wrigley himself professes
awareness of the diffusion of steam engines in industrial production as the
watershed event – and yet it is an anomaly to the paradigm, since the crucial
victory of steam power came at the expense of a prime mover that did not grow
from plants.38 There is still, of course, the possibility that scarcity in a more
general sense, along the lines suggested by Wilkinson and Pomeranz, afflicted
water power, and that steam offered relief from it. We shall see presently how
that proposition chimes with the data.

A more fundamental problem of the Ricardian-Malthusian paradigm,
however, lies in its form of explanation. It runs something like this: there is a
constant appetite for more energy inherent in all societies, and in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, Britain finally managed to satisfy it. To construct
such an explanation for the emergence of a fossil economy, the paradigm’s
exponents need to invoke a transhistorical factor, an urge shared by all societies
finding its wanted object in Britain’s mines. For Wrigley, that factor is simply
the drive to perpetual economic growth. ‘The move away from an exclusively
organic economy was a sine qua non of achieving a capacity for exponential
growth’, he writes, or: ‘The land surface of the earth was a fixed quantity and
formed a barrier to indefinite growth’, or: ‘The energy bottleneck which set
limits to growth in organic economies was widened progressively as fossil fuels
replaced organic [sic] fuels.’39 Similar statements are repeated ad infinitum in
Wrigley’s writings.

37. See, for example, Tann 1970.
38. For Wrigley’s awareness of the centrality of mechanical energy and rotary motion in

particular, see for example Wrigley 1990, pp. 6, 78, 90; Wrigley 2004, pp. 35, 78; Wrigley 2010, pp.
42–5, 100, 177–8, 190–1.

39. Wrigley 2000, p. 139; Wrigley 2010, pp. 193, 191.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 25

For Wilkinson, a rather more avowed Malthusian, the transhistorical factor
is the biological urge to breed, shared not only by all societies but by all animal
populations. Since the dawn of time, it aroused a unilinear ‘growth of need’
that forced man ‘to involve himself in more and more complicated processing
and production techniques’; in hyper-fertile Britain, it finally impelled him to
enter the age of fossil fuels.40 According to Pomeranz, the English economy
diverged from an equally growth-prone China because the turn to coal – via
the steam engine – ‘enabled it to break through the fundamental constraints
of energy use and resource availability that had previously limited everyone’s
horizons.’41 Such formulae rest precisely on the assumption that the impulse
to expansion was permanently present in pre-fossil economies, bottled up
throughout history, on everyone’s horizon, from the Yangzi to the Thames. The
growth imperative was always there, though frustrated by the dependency on
land – and this explains why fossil fuels were introduced in the end.42

The transition then becomes a mere formality. Since that which requires
explanation – the dynamics of business-as-usual – is postulated a priori as
biding its time, there is not much to uncover in the passage from one form of
economy to another. In Wrigley and his peers, the fossil revolution resembles
the fulfilment of historical destiny, rather than a rupture separating two distinct
orders from each other. There are no laws of motion specific to the fossil
economy, no emergent imperatives that compel economic agents to combust
fossil fuels, only an opportunity to realise age-old, universal forces – laws of
nature, in effect. And hence there are no social antagonisms. ‘Capitalism’,
according to Wrigley, ‘is an elusive concept’ unworthy of application; no
relations of power between labour and capital appear on his radar.43 In
claiming that ‘the spread of steam power was ecologically favoured’, Wilkinson
elevates the agents of steam to representatives of the common interests of
their biological population, while Sieferle similarly refers to humanity as an
undifferentiated whole: ‘Fossil energy liberated humans from their ties to area
size.’44 As if the fossil economy was the work of humans in general, of a species
in action, united and harmonious.

40. Wilkinson 1973, pp. 90, 102.
41.  Pomeranz 2000, p. 207; emphasis in original.
42. This critique is derived from that developed by Ellen Meiksins Wood and Robert Brenner

in the context of the debate on the origins of capitalism. See Meiksins Wood 1995; Meiksins Wood
2002; Brenner 1986; Brenner 1987a; Brenner 1987b; Brenner 2007.

43. Wrigley 2010, p. 209.
44. Sieferle 2001, p. 121.

26 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

The puzzle of superior water
In actual history, the decision to replace water with steam was not, of
course, democratically taken. Choice of prime mover was the prerogative of
capitalists. It presupposed the separation between the direct producers and
the means of production; only when operatives were gathered under the eye
of a manufacturer, who paid them to perform labour on his machines, did
he have reason to weigh the relative merits of different non-human motive
forces for the propulsion of machinery. Choice of prime mover, in other
words, was a corollary of the factory system, and though its instigator Richard
Arkwright failed in his early experiments with steam, it did not last long before
cotton-mills puffed out black soot. In 1786, the brothers Robinson erected the
first rotative steam engine to drive machinery for spinning cotton in their
Papplewick factory on the River Leen. But they soon became disappointed. In a
complaint that would long haunt steam power, the brothers faulted the engine
for excessively high fuel costs: coal commanded a price of 11 to 12 shillings, to
be measured against the free running water of the Leen. Instead of pursuing
steam further, they fell back on the natural supply of the river, augmented it
with reservoirs, and continued to spin by water.45

The rotative steam engine first made a home in the mills of Manchester in
1790.46 By the middle of the decade, the technical capability of the prime mover
had been thoroughly demonstrated, knowledge of steam was widespread,
and cotton capitalists in some Lancashire towns eagerly embraced it. Yet
water power reigned supreme, its dominance in the cotton industry barely
dented.47 Frustration surfaced in the sales efforts of Boulton & Watt. In 1791,
one manufacturer explained why he turned down their offer: ‘The Expense of a
small engine as well as the consumption of coal and water being much greater
than I apprehended would be required for our work, it seems more advisable
to place our machines on a stream of water about a mile from our house’.48
Watt himself offered a sober assessment in the same year: ‘I hear that there
are so many mills resting on powerful streams in the North of England that the
trade must soon be over-done.’49

45. Marshall 1957; Chapman 1971, pp. 5–6. On Arkwright and steam, see Fitton 1989; Tann
1973a.

46. Chaloner 1954–5.
47. See Chapman 1969; Chapman 1971; Chapman 1972; von Tunzelmann 1978; Musson 1976;

Kanefsky 1979; Hills 1970; Hills 1989.
48. Letter quoted in Tann 1973b, p. 220. This particular manufacturer was in the woollen

industry, but his objections summarised those ‘of many small clothiers to steam power at the
turn of the century’ (ibid.). Compare Musson and Robinson 1959, pp. 423–4; Hills 1970, p. 145.

49. Quoted in Briggs 1982, p. 57.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 27

By 1800, 84 Boulton & Watt engines in British cotton mills were still
overshadowed by around one thousand water wheels. Water remained the
foundation for the capitalist factory system, and not merely as a relic of the past:
wheels were enlarged and perfected, dams and reservoirs excavated en masse,
new and extended mills – particularly in the great cotton boom of 1823–5 –
equipped with the latest wheel-models of gargantuan dimensions. More than
four decades passed from Robinsons’s first installation to the decisive triumph
of steam. Some time between the mid-1820s and the late 1830s – no exact
date can be pinned down – steam power reached parity with and, in quick
succession, dethroned water in the cotton industry. This was the time of the
transition, in at least three senses. New or extended mills were now only rarely
fitted with water wheels, in a sharp break with the past. For the first time, the
bulk of horsepower came from steam engines. But perhaps most importantly,
a range of decisions were taken over the 1830s by manufacturers and legislators
that, for all practical purposes, ended water power expansion in the cotton
industry and cleared the way for steam, not only there, but throughout British
manufacturing.50

The time-lag has long been considered a puzzle: ‘Explaining the slow
adoption of steam power in the cotton industry is an important problem for
the historians of its technology’, in the matter-of-fact words of a recent account
of the industrial revolution.51 But the problem could just as well be formulated
in the reverse terms. The very slowness of the process – four or five decades are
a blink of an eye in geological time, but they can be an aeon in the annals of
capitalism – raises the question not only of why it happened so late, but why
steam power was adopted at all. We need an explanation that can account for
the adoption that took place before the mid-1820s, but particularly thereafter,
with the 1830s standing out as the decade of the most concentrated shift.

Was steam resorted to because water was scarce by the time of the 1830s?
The hypothesis of an energy crisis – a wall of water shortage confronting cotton
manufacturers, leaving them no choice other than steam – was submitted to
rigorous testing by Robert B. Gordon in 1983. ‘If it can be shown’, Gordon wrote,
‘that nearly all the water power physically available in the industrial regions
was exploited before steam power was much used, the energy crisis hypothesis
would be proved.’ But if the recoverable data rather indicated that ‘there were
unused water power resources throughout this period, it would be necessary to
appeal to the social factors for support of this hypothesis’ – or, to be exact, the

50. See, for example, Kanefsky 1979; Rose 1986; Taylor 1949; von Tunzelmann 1978; Chapman
1972; Chapman 1969, p. 75; Crafts 2004. More extensive empirical support for the claims in this
article, with full sourcing, will be found in the dissertation in progress of the present author.

51.  Allen 2009, p. 172.

28 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

hypothesis would be disproved, and a completely different explanation would
be needed.52

Gordon proceeded with a scrupulous reconstruction of the meteorological,
geological and topographical conditions in the industrial areas of both
England and New England. To assess the potential power supply, he identified
the available watersheds and computed their drainage areas, falls and stream
slopes, but excluded sites where the initial costs of establishing a mill would
have been prohibitive. The results for both regions were unambiguous. As for
England, in the year 1838, mere fractions of the potential water power in eleven
major rivers running through the textile districts were utilised. For Irwell, that
fraction was 3.4%; for Derwent, 1.7%; for Dove, 0.8%; for Ribble, 3.0%; for
Spodden – the most heavily exploited watercourse on the list – 7.2%. ‘More
water power could have been obtained by continued geographical extension
of the industrial districts without encountering either high initial costs or
excessive variable, transportation, or other costs. It follows’, Gordon concluded,
‘that physical bounds on the availability of water power at low cost was not
a limitation on the development of industry.’53 The energy-crisis hypothesis
demolished, he stopped short, however, of exploring alternative explanations.

For Scotland, a cotton district second in importance only to Lancashire,
the picture is similar. ‘The potential of water power in Scotland was never
fully realised, except in a few localities favoured by other attributes’, runs the
conclusion of John Shaw in his Water Power in Scotland, 1550–1870. ‘The end of
the Age of Water Power came about not so much on account of any inherent
weakness as through changes in the scale of industrial units, in work patterns,
populations distributions and economic goals’ – factors which, again, Shaw left
without further examination.54

Did the transition happen because steam engines had become more
powerful and reliable – in short, technologically superior? In the early decades
of the nineteenth century, the average output of both an iron breast-wheel
and a Boulton & Watt steam engine was 20 horsepower, or slightly less. But
the most powerful prime movers were invariably water wheels. In the 1820s,
steam engines of 60 horsepower were considered unusually powerful, while
a string of giant water mills in northern England and Scotland had a capacity
of between 300 and 500 horsepower. Indeed, as late as in the early 1840s, the
most imposing wheel constructions generated more power than the mightiest
steam engines – a situation that would not remain for much longer, the engines

52. Gordon 1983, p. 243.
53. Gordon 1983, p. 256.
54. Shaw 1984, p. 544.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 29

leaping ahead in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, but by then the
transition in the cotton industry had long been completed.55

One of the greatest obstacles for Boulton & Watt was the perceived
irregularity and frailty of their engines, compared to the robust wheels. Not
until the mid-1830s could the finest workshops deliver steam engines capable
of producing a motion as smooth and even as that of water.56 In 1840, The Civil
Engineer and Architect’s Journal reported that factories at Stockport erected
two engines to work the same machinery in order to equalise the action of
steam, ‘yet the motion is not so regular as that of an overshoot water-wheel,
where the supply of water is uniform.’57 In his unpublished PhD thesis from
1979 – the authoritative compilation of statistics on water and steam in British
industry – John Kanefsky reckoned that ‘cotton produced by water mills was
still regarded as being generally superior to that produced by steam power’,
due to the unequalled evenness of motion in the former, all through the 1830s.58
Well into the second half of the century, water wheels were less prone to
mechanical glitches and breakdowns.59

Was steam cheaper than water? This is, at first sight, the most plausible
explanation: cotton capitalists opted for steam because one horsepower
thereof was cheaper than one of water. A water wheel represented a substantial
investment. The wheel itself had to be purchased, positioned in a wheel-house,
and, in most cases, supplemented with a dam to secure a regular supply of
water. Then the mill-owner would have to build a system of conduits – canals,
leats, sluice-gates – to lead the water onto the wheel in proper amounts,
presuming that it was of the standard overshot or breast type. A steam engine,
on the other hand, consisted of iron, brass and copper, fly-wheel, boiler and
pipes; fixed on a solid framing in a special engine-house, its construction
required skilled labour. Then there was the occasional need for extensive
repairs following breakdowns and the spectacularly high depreciation rates,
whereas water wheels could function with only minor maintenance for
decades or even a century. Water came flowing for free. Once the capitalist
had secured a lease from the landowner, paying rent for the right to utilise the
stream, there were no further fuel costs. Coal had to be constantly purchased
on the market. The sum of these relations is widely accepted in the literature:
water wheels were consistently cheaper per horsepower than steam engines in

55. Musson 1976; Reynolds 1983; Hills 1970; von Tunzelmann 1978.
56. Chapman 1971, p. 12.
57. The Civil Engineer and Architects’ Journal 1840, p. 8; emphasis added.
58. Kanefsky 1979, p. 141.
59. Kanefsky 1979, p. 142.

30 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

the early nineteenth century.60 ‘It is difficult to resist the conclusion’, writes
cotton historian Stanley Chapman, ‘that steam was more expensive than the
costliest water power installations.’61

But had not the balance swung in favour of steam by the time of the 1830s?
Could water wheels still put up with the challenge, in pure cost terms? The
1833 Factories Inquiry, carried out by a Parliamentary commission under the
leadership of Edwin Chadwick, provides some answers. One proprietor of a
steam-powered mill in Manchester declared that a manufacturer with water
power enjoyed an ‘advantage over his competitors’. Curious, his interviewer
wondered:

Why do you think he has till now enjoyed an advantage over his competitors in
trade? – Because it is a well-ascertained fact that water-power is cheaper than
steam.
Then if a mill-owner wishes to set up a manufactory, he can always do it cheaper
by purchasing a waterfall than a steam-engine? – Yes; if he does not pay too high
for his water.
Suppose he does not pay too high for his steam-engine, would he be in the same
condition? – No; because the price of fuel is a greater object than the price of a
steam-engine.
Why is it cheaper to purchase a waterfall than a steam-engine? – On this ground –
the constant supply of water is much cheaper to turn an engine with than the supply
of coal.62

‘If I wanted to hire power to-morrow’, announced Thomas Worsley, a Stockport
shopkeeper, ‘I can procure it in the country parts round Manchester’ – i.e. along
rivers – ‘one-third under what I should have to give for it in Manchester or any
of the manufacturing towns’. Therefore ‘the owners of water power can work
cheaper than the owners of steam power.’63 One commissioner alluded to a
‘jealousy of the water-mills’ on the part of steam-dependent manufacturers
in the cotton industry.64 Factory philosopher Andrew Ure referred to the
‘cheapness’ of water ‘as compared to that of steam’.65 In 1849, the manager of
Quarry Bank mill, the water-powered jewel of Samuel Greg & Co. – known as
the largest cotton empire in all of Britain – calculated that running an engine of

60. See, for example, Chapman 1971; Kanefsky 1979; von Tunzelmann 1978; Tann 1970; Hills
1970; Hills 1989; Briggs 1982; Musson 1976.

61.  Chapman 1971, p. 13.
62. Parliamentary Papers 1833a, p. D2.132; emphasis added (John Cheetham).
63. Parliamentary Papers 1833a, p. D1.16.
64. Parliamentary Papers 1833a, p. D2.99.
65. Ure 1835, p. xlvii.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 31

100 horsepower instead of the current wheel of the same capacity would burden
the factory with a cost of £274 per annum.66 The computation was repeated in
1856, now against a water wheel of 172 horsepower; again, the manager found
that ‘our waterpower is worth about £280 a year’ due to ‘the saving in coal.’67

Such evidence dovetails with all modern reconstructions of power costs in
the period. Chapman estimated the cost per unit of horsepower in a cotton
mill in the year 1840 as £86 for steam and £59 for water.68 In Steam Power and
British Industrialization to 1860, Nick von Tunzelmann inferred that water
wheels ‘cost far less per horsepower for purchase and erection than did steam-
engines’ in the 1850s; ‘for large wheels the cost was around half that of steam-
engines of equal power.’69 But the decisive factor remained the difference
in fuel costs, underpinning ‘the profitability of water-power up to at least
the mid-nineteenth century’.70 Kanefsky went even further. ‘It is quite plain
that throughout the period’ – up to 1870 – ‘water power was, when available,
significantly cheaper in all but very exceptional circumstances and that where
coal was expensive the difference could be considerable.’71 The railways failed
to close the gap, so that water was ‘preferable to steam even in 1870 if cost factors
alone were under consideration’ – but then again, in 1870 the transition had
been accomplished long ago.72

All of this points to a conclusion of rather startling implications for the
history of the fossil economy. The transition from water to steam in the British
cotton industry did not occur because water was scarce, less powerful, or more
expensive than steam. To the contrary, steam gained supremacy in spite of
water being abundant, at least as powerful, and decidedly cheaper. None of this
is in serious dispute, pace Wrigley et al., but so far it has only served to deepen
the mystery: then why did the transition occur? Was it irrational, or did it have
another rationale, a different set of causes, hidden beneath the immediately
visible differentials in economic and technological benefits? Neither Gordon,
nor von Tunzelmann, nor Kanefsky or anyone else has systematically examined
the actual motives for turning to steam. It is to this task we now turn.

66. Rose 1986, p. 42. On the size of the firm, see for example Ure 1835, p. 347.
67. Greg archive: C5:3/2, memorandum, ‘Water Wheel Power at Quarry Bank, August 4th

1856’.
68. Chapman 1971, p. 18.
69. von Tunzelmann 1978, p. 130.
70. von Tunzelmann 1978, p. 136.
71. Kanefsky 1979, p. 175.
72. Kanefsky 1979, p. 176; emphasis added.

32 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

Power to visit labour
The steam engine could not explain or promote itself. Its way had to be paved
by tracts and manuals, written for manufacturers and their right-hand men,
teaching them how to properly handle the boilers and the pipes, the fly-
wheels and the governors, and appreciate the superior principles of steam.
The specimen of the genre today regarded as most accurate – and probably
wielding most influence over manufacturers at the time – is the voluminous
A Treatise on the Steam-Engine, written in 1827 by John Farey, owner of a
consulting firm through which he advised capitalists on technical matters.73
Here he wished to ‘perfect the practice of those engineers and others who
require to employ steam-engines’, averring that the application of the ‘power
of the steam-engine’ was of paramount importance for the well-being of the
nation. The reason was simple: ‘Unless the industry of the working class is
systematically applied, and aided by the use of machines, there can be but little
surplus wealth to maintain an educated class in society, and produce that state
of general affluence which is conducive to the progress of civilization, and the
development of the intellect.’74 The steam engine was eminently conducive
to this pursuit. In the Introduction to his Treatise, Farey juxtaposed water and
steam, without hinting at any scarcity of the former: the advantage of steam lay
not in its being uniquely plentiful, nor in its commanding a lower price. Instead,
Farey argued, steam ‘is often preferred, because a manufactory by steam power
may be established in any convenient situation where fuel can be procured’,
whereas ‘water power can only be obtained in particular situations, which are
frequently unfavourable in other respects’. Of particular significance,

natural falls of water are mostly found on rivers in the open country; but steam-
engines can be placed in the centres of populous towns, where labourers are easily
procured. Steam-power is frequently preferred, as a first mover for those mills
which consist of a number of small machines, each performing some delicate
operation; such machines require considerable assistance from work-people
to direct their actions, and supply them with the materials upon which they
are to operate. As all manufactories of this nature require many work-people,
they are more advantageously carried on by steam-power in populous towns,
than by water-power in the country: this is fully proved by the number of large
manufactories in London, Manchester, Leeds, and Glasgow.75

73. On Farey and the Treatise, see Woolrich 1997; Woolrich 1998; Woolrich 2000; Nuvolari
2004.

74. Farey 1827, pp. v–vi.
75. Farey 1827, p. 7; emphasis added.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 33

The edge of steam, in other words, was its unique suitability not for the
generation of power per se, but for the exploitation of labour.

John McCulloch, a leading bourgeois economist of the period, had as his
mouthpiece the Edinburgh Review, house organ of cotton capital. He hammered
away at the point throughout the 1820s and ’30s, dispelling misunderstandings
and speaking the truth to his audience of manufacturing interests:

The real advantage of the application of the power of steam to give motion to the
machinery of a spinning mill, or of a number of power-looms, appears to be a good
deal misapprehended. It does not consist so much in any direct saving of labour,
as in permitting it to be carried on in the most proper situation. The work that is
done by the aid of a stream of water, is generally as cheap as that which is done
by steam, and sometimes much cheaper. But the invention of the steam-engine
has relieved us from the necessity of building factories in inconvenient situations
merely for the sake of a waterfall. It has allowed them to be placed in the centre of
a population trained to industrious habits.76

The argument was echoed on both sides of the transition. In 1818, John
Kennedy, partner in McConnel & Kennedy – among the largest fine-spinners
in Manchester and pioneers of steam – deplored how the dependency on water
caused manufacturers to be ‘removed from the experienced workmen’. But the
steam engine offered salvation: ‘instead of carrying the people to the power, it
was found preferable to place the power amongst the people.’77 Almost half a
century later, in 1866, William Stanley Jevons, in his classic The Coal Question,
maintained that ‘when an abundant natural fall of water is at hand, nothing
can be cheaper or better than water power. But everything depends upon local
circumstances.’ Some circumstances worked to the detriment of this source
of energy, however cheap it may be: the necessity of ‘carrying the work to the
power, not the power to the work, is a disadvantage in water power, and wholly
prevents that concentration of works in one neighbourhood which is highly
advantageous to the perfection of our mechanical system.’78

Statements of this kind can be multiplied over and over. In steam-engine
manuals, essays on the factory system, testimonies from manufacturers and
other contemporary sources, this is the single most salient motive: steam was
a ticket to the town, where bountiful supplies of labour waited. The steam
engine did not open up new stores of badly needed energy so much as it gave
access to exploitable labour. Fuelled by coal instead of streams, it untied

76. McCulloch 1833, p. 323; emphasis added. Compare The Circulator of Useful Knowledge,
Literature, Amusement, and General Information 1825; McCulloch 1835, p. 457.

77. Kennedy 1818, pp. 10, 15–16.
78. Jevons 1866, pp. 150–1.

34 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

capital in space, an advantage large enough to outdo the continued abundance,
cheapness, and technological superiority of water. But before we accept this
conclusion, we need answers to at least three questions. What determined
the geographical mismatch between water and labour supplies? How did it
affect cotton capitalists in their daily operations? And did the locality of water
become particularly burdensome during the 1830s?

The centrifugal dynamic of water mills
Water power was not without its limitations. With electric transmission far into
the future, streams had to be used right on the spot, and not all spots were, of
course, equally generous in their supply of moving water. As William Fairbairn,
the era’s super-engineer and designer of several of the most stupendous water
mills, pointed out in his Treatise on Mills and Millwork, water wheels received
their ‘energy from falling or flowing water, and their power or dynamic effect
clearly depends upon the amount of water supplied and the height through
which it falls, or its velocity at the point of application.’ Thus the wheels had
to be placed ‘on the banks of rivers where a large body of water is at hand,
and near some considerable natural or artificial fall in the bed of the stream.’79
Riveted to the spot, the water supply was contingent on the varying attributes
of the landscape. While profuse on the whole, cotton capitalists could not take
for granted that it was present in the right amount where they so wanted it to
be; near or inside towns, sites might become crowded.

But there was always an exit. Manufacturers could move out to eschew
congested areas, or simply to find the best sources. In the 1780s, master spinners
from Manchester and other cotton centres fanned out across the countryside
of Lancashire, the Midlands, Scotland and Wales; penetrating deep into the
Pennine and Rossendale valleys, into Derwent and its sister valleys or the upper
Clyde, they found untouched, spurting flows of water. Not only were the banks
unoccupied uphill, but the falls tended to be steeper, the rain more frequent,
and the need for extensive dams lesser.80 Reliance on water power generated
a centrifugal dynamic in the localisation of cotton mills. The more capitalists
used water, the stronger the push to search farther afield – but the farther
they went, the smaller the likelihood of them encountering a pre-existing
settlement. If the water resources were the chief reason for choosing the site, as
was so often the case in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the

79. Fairbairn 1864, p. 67.
80. See, for example, Chapman 1971; Ashmore 1969; Rodgers 1960; Taylor 1949; Ashworth 1951;

Atwood 1928; Turner 1958; Foulkes 1964.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 35

other prerequisites for factory production might have to be assembled from
the ground up. First of all, that meant labour power.

In order to construct a viable factory at Cromford, where the swift streams
of the Derwent could power his water-frames, Richard Arkwright had to collect
operatives from towns and conjure up a whole village, establishing not only
the first full-fledged factory, but also the blueprint for the factory colony, to be
copied along the rivers of northern Britain. Once collected, the operatives –
primarily young women – had to be accommodated in houses built for the
purpose. A colony usually also included a church or a chapel, a Sunday school, a
shop for groceries, perhaps roads and bridges, maybe also an inn, and certainly
a mansion for the manager. Without assistance from any authority or public
budget, all of this had to be financed from the pocket of the manufacturer
himself.81

Recruitment and maintenance of a labour-force were the defining problems
of the factory colony. When a manufacturer came across a powerful stream
passing through a valley or around a river peninsula, chances were slim that he
also hit upon a local population predisposed to factory labour: the opportunity
to come and work at machines for long, regular hours, herded together under
one roof and strictly supervised by a manager, appeared repugnant to most,
and particularly in rural areas. Colonisers following in the steps of Arkwright
frequently encountered implacable aversion to factory discipline among
whatever farmers or independent artisans they could find. Instead, the majority
of the operatives had to be imported from towns such as London, Manchester,
Liverpool and Nottingham, requiring steady advertisement in the press as well
as attractive cottages behind leafy trees, allotment gardens, milk-cows, sick-
clubs and other perks to persuade the workers to come, and to stay.82

While wages were generally lower in the countryside, the total costs for
assembling and sustaining a labour force might well have been higher in the
colonies. In 1826, an anonymous ‘practical spinner’ published a note ‘on the
comparative costs of power obtained by steam or water’ in Glasgow Mechanics’
Magazine, including in his calculation rent to the landlord, outlays on dam and
sluices, expenses for transporting raw materials and a manager between mill
and market and other costs associated with water. Even so, the steam engine’s
consumption of coal resulted in a balance in favour of water ‘at the rate of
£1.10s. per horse power: but this must be more than counterbalanced by the
great advance of capital necessary to start such a work in the country, where

81.  See, for example, Pollard 1964; Pollard 1968; Fitton and Wadsworth 1958; Chapman 1992;
Ashworth 1951; Aspin 2003.

82. See, for example, Cohen 1981; Pollard 1968; Redford 1976; Cooke 2010.

36 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

a village must be built, loss of time in collecting a regular set of workers, with
other innumerable inconveniences, which in many instances requires years to
accomplish.’83 The problem of labour was inherent in the centrifugal dynamic
of water power: for every new colony constructed on a riverbank, there ensued
the process of ingathering of labour, of concentrating workers from all possible
directions on the spot. It was the constitutive feature of the colonies, their
very structure intended to attract and keep operatives in place. When they
failed – when workers left – the loss was of another magnitude than what
an absent worker might cause in a town mill, since every employed piecer,
spinner or mechanic was, almost literally, a living investment; their departure
necessitated a new round of recruitment, posing the whole problem anew.

None of this was a fact of nature. Physical laws did not determine low
concentrations of population in a water-rich area, the reluctance to enter the
factories or the desire to escape once inside. These were socially determined
factors, making labour difficult to capture and easy to lose, but they were played
out and magnified in an immutable geography of riversides, from which the
water wheels could never stray like the workers. The contradiction was generic
to water power as a source of mechanical energy in capitalist commodity
production, present from the very beginning. But in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, it was manageable and fully compatible with good
business, for average profit rates were high, and the working class had yet to
emerge as a force of organised power. By the 1830s, all of that had changed.

Crisis in the colonies
When the Combination Laws were repealed in 1824, the powder keg built
up over half a century of industrialisation exploded in strikes and union
activism across Britain. Cotton spinners were the most militant segment of
the proletariat.84 The epicentres of mobilisation were, of course, the towns,
not the dells and brooks of the countryside, but rural colonies were always
more vulnerable to the effects of disorder than urban factories. As strikes
hit water mills with full force in the early 1830s – rioting workers rampaging
through and partly trashing the colony of the Ashworths, operatives at the
Catrine works blocking the gates and throwing dirt and stones on knobsticks,
the Stanley colony turned into a bulwark of the Scottish spinners’ union –
that vulnerability was violently exposed.85 Leading owners of water mills
responded with unusually fanatical attacks on unions in general and those of

83. Glasgow Mechanics’ Magazine 1826.
84. See, for example, Turner 1962; Kirby and Musson 1975.
85. Manchester Guardian 1830; The Scottish Jurist 1835; Cooke 2003, pp. 126–7.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 37

their own workers in particular. The Ashworth brothers, major spinners of fine
yarn near Bolton, referred to the legalisation of combinations as ‘this indulgent
Act’ and sacked the entire vanguard of the strike-cum-riot in 1830. A perfectly
viable tactic inside towns, the mass dismissal renewed the problem of labour
supply: now the Ashworths had to advertise for spinners again, replacing the
strike leaders with much difficulty and extra cost. The price of the strike was
obliterated profits.86

By its very logic, the factory colony rendered layoffs, recruitment of strike-
breakers, riots and repression risky and potentially ruinous; with the strike
waves of the 1830s, the advantage of immediate access to a reserve army of
labour came decisively to the fore. Adding to the pressure, profit rates in the
cotton industry were falling, ever since the financial panic of 1825 set off a
cycle of protracted stagnation and brief booms. In the mid-1830s, a bonanza of
factory construction and expansion – the first in a decade – temporarily ended
the depression. Manufacturers wishing to survive now had to keep up with
the competition, introduce the latest machinery and enlarge their premises,
but if they relied on water, they often faced a predicament: ‘There is in this
neighbourhood a greater scarcity of workpeople than I have ever known’,
Henry Ashworth lamented in 1835.87

For the Gregs, owners of Quarry Bank and two other water mills in Lancashire,
the worries were similar: the scarcity of labour and the trade unions conspired
to bring about ‘a difficulty in obtaining labourers at extravagant wages in these
northern counties.’ If they would expand their water mills, there was an obvious
risk that ‘any further demand for labour would still further increase the unions,
drunkenness, and high wages.’88 Luckily for the Gregs, however, alternative
options were available. In late 1826, the company acquired two factories inside
the towns of Lancaster and Bury, both powered by steam. Most of the investment
was redirected to these two mills; already in 1832, the one in Lancaster surpassed
Quarry Bank mill as the largest establishment of the concern. The factories in
Lancaster and Bury had one decisive advantage: they offered local supplies of
labour power.89 Throughout the 1830s, the Gregs continued to expand through
their steam-powered assets – while the Ashworths, still based on water, lost
their leadership position in fine spinning.90

Scarcity of labour was never absolute or evenly distributed. In Lancashire at
large, the Manchester Guardian noted in 1835, there was in fact ‘an abundance’

86. Boyson 1970, pp. 141–55.
87. Parliamentary Papers 1835, pp. 344–50.
88. Parliamentary Papers 1835, pp. 346–7.
89. Rose 1986, pp. 39, 43, 55; Owens 2011, p. 74.
90. See Boyson 1970.

38 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

of spinners.91 McConnel & Kennedy never had reason to complain about a
shortage of workers; ‘unless they appear by Eight or Nine o’Clock on Monday
Morning, we get fresh ones’, they could boast.92 It was an ever more powerful
magnet. Throughout the strikes waves and business cycles of the 1830s,
cotton capitalists sought to defend their positions against workers and each
other by further mechanising production, introducing self-acting mules for
spinning and power-looms for weaving; and with automation approaching,
the premium on operatives amenable to the discipline of the machine rose.
Inside the towns, a second generation of ‘hands’ had now grown up: ‘There is
always that superabundance of labour in the market that I can always attain a
sufficiency of hands who have been accustomed to the work, and brought up
in it, I suppose; which are always preferred’, explained another Manchester
manufacturer.93 In the late eighteenth century, when factories were novel
sights everywhere, the advantage of urban locations was muted. Three or four
decades later, the towns of Lancashire and Scotland were brimming with the
‘population trained to industrious habits’ of which McCulloch spoke: young
men but preferably women, born in a world of mills, resigned to bells and
managers in a way country folk would rarely if ever be.94

A fascinating victim of the dynamics was Robert Thom. Having doubled
the water supply of his cotton mill at Rothesay by excavating an ingenious
system of aqueducts and reservoirs, he rose to become the foremost hydraulic
engineer of Scotland and a zealous advocate of water as a superior source
of energy. ‘Get water if you can, and be quit of these smoky and expensive
engines’, ran his rallying cry to Britain’s cotton manufacturers.95 The pinnacle
of his lifework was the Shaws’ Water-Works at Greenock, by which water was
collected and distributed to prospective mill sites, in quantities said to exceed
the total power capacity of ‘all the steam-engines in Glasgow and its vicinity.’96
Deeply impressed, the Manchester Guardian proposed the construction of a
similar system on the River Irwell, in the heart of Lancashire, to ‘enable the
mill-owners to dispense with the assistance of steam-engines’.97 But in 1834,
seven years after the inauguration of the Shaws’ Water-Works, a dejected Thom
had to concede that ‘the waterfalls’ he had made available to investors

91.  Manchester Guardian 1835.
92. Quoted in Fitton 1989, p. 151. See further Lee 1972.
93. Parliamentary Papers 1834, p. D1.206 (James Fernley). On the self-acting mule, see Catling

1970; on the power-loom, see Bythell 1969.
94. Balderston 2010; Williamson 1988; Thompson 1966, p. 249; Redford 1976, p. 111; Gatrell 1977,

p. 115.
95. Mechanics’ Magazine 1832.
96. Manchester Guardian 1827.
97. Manchester Guardian 1831.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 39

go off very slowly – there being about thirty of them still unlet – while during
the time these have been in the market, a great many Steam Factories have been
erected at Glasgow, though steam power there costs about £20 per horse power,
or nearly seven times the cost of water power at Greenock. And this preference is
given to Glasgow, why? Because it is the principal seat of trade in Scotland with a
trained population ready for such Factories.98

The Irwell reservoirs were planned and designed, but never built.99
What had happened by the 1830s was clearly not an exhaustion of the

potentials of water power, in physical, technological or strictly economic
terms. Instead, capitalist development had reached a point where the greatest
advantage of steam power – its mobility in space – overrode all other concerns.
The eruption of union struggles, the booms and busts of the post-1825 business
cycle and the advancing mechanisation of cotton production enhanced the
demand for workers that were substitutable, expendable and adapted to
machinery. While the incentive to shift to urban steam was certainly already
operative around the turn of the century, the underlying contradiction between
the centrifugal dynamic of water-powered factories and the geographical
concentration of suitable reservoirs of labour power became acute after the
repeal of the Combination Laws and the financial crash of the mid-1820s.
As profits fell, moreover, the cost of establishing a colony de novo became
deterrent.

The boom of the 1823–5 period was the last to see a major expansion of
water-powered factories. In the 1830s, colonies fell like dominoes, while mills
survived and grew inside Manchester, Oldham, Stockport, Blackburn. The
period marked a decisive shift from a centrifugal to a centripetal dynamic, as
the cotton industry retracted into the urban core of Lancashire, in a process of
urbanisation indistinguishable from the conversion to steam.100

The foundation of the industrial town, in other words, was fossil. Coal had
the benefit of not being a part of the terrestrial landscape. Buried in its interior,
it was reached through a hole in the ground – the pit-mouth – hauled up in bits
and pieces and ferried off to circulate freely on the market. Unlike water, coal
could be transported to mills and stored in warehouses, without the need for
further attention, passively awaiting combustion. For the first time in history,

98. Thom archive: valuation report, ‘On the Waterfall between Dalernie Mill and the Devils
Bridge’, 29 March 1834; emphasis in original.

99. For an inquiry into the fate of these reservoirs, Thom’s failures, and some other aspects of
the political economy of the transition from water to steam, see Malm 2013.

100. Rodgers 1960; Taylor 1949; Atwood 1928; Ashworth 1951; Balderston 2010; Chapman 1972.

40 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

the converter and the source of mechanical energy – the engine and the
mine – were disassociated in space.101

The mobility of capital, the freedom to seek out the ‘populous towns, where
labourers are easily procured’, was constituted by fossil fuels. That freedom
was only relative – the price of coal rose with the distance from mines – but
Lancashire happened to lie on top of rich coal-fields, ‘sufficient to supply the
consumption of its steam-engines for uncounted generations’, in the estimate
of industrial traveller William Cooke Taylor.102 Lancashire was likewise bathed
in rivers, but whereas extended utilisation of water at one point or another
required capitalists to move away from the labour power, the coal deposits
merely demanded that collieries were sent into the ground. Space, however,
was not the only dimension in which the transition unfolded. Time mattered
as well.

Power to command labour
Nailed to the landscape, the flow of water was not only immovable, but exposed
to shifts in the weather. A river might freeze, overflow, ebb and peter out. In
1833, Samuel Greg described the power source of the Quarry Bank mill:

Water, ninety horse power; stream irregular, occasionally a day or day and a half
lost by floods. In dry seasons, for some weeks, only three quarters of daily work
done. In ordinary seasons, a few hours lost daily for two or three weeks.103

A book-keeper at a cotton mill near Bingley in the West Riding, named Edward
Birkett, told the commissioners of the Factories Inquiry that work normally
went on for 13 hours, but in dry summer months production might have to be
discontinued after a mere six.104 In the absence of massive reservoir structures
of the kind Robert Thom championed, such weather-induced irregularities
were an all but ineluctable feature of water power.

By its very nature, in other words, water was subject to the whims of the
seasons – but the problem was constituted socially. As long as mills catered
to a local market for corn, linen, silk or whatever produce they turned out, a
day of too much or too little water in the river was ‘a source of inconvenience

101. Adapted and developed from Smil 2008, p. 204; Sieferle 2001, pp. 124–5; Debeir, Deléage
and Hémery 1991, p. 102.

102. Cooke Taylor 1843, p. 156.
103. Parliamentary Papers 1834, p. D1.301.
104. Parliamentary Papers 1833a, pp. C2.65–6.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 41

but nothing more serious’: people simply turned to other tasks for a while.105
The cotton mills of the early nineteenth century operated on other principles.
They were oriented towards global markets, tailored to maximise output,
constructed with profit as sole raison d’être – and thus working days had to be
long. If the norm had been, say, six or eight hours of production, the demand
for uninterrupted water power would have been significantly easier to satisfy,
but the norm in the early 1830s was 12 hours, at a minimum. Simple arithmetic
tells us that such a long day of work – compared to a hypothetical, shorter
day – was exacting for any given watercourse. Furthermore, if water had been
the only source of energy available, its irregularity would have been a fact of
life, to be handled with anything from insurance schemes or dams to slight
variations in output: it was the challenge of the steam engine that defined it
as a drawback.106

That drawback could be easily offset, up to the 1830s. If water was in –
sufficient, the workers were simply sent home and ordered to make up for the
shortfall when the flow returned through even longer working days, effectively
cancelling out the power shortages over time. As Birkett explained: ‘The hands
are dismissed, and recalled by a bell; they have that time to themselves; they
are always paid as working a full day, and expected to make up the time as
opportunity may occur.’ In its first summary of the Factories Inquiry, the
Chadwick Commission submitted that ‘it is the custom for the people to work
sometimes half an hour, at other times an hour, and occasionally even as
much as two hours daily, until the whole of the lost time be made up.’107 The
irregularity of water was thus translated into bouts of extreme working days;
from the baseline of 12 hours, capitalists pushed their workers even further, to
cushion themselves against intermittent flow. Within the parameters of early
capitalist commodity production, as it intersected with the nature of water, the
practice appears to have been a necessity.

But it was precisely from the unbearable extension of the working day that
arose some of the most passionate popular fury in the early 1830s. The demand
of the factory movement – a universally applicable Ten Hours Act – was
dreaded by proprietors of water mills. The Chadwick Commission found them
fearing for their commercial survival. One master of a water-powered factory
at Burley, Yorkshire, believed that ‘the contemplated Ten Hours Bill would be
exceedingly injurious to the cotton-trade; the legislature no doubt wishes to
encourage health and morals, but if this Bill becomes a law the effects would
be to destroy many water-mills entirely in rural situations in the country, and

105. Shaw 1984, p. 481.
106. von Tunzelmann 1978, pp. 154, 170.
107. Parliamentary Papers 1833a, p. 10.

42 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

drive the trade into large populous towns. . . . Steam-power is mostly in large
towns, and can be set to work at any moment; water-mills are subject to many
interruptions for want of water.’108 Edward Birkett the book-keeper testified that
a Ten Hours Act would be ‘ruinous’ to water mills, telling his interviewer about
three he knew first-hand, which ‘the masters would be compelled to abandon,
such would be the injury to their profits. It would be perfectly impossible
for them to carry on their mills at all during the summer season, under such
restrictions.’109 Statements of the same tenor can be piled up from the Inquiry.
Though some certainly exaggerated the threat – prophesies of doom were a
constant in bourgeois polemics against the Bill – the fundamental concerns
were real: water supplies did fluctuate, manufacturers did make up lost time,
criminalisation of the practice would cause serious trouble. The special
circumstances for water mills were widely recognised, including by adherents
of the factory movement. And logically, resistance to factory legislation was
led by proprietors of water mills: from the early 1830s to the early 1850s, the
Ashworths and the Gregs commanded the forces of the manufacturing
interests, headed the associations of the Lancashire cotton masters, negotiated
with Parliament, lobbied commissioners, penned pamphlets, spoke at public
meetings and did everything in their power to thwart any limitation on the
working day.110 Of all cotton capitalists, those dependent on water stood to
lose most, and therefore came to articulate the common interests of their
class with particular urgency and stridency. Due to the nature of their prime
mover – and the social demands placed on it – they found themselves first in
the line of fire.

Steam engines, meanwhile, were independent of weather. While their
owners were, as a rule, equally opposed to the Ten Hours Bill, their motive force
could be fully adapted to a shorter working day. As it became increasingly clear
in the early 1830s that popular unrest was forcing the British state to place a cap
on the working day lest the country descend into full revolutionary chaos, the
incentive structure was altered, the mere threat of a Ten Hours Act reducing
the expected profitability of water.

Despite the protestations of the Ashworths and their kind, Parliament
made a first, meagre concession to popular pressure with the Factory Act of
1833. Employment of children below the age of nine was banned in textile
factories, while the working day was limited to eight hours for children up to
13 and to 12 hours for ‘young persons’ up to 18; factory inspectors were charged
with enforcing the regulations. After extensive deliberations, the Chadwick

108. Parliamentary Papers 1834, p. C1.19 (J. Whitaker); emphases added.
109. Parliamentary Papers 1833a, p. C2.66.
110. See Howe 1984; Ward 1962; Boyson 1970; Rose 1986.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 43

Commission, on whose recommendations the Act was based, had concluded
that water mills deserved exemptions, and so they were given the right to order
their children and young persons half an hour extra per day to compensate for
any shortfall in power.111 Was that enough? Half an hour was at the low end
of established custom. The special needs of water capitalists were enshrined
in the Act, but their latitude was severely constrained; anything beyond
half an hour overtime – previously comme il faut – was now a crime, at least
on paper.

Proprietors of water mills immediately set about flouting the law. Soon
responding in force, the factory inspectors endeavoured, under the leadership
of Leonard Horner, to uncover their offences and bring them to court. In 1840,
a parliamentary committee reviewing the workings of the Act asked Horner
where he found the greatest number of violations: ‘in the detached and out-
lying mills’ situated ‘on streams’, he replied.112 Water was less compatible
with lawful behaviour than steam. Howard P. Marvel has demonstrated that
reliance on water was closely correlated with court action already in the
years 1834–6 in Lancashire and West Riding, heartland of the English cotton
industry, in a pattern that would remain in force for the coming two decades:
water capitalists committed more offences, were more likely to be prosecuted,
and were subject to stiffer penalties than their steam-powered competitors.113

To this must be added another consequence of a capped working day. The
grand strategy for counteracting any reduction of hours was to produce more
in the hours left. The disposition of labour power curtailed, more must be
squeezed out of the fewer hours of work by means of installing more productive
machines, speeding up those already in place, and/or enjoining operatives
to work more intensely. The Factories Inquiry and subsequent reports made
it abundantly clear that this was the Plan B of the manufacturers. They had,
Leonard Horner reasoned in 1845, all sorts of opportunities: ‘The work turned
off is produced by the combined effort of the steam-engine and the workman,
and the amount contributed by each varies immensely in different factories,
and in different departments of the same factory.’ But the opportunities on the
rivers were not as promising. ‘In the case of water mills’, Horner wrote, ‘where
the intensity of the power in some seasons is continually varying during the day,
the workman cannot bring increased vigilance or attention to bear.’114

111.  See, for example, Horner 1834. For the history of factory legislation and the factory
movement, see for example Gray 1996; Ward 1962.

112. Parliamentary Papers 1840, pt. 1, pp. 5, 9.
113. Marvel 1977. On the prosecution of the Act, see also Peacock 1984; Bartrip 1985; Nardinelli

1985; Peacock 1985.
114. ‘Report’, in Parliamentary Papers 1845, p. 22.

44 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

The prerequisite for neutralising the effects of factory legislation was a
source of mechanical energy under the complete command of the master. In
the autumn of 1848, when the Ten Hours Bill had finally been passed, Horner
polled the opinions of mill owners, managers and labourers in Lancashire to see
how they coped with ten hours only. One manager of a cotton mill explained:
‘The weavers are now producing quite as much cloth as before in 12 hours. The
engine has been speeded.’ Two cotton spinners at another factory testified that
‘they work harder now during the time, and turn off nearly as much work as
they did in 12 hours, the engine having been speeded’.115 Steam was an integral
part of the capitalist solution to the reduction in the working day.

From the prelude to the Act of 1833 to the culminating Ten Hours Act of
1847, factory legislation gradually strangled water power: ‘It is obvious’,
one Manchester cotton manufacturer noted, ‘that the more you diminish
the number of hours the more you decrease the value of a water-wheel, in
proportion to that of a steam-engine.’116 The Act of 1847 eventually sounded
the death-knell of water power as a viable energy source in the British cotton
industry.117

With this, we can suggest an answer to our main question. Cotton capital
turned to steam because it offered superior power over labour. Needless to say,
there were other factors at work as well; the shift from water to steam was,
indeed, over-determined by a wide range of tendencies in early nineteenth-
century British capitalism, others of which we cannot investigate here. But
power over labour was an outstanding keynote of the transition.

The most tractable labourer we can employ
The character of steam power as a class project was written all over it. The very
appeal of the steam engine – despite its strictly economic and technological
inferiority, relative to the water wheel – was precisely its unique capacity to
apply ‘the industry of the working class’ to the production of ‘surplus wealth’,
in Farey’s words. The formula of that capacity, and a recurring theme in the
bourgeois visions of steam, was what we might call its powerless power. In the
same breath, apologists would extol the great power of steam and its complete
absence of any power of its own, outside that desired by its proprietors. ‘What
distinguishes it from all others’, renowned bourgeois economist Nassau Senior
alleged in his 1848 lectures,

115. ‘Report’, in Parliamentary Papers 1849, pp. 47–8; emphases added.
116. Parliamentary Papers 1833b, p. D2.49 (Charles Hindley).
117. Compare von Tunzelmann 1978, p. 225; Allen 2009, pp. 173, 177.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 45

is its manageability. Wind power must be taken as it is given by nature. It can
neither be moderated nor augmented. Water power is rather more under control.
It can always be diminished and a little may sometimes be done to increase it. The
power of steam is just what we choose to make it.118

While noting the noxious effects of ‘carbonic acid’, Babbage admired steam
for being ‘obedient to the hand which called into action its resistless powers’.119
M.A. Alderson, author of an acclaimed 1833 steam-engine manual, emphasised
that it could ‘be obtained on the spot’, and ‘its mighty services are always at our
command, whether in winter or in summer, by day or by night – it knows no
intermission but what our wishes dictate.’ 120 Fairbairn marvelled at ‘powers
so great and so energetic as to astonish us at their immensity, while they are at
the same time perfectly docile’, while another manual author lauded not only
‘the prodigious powers of steam’, but just as much ‘the ease and precision and
ductility with which they can be varied, distributed, and applied.’121 But perhaps
it was John Farey who offered the most pregnant formulation. James Watt and
the other modern improvers of the steam engine had, he wrote, ‘rendered it
capable of very rapid movements, and put its powers so completely under
control, that it is now the most tractable, as well as the most active, labourer
we can employ.’122 A perfectly docile, ductile, tractable labourer: the wettest
dream of employers come true. Here were the reasons to glorify ‘the creator of
six or eight million labourers, among whom the law will never have to suppress
either combination or rioting’, in the words of François Arago, author of the
first major biography of Watt.123

Steam was the consummate substitute for labour, ready to step into its shoes
with an infantry of machines, because it was everything that labour was not.
All its virtues were constituted as the negations of working-class vices. Just as
much, however, they appeared in contrast to all other available prime movers,
particularly water power, whose perceived deficiencies were uncannily
analogous to those of labour. Unlike water, steam was appreciated for having
no ways or places of its own, no external laws, no residual existence outside
that brought forth by its proprietors; it was absolutely, indeed ontologically
subservient to those who owned it. The purpose of machinery – to secure
absolute power over labour – was understood to necessitate a prime mover
over which capital could exercise absolute power while at the same time offering

118.   Senior papers: B18, notes for ‘Course II, Lecture 8’, 1848.
119.   Babbage 1835, p. 49; emphasis added.
120.     Alderson 1834, p. 44; emphasis added.
121.    Fairbairn 1861, p. 9; Stuart 1824, p. 192; emphases added.
122.   Farey 1827, p. 13.
123. Arago 1839, p. 147. On this as the first biography of Watt, see Hills 2006, pp. 175–7.

46 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

capital all the power it needed. In the powerlessness of the great powers of
steam, British capital found the ideal spring of its class power. The ultimate
bedrock of all that power, however, was revealed in that one little detail: the
engine had to be fed with coal.

The factor in everything we do
In the final years of the 1830s, the amount of motive power derived from water
in the British textile industry began to fall. Cotton drove the decline, with an
ever heavier weight in Lancashire; by 1838, steam had gained ascendancy in
all parts of the county except for the outlying northern areas. The rise was
particularly fast in the second half of the decade, at the time of the bonanza:
between 1835 and 1838, horse-power from steam in the cotton mills of
Lancashire and Cheshire jumped by 62 per cent.124 With a lag, the transition
was mirrored nationwide. In 1830, steam engines supplied as much power to
the British economy as water wheels – adding wind to the side of water, steam
provided slightly less – but 40 years later, steam gave almost ten times more
than water and wind combined. In the meantime, after the initial triumph in
the cotton industry, the engine swept the factories and workshops of Britain;
‘it is only of late years’, noted Fairbairn in 1864, ‘that in this country the steam-
engine has nearly superseded the use of air and water as a prime-mover.’125

Since steam engines had to be fed with coal, the shares of coal consumption
were redistributed with their rise. In 1800, as we have seen, domestic heating
was the pre-eminent sector, and ‘in no sense could the coal industry be
regarded as one of the fundamental basic industries’ of Britain; little more than
half a century later, the situation had been reversed.126 Domestic heating fell
below the 50% line in the 1820s, but remained the single largest end-use up to
1840. By 1855, general manufacturing had eclipsed it, taking up 31% of all coal
consumption in the British Isles, as against 25% for domestic heating; by 1870,
three times more coal was burnt in the sectors of general manufacturing, iron
and steel than in the hearths and homes of Britain.127 In this turning of tables,

124. Kanefsky 1979, pp. 254–5, 281–90, 301; Journal of the Statistical Society of London 1838;
Gatrell 1977, p. 101.

125. Allen 2009, pp. 172–3, 177–9; Lloyd-Jones and Lewis 1998, p. 70; Fairbairn 1864, p. 67. There
were, of course, a whole spectrum of branches that had yet to be mechanised. See, for example,
Samuel 1977; Greenberg 1982.

126. Mitchell 1984, p. 1.
127. Mitchell 1984, p. 12.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 47

‘the major growth point was the consumption of coal for steam-powered
production in factories and workshops.’128

Responding to the demand, output from British coalmines leapt ahead.
Lancashire was the scene of the most dramatic advance, its mines expanding
on the direct and indirect stimulus from the local cotton industry. Total output
in Britain entered a phase of acceleration somewhere between 1815 and 1830,
reaching an apex of growth in mid-century before falling back to previous
levels; the span 1831–54 saw the highest growth rate in coal production ever
experienced between 1700 and 1900.129 The new deep roots of the British
economy did not escape contemporary observers. ‘Without an abundant supply
of coal’, Farey acknowledged, ‘the use of steam-engines, and the practice of
the modern system of manufactures, would be very limited.’130 No longer was
coal merely used for heating homes; these days, McCulloch pointed out – in
the process defining the quintessence of the fossil economy – the British coal
reserves ‘are the principal source and foundation of our manufacturing and
commercial prosperity.’131 In 1866, when business-as-usual already appeared
entrenched in Britain, Jevons famously summed up its logic: ‘Coal in truth
stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material
energy of the country – the universal aid – the factor in everything we do.’132
The railway to global warming had been laid down.

Towards a theory of fossil capital
It should be clear by now that the transition to steam in the British cotton
industry presents the Ricardian-Malthusian paradigm with a serious empirical
anomaly. Not only was the vanquished contender not running on present
photosynthesis, but the basic tenets of the paradigm run counter to perhaps
the most remarkable aspects of the process: the abundance, the technological
strength, and the cheapness of water at the time of the transition – and anything
that happened subsequently cannot, of course, be used to explain it. The fact
that the total consumption of mechanical energy in the British economy much
later came to exceed the potential supply from the watercourses of the country
could not possibly have been a factor in the actual transition.

128. Church 1986, p. 27.
129. Pollard 1980; Mitchell 1984, pp. 7, 23–31; Church 1986, pp. 28–9; Flinn 1984, p. 26; Church

1986, p. 3.
130. Farey 1827, p. 225; emphasis added.
131. McCulloch 1837, p. 2.
132. Jevons 1866, p. viii.

48 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

But Wrigley makes an attempt to apply the Ricardian law of diminishing
returns to what we have here called the centrifugal dynamic. Water power, he
claims, ‘was subject to rising marginal cost of provision since the better sites
were naturally developed first, leaving smaller or less conveniently situated
falls for later exploitation.’133 Though this might sound a good match for the
law, in fact it diverges from it in crucial respects. There is no evidence that the
waterfalls at the outer rims of the centrifugal dynamic were ‘smaller’ or worse
in any other absolute sense, whereas the inferior soils of Ricardo’s law were,
as both he and Wrigley assert, less fertile by the laws of nature (thin soil, steep
slopes, poor drainage, etcetera). The disadvantage of distant watercourses was
not their deficient capacity to produce power – rather the opposite: waterfalls
uphill tended to be more powerful than in the towns – but precisely their
‘inconvenience’. And that was a socially determined factor. It arose not from
the fixed supply of land, but from the contradiction between the locations
of streams on the one hand and the need for cotton capitalists to access
concentrated supplies of labour on the other.

As for the Malthusian component of the paradigm, it was hardly a desperate
struggle to satisfy the needs for the clothing of a growing number of British
denizens that made the Arkwrights, the Ashworths, the Gregs or any other
manufacturers establish and enlarge their mills. If a causal connection can
at all be stretched out from the acceleration of population growth in the late
eighteenth century to the transition from water to steam in the second quarter
of the nineteenth century, it looks set to be exceedingly tenuous. As it appears
in the data, the transition was nothing like ‘a valiant struggle of a society with
its back to the ecological wall’.

Someone of neoclassical persuasion, finally, might object that if access to
labour in space and time is counted as an associated cost of a prime mover,
water was indeed more expensive than steam – but this is merely to displace
the problem, to which neoclassical theory seems oblivious. In a capitalist
economy, the relative cost-efficiency of prime movers cannot be understood
outside of the relations of production. The obvious alternative is Marx. An
exegesis of all that he and Engels wrote on steam remains an unfulfilled task,
beyond the scope of this paper. Suffice it to say that the first volume of Capital
contains a finely textured account of the rise of steam power, including an
apt précis: ‘The steam-engine was from the very first an antagonist of “human
power”, an antagonist that enabled the capitalists to tread underfoot the

133. Wrigley 1990, p. 75. Compare Wrigley 1972, p. 249.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 49

growing demands of the workers, which threatened to drive the infant factory
system into crisis.’134

As a starting-point for an analysis of the fossil economy – far more
promising than anything derived from earlier classical economists – we
may simply take the canonical Marxian view of the specificity of capitalist
growth. The compulsion to expand the scale of material production is not an
attribute of the human species, present – if only in latent, bottled-up form –
from the beginning of history. It is an emergent property of capitalist property
relations. Once the direct producers and the means of production have been
separated, the compulsion is inscribed in the very structure of production, in
a qualitatively novel, indeed historically unprecedented way.135 Divorced and
reconstituted as commodities, labour power and means of production can only
be reunified – and reunified they must be, if society is to survive – ‘in the hands
of the capitalist’.136 His function is to acquire both with money. When the new
commodities begotten by the rendezvous are sold, the capitalist again receives
money. But why exchange money for money? The point of the process can only
be the difference between the original amount thrown into circulation and
the amount withdrawn at the end. If the business forecast told the capitalist
that he would get back 95 per cent of his money, he would be wise to keep it
in his pocket or do something else with it; if it said that he would stand a good
chance to get 100 per cent of the expenses covered but no more, he would still
be prudent to abstain. The effort would be pointless. Given capitalist property
relations, only the reasonable expectation of an increment in exchange-value can
set the process of production in motion.

Another word for that increment is, of course, profit, obtained from the
surplus-value produced by workers. Profit is the ‘driving fire’ of capitalist
production.137 It recognises no end: more money can only usher in attempts
to make even more money, the profit from the first circuit igniting production
anew on a larger scale. This is the process commonly known as ‘growth’, better
understood as capital accumulation, encapsulated in Marx’s general formula of
capital as M – C – M´, or Money – Commodities – Money-with-an-increment.
More precisely, the commodities purchased by the capitalist fall into the two
categories of Labour Power and Means of Production, unified in the process of
Production, giving the following extended formula:

134. Marx 1990, pp. 562–3.
135. For this analysis of the growth imperative, see for example Brenner 1986; Brenner 2007;

Joffe 2011. For the specifically eco-Marxist analysis, see for example Burkett 2006; Foster, Clark
and York 2010; Foster 2011; Blauwhof 2012.

136. Marx 1992, p. 120. Compare Marx 1992, pp. 114–15.
137. Mandel’s translation of Marx. Mandel 1990, p. 60; compare Marx 1990, p. 254.

50 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

M – C (L + MP) . . . P . . . C´ – M´.

Reigniting after every circuit, the driving fire never goes out, and the general
formula can thus be extrapolated in perpetuity:

M – C . . . P . . . C´ – M´ → M´ – C´ . . . P . . . C´´ – M´´ → M´´ – C´´ . . . P . . . C´´´ – M´´´,

and so on. Capital is, by its very definition, this circulatory process of
valorisation, or self-expanding value. But capital is also – by its very definition –
the relation between capitalists and workers. The two moments are intrinsically
connected: the relation unleashes the process, which in turn reproduces the
relation.

Capital, thus defined, exists ‘only by sucking in living labour as its soul,
vampire-like’.138 But if labour is its soul, nature is its body. No profit from
commodity production is possible without the appropriation of nature as
‘the material substratum of exchange-value’.139 The deeper meaning of P in
the formulae of capital is a closely regulated Stoffwechsel, or metabolism,
between humans and the rest of nature: materials are withdrawn and, under
the command of the capitalist, placed in the hands of workers as means of
production.140 Apart from machines and other instruments, they include
raw materials, a subcategory of which is ‘ancillary materials’ or ‘accessories’,
in Marx’s terminology. These are the substances that do not enter into the
product itself – in contradistinction to, say, cotton in a thread – but form a
necessary part of the process of production. ‘An accessory may be consumed by
the instruments of labour, such as coal by a steam-engine, oil by a wheel, hay by
draft-horses.’141 Coal and oil are treated by Marx as the archetypal accessories.

All required means of production – ‘machines, coal, oil, etc.’ – have to be
present in sufficient mass ‘to absorb the mass of labour which is to be turned
into products through them’.142 In the right quantities, finely tuned to labour
power, the means of production will then be productively consumed, for the
production of commodities is also a ‘consumption of the means of production,
which become worn through use, and are partly (e.g. in combustion) dissolved
into their elements again.’143 As value expands, more of the body of nature thus
has to be appropriated and consumed. The fire demands its fuel.

138. Marx 1993, p. 646.
139. Ibid.
140. For this analysis of the labour process, see Burkett 1999; Foster 2000.
141.  Marx 1990, p. 288.
142. Marx 1992, pp. 177, 111.
143. Marx 1993, p. 90; emphasis added.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 51

At a certain stage in the historical development of capital, fossil fuels become
a necessary material substratum for the production of surplus-value. But they
are not merely necessary in the sense that raw cotton is necessary for the
production of cotton textiles, wood for that of tables, or iron ore for machines:
they are utilised across the spectrum of commodity production as the accessory
that sets it in physical motion. Other sources of rotary motion are pushed to
tiny fringes, while capital expands in leaps and bounds, energised by fossil
fuels. These have now become the general lever for surplus-value production.

With F for fossil fuels, we can thus derive the general formula of fossil
capital:

M – C (L + MP (F)) . . . P . . . C´ – M´

In the circuit of capital, fossil fuels are now a portion of the means of production.
The more capital expands, the larger the volumes extracted and combusted.
Integral parts of the Stoffwechsel, fossil fuels are subjected to productive
consumption in ever growing quantities, with an inevitable chemical
by-product, of which Marx and Engels were aware. In the second volume of
Capital, Marx explains that the time expended by the capitalist on buying and
selling his commodities, on prowling the market and securing transactions in
meetings with other businessmen, is not value-creating time, but nonetheless
‘a necessary moment of the capitalist production process in its totality’. Marx
draws a parallel pregnant with meaning. The time spent on buying and selling

is somewhat like the ‘work of combustion’ involved in setting light to a material
that is used to produce heat. This work does not itself produce any heat, although
it is a necessary moment of the combustion process. For example, in order to use
coal as a fuel, I must combine it with oxygen, and for this purpose transform it from
the solid into the gaseous state (for carbon dioxide, the result of the combustion,
is coal in this state: F.E.), i.e. effect a change in its physical form of existence
or physical state. The separation of the carbon molecules that were combined
into a solid whole, and the breaking down of the carbon molecule itself into its
individual atoms, must precede the new combination.144

When Engels edited the posthumous second volume of Capital, using his
initials to mark insertions in Marx’s manuscripts, the science of chemistry
had made progress since the days of Babbage. Today, we may take Marx’s
analogy literally and conclude that constantly increasing quantities of CO2,
just as market transactions, are a necessary part of capital accumulation; the
combustion of fossil fuels in their solid form and the consequent release of CO2

144. Marx 1992, p. 208.

52 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

do not in themselves create any value for the capitalist, but they are materially
indispensable for value creation. The extended formula of fossil capital thus
reads:

.CO2 . .
M – C (L + MP (F)) . . . P  . . . C´ – M´

Since fossil energy now fuels the perpetuum mobile of capital accumulation,
igniting itself anew, as a driving fire that never goes out, the cycle continues
indefinitely:

and so on. Valorisation proceeds through combustion. Fossil capital, in other
words, is self-expanding value passing through the metamorphosis of fossil fuels
into CO2. It is a relation, a triangular relation between capital, labour and a
certain segment of extra-human nature, in which the exploitation of labour
by capital is impelled by the combustion of this particular accessory. But
fossil capital is also a process, a flow of successive valorisations, at every stage
claiming a larger body of fossil energy to burn. It recognises no end. One could
think of this as the biophysical shadow of Marx’s general formula of capital,
coming to the forefront only in the times of unexpected biospheric dusk.

The general formula of fossil capital, in these simple, extended and
extrapolated versions, does not, of course, capture the entire field of fossil fuel
consumption even in a capitalist society. The most obvious omission is a form
of consumption preceding fossil capital by at least six centuries: the purchase
of use-values whose very usage emits CO2. Heating cottages with coal falls
into this category, as does, to take but two examples, driving to work in a car,
or surfing the web with a computer (in so far as these run on fossil energy).
The immediate cause of combustion in these cases is the satisfaction of some
need or other in the sphere of private consumption. Here the formula would
rather be:

But even though such individual consumption predates the productive
consumption of fossil fuels as a source of rotary motion, it does not give rise to
business-as-usual, for individual consumption is not the ignition mechanism of
capitalist growth.

.CO2 . .
M – C (L + MP (F)) . . . P  . . . C´ – M´ → M´ (L´ + MP´ (F´)). . . P  . . . C´´ – M´´

.CO2´ . .

.CO2 . .
C – M – C (F)

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 53

Only with the emergence of fossil capital was business-as-usual established.
By placing coal right under the driving fire of capital accumulation, as the fuel
transmitting physical motion to the labour process, a spiral of growing fossil
fuel combustion was, for the first time, directly tied to the spiralling growth
of capitalist commodity production. But why did capital strike root in fossil
fuels? Why did capital in general become fossil capital? What tensions in the
relationship between capital, labour and the rest of nature – or, what properties
of the capitalist property relations – prompted this fateful step?

The abstract and fossil spatio-temporality of capitalism
The separation between direct producers and means of production means
that peasants are pushed off their land. Capital hinges upon a popular exodus
from the countryside. Released from their attachment to the soil, the ‘free’
workers congregate at particular points, where they reconnect with the means
of production on someone else’s property. The receptacle for this original
spatial concentration of capitalist property relations is, of course, the factory,
but it immediately points beyond itself: every factory ‘bears in it the germ of a
manufacturing town’.145

As the larger receptacle, the town amasses raw materials, instruments, means
of subsistence and, above all, workers. The concentration of proletarians in the
town is the flipside of the draining of the countryside. It is also a necessary
condition for the production of surplus-value. If there are no unemployed
workers knocking at the factory gates, labour will be in a perilously strong
bargaining position; the ‘dead weight of the industrial reserve army’ has to
be in situ, in the form a large, dense, overflowing market for labour power.
In a small, thin, spatially dispersed labour-market, capitalists have to treat
their workers as precious assets, circumscribing the power to extract surplus-
value. Moreover, propertyless ex-peasants must become habituated to life as
disciplined operatives, in a community where wage-labour has become the
normal mode of existence for masses and generations of people. The town is
the ideal if not the only feasible receptacle for all these mutually dependent
processes.146 Water stood in fundamental contradiction to it.

Capitalist property relations engendered concentration in space: capitalists
sticking with water were obliged to expand out from the centre. In the colonies,
they had to fuse the spaces of production and reproduction, providing for all
the needs of their workers – accommodation, access to staple goods, religious
institutions, schooling – rather than letting them get by on an infrastructure

145. Engels 2009, p. 34.
146. Storper and Walker 1989, pp. 140–5; Smith 2008, p. 116; Harvey 1999, pp. 381–4.

54 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

already in place.147 It would have been different had the abundance of cheap
water been located in a hole in the ground, in a trunk around which the town
could bush out, or in some other vertical configuration – but then water would
not have been water. As water, it flowed on the surface of the British landscape,
fully available but incongruous with the emergent spatial dynamic.

The contradiction was present from the start, but it was long hidden under
the super-profits of the first generations of cotton capitalists. Only after the
mid-1820s was it brought to a head. Resolving the contradiction, the cotton
capitalists then cut off the tether of water power, gained a fundamental mobility
to seek out – and discard – workers, broke loose from what Henri Lefebvre
called ‘absolute space’ and moved into its ‘abstract’ counter-dimension.
Absolute space is ‘made up of fragments of nature located at sites which were
chosen for their intrinsic qualities (cave, mountaintop, spring, river). . . . Then
the forces of history smashed naturalness forever and upon its ruins established
the space of accumulation’.148 There emerged abstract space. Instead of going
reverently to the mountaintops and rivers and establishing its businesses
there, capital produced a matrix of nodes and arteries through its own circuits.
Absolute, natural space ‘juxtaposes – and thus disperses’. Abstract, social space
‘implies actual or potential assembly at a single point’, and thereby also ‘the
possibility of accumulation’.149

But even abstract space ultimately has to rest on nature. Fossil fuels alone
have the characteristics that allowed for its formation. They are not diffused
on the surface of the natural landscape, not weaved into its qualitative
properties but concentrated in deposits beneath the ground, outside the realm
of human habitation and visible variety. Their most concrete property is their
abstractness. While bound to specific, irreproducible places – seams, in this
case – coal is buried at a remove from the space of humans, as the relic of
a landscape long dead and gone.150 It was the optimal raw material for the
initial break-out into spatial abstraction. By virtue of being concentrated in
subterranean sites of no other use or meaning, coal could be brought into the
world of earthlings as loose fragments, passing from hand to hand, circulating
freely inside the commodity circuits and releasing the forces of accumulation.

The temporality of capitalist property relations is homologous. Pre-capitalist
modes of production were structured by what Moishe Postone calls ‘concrete
time’: time as dependent variable, the function of an occasion, process, or

147. Compare Lefebvre 1991, p. 319; Harvey 1999, pp. 398–405; Smith 2008, pp. 166, 182.
148. Lefebvre 1991, p. 49.
149. Lefebvre 1991, p. 101.
150. Compare the argument made in Mitchell 2011, especially Chapter 1.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 55

sensuous rhythm. Above all, concrete time is embedded in natural cycles.151
The pre-capitalist fisher attended to the tides, while the artisan downed his
tools when darkness fell. In peasant households the grain must be harvested
before the rains arrive, the cows must be milked in the morning, and the
firewood must be at hand when autumn comes – in short, ‘hours and task must
fluctuate with the weather.’152

But capitalist property relations generate a radically different, indeed
antithetical temporality: when a capitalist purchases the right to dispose of
labour power, that right is restricted and specified in time (otherwise there
would be slavery). His objective is to make sure that the worker performs as
much labour as possible within the given time-frame, be it six or twelve hours,
for one week or as long as the parties agree. The labour has to occur precisely
within that time – not when the weather is right, or when the sun has risen,
or when the worker happens to be in the mood for hard labour, for then the
right to dispose of labour power might have already expired, and the purchase
would come to nought. Moreover, the capitalist must see to it that his workers
produce the commodities at least as fast as those of his competitors, and so he
becomes intensely preoccupied with productivity: labour output as measured
against a fixed time unit.153 With the rise of capitalist property relations,
there emerged, in Postone’s terms, abstract time. This is time as independent
variable, a mathematical vessel, an incorporeal repository of events which
heeds no seasons, weather or other concrete appearances in nature. It serves
as a measure of activity, beginning with labour.154

Water power was a legacy from the era of concrete time. It was eminently
commensurate with modes of production attuned to the ups and downs of
natural fluctuations, the ebbs and flows, the floods and dry spells, the freezing
cold in wintertime. But abstract time inhered in capitalist property relations.
A contradiction was inevitable, though it did not make itself felt until a certain
juncture in the history of capitalist development: as long as absolute surplus-
value was dominant – as long as manufacturers could extend the working day
at will – water was still a perfectly viable energy source. It could be used to
produce surplus-value, even as labour-time had to be adjusted to the power
supply. But with the Factory Acts of 1833 and 1847, not only was the lengthening
of the working day for the first time brought to a mandated halt, but the day
was shortened. How did capital respond to this challenge? It ‘threw itself with
all its might, and in full awareness of the situation, into the production of

151.  Postone 1993, pp. 201–2.
152. Thompson 1967, p. 78. Compare Ingold 1995.
153. Postone 1993, pp. 210–12; Thompson 1967, pp. 61, 90–1.
154. Postone 1993, pp. 202, 214–15.

56 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

relative surplus-value’, by increasing the productivity and intensity of labour,
so that more commodities were produced in the remaining given time units.155

The struggle for a shorter working day – Urform of working-class self-
defence – provoked capital to counterattack with a further abstraction of time.
‘The pores of time are so to speak shrunk through the compression of labour.’156
Abstract time became ever more sovereign and supreme in its claims on
labour – and consequently on nature. If labour was to proceed faster and more
intensely, so must the prime mover; all bulging pores of interruption had to
be banished. In the 1830s and 1840s, as absolute surplus-value was overtaken
by its relative twin, the increased expenditure of labour had to be placed on
the solid footing of the steam engine, utterly malleable to the temporal needs
of capital – turned on, turned off, speeded up at will. Such virtues were mere
corollaries of the essence of fossil fuels: their ejection from perceptible natural
rhythms through burial underground. Frozen in time, coal was congenial to the
abstract time of capitalist property relations, and, under the duress of factory
legislation, it became a prerequisite for its continued abstraction.

Abstract space and abstract time together form what Noel Castree calls the
‘distinctive spatio-temporality’ of the capitalist mode of production.157 Capital
does not circulate in space and through time, as if the two were fixed axes
along which it develops; rather, it produces its own abstract space-time. The
one dimension is inseparable from the other. They constitute a single spatio-
temporality, which emanates straight from the fundamentals of capitalist
property relations. A primordial rift in the relation between humans and
between them and the rest of nature – the separation between direct producers
and means of production – is propagated in space and time, severing human
beings from the qualitative properties of both dimensions. Labour is relocated
to particular places and moments set aside strictly for the purpose.

The necessary material substratum for this spatio-temporality – long hidden
from the view of most Marxists, however sharp their eyes have otherwise
been – is fossil fuels.158 They represent the geological compression of the time
and space required for photosynthesis hundreds of millions of years ago, when
no humans roamed the planet; sui generis, their dense energy permits capital
to produce its own abstract spatio-temporality for the production of surplus-
value. They are incorporated into capital as its own motive force.

155. Marx 1990, p. 534; emphasis added.
156. Marx 1991b, p. 335.
157. Castree 2009, p. 27; emphasis in original.
158. Some Marxists who have argued in this direction are Altvater 1994; Altvater 2006; Clark

and York 2005; Huber 2009.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 57

Marx comes close to capturing this logic in the third volume of Capital, at
the beginning of his treatment of ground-rent, devoted to an extraordinary
discussion of the relative benefits of water and steam. ‘Assume’, Marx opens
his excursion, ‘that the factories in a country are powered predominantly by
steam-engines, but a certain minority by natural waterfalls instead.’ Water
is far cheaper, Marx further assumes – this is written in London in the mid-
1860s – and provides the proprietors of water mills with ‘exceptionally
favourable conditions’. Labour applied in the water mill has greater productivity
than in the steam mill, expressed ‘in the way that it needs a smaller quantity
of constant capital to produce the same amount of commodities, a smaller
quantity of objectified labour than the others; and a smaller quantity of living
labour as well, since the water-wheel does not need to be heated.’159 However,
water is

a natural force that is not available to all capital in the same sphere of production,
as is for example the elasticity of steam. . . . It is in no way just up to the capital
to call into being this natural condition of greater labour productivity, in the way
that any capital can transform water into steam. The condition is to be found in
nature only at certain places, and where it is not found it cannot be produced
by a particular capital outlay. It is not bound up with products that labour can
produce such as machines, coal, etc., but rather with particular natural conditions
on particular pieces of land.160

Water, Marx reiterates, ‘cannot be produced by capital’s own production
process’: capital ‘cannot create a water-fall from its own resources’.161 This is
in stark contrast to fossil fuels. Their power is ‘just what we choose to make
it’, in the words of Senior; their ‘mighty services are always at our command’,
with Alderson. Needless to say, capital is unable to literally manufacture
coal seams or any other fossil fuel reserves, but it can call them into being
as energy deposits by mobilising its own resources: labour power and means
of production. Indeed, fossil fuels are not a natural force like water, running
through forests and meadows prior to capital’s arrival, dispensing its energy
merely by existing: fossil fuels must be called into existence. The appearance
of fossil energy qua energy is not autonomous, but contingent upon capital
itself. It assumes the guise of a power in motion internal to capital, lending it a
physical life of its own.

Precisely because it is so abstract, and founded on the power of the capitalist
class, the spatio-temporality of capitalism is more deeply rooted in a particular

159. Marx 1991a, pp. 779–81; emphasis added.
160. Marx 1991a, p. 784; emphases added.
161.  Marx 1991a, pp. 784–5.

58 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

form of nature than other spatialities and temporalities in history. Arago
neatly laid out the principles in his hagiography of Watt: ‘The great mechanical
powers which had formerly to be sought for in mountainous districts, at the
foot of rapid cascades, will, thanks to Watt’s invention, readily and easily arise,
in the midst of towns, on any story of a house. The extent of these powers will
vary at the will of the mechanician; it will no longer depend, as heretofore,
on the most inconstant of natural causes, – on atmospheric influences.’162
Instead, capitalist spatio-temporality came to influence the atmosphere. The
depth of its dependency on nature is fully disclosed when carbon dioxide
from the combustion of fossil fuels, with a transformative power unlike any
other anthropogenic substance, rearranges the qualitative properties of space
and jumbles historical and geological time in ways never previously seen.
Abstracting itself from nature, capital ended up making it less and less liveable,
in very concrete terms.

The persistence of business-as-usual
Fossil capital has proved fantastically profitable for almost two centuries. Up
to this day, its rotation continues to propel business-as-usual, in complete
disregard of the scientific knowledge of the noxious effects of increasing the
atmosphere by large quantities of carbon dioxide. How do we approach this
all-time social wreck? The favoured Ricardian-Malthusian explanation for
the transition to a fossil economy – the liberation from land constraint –
can only be a one-off driver, at the very best. This becomes obvious if we
revisit the mathematical conversions from fossil fuels to acres of woodland
so highly regarded as explanatory exercises by Wrigley and his followers.
When Wrigley calculates that all coal in 1800 equalled 35% of the British land
surface, rising to 150% in 1850, this is, of course, a hypothetical, counterfactual
thought-experiment. Can it tell us anything about the causal forces operating
in the expansion of coal consumption in the period? For that to be the case,
Wrigley would have to present evidence that land scarcity pushed up prices for
alternative fuels in the first half of the nineteenth century, that the rising costs
of these other fuels impelled consumers to shift to coal, and that such cost-
motivated consumption made up the bulk of all coal-burning. Wrigley does
not, however, provide anything of the sort, and it would be difficult to do so.
Then can the exercise tell us anything about the causal forces operating later
in the history of business-as-usual?

162. Arago 1839, p. 150.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 59

Consider Malanima’s conclusion that a Europe bereft of fossil fuels would
have needed 2.7 times its continental surface in 1900 and more than 20 times a
century later: can it tell us anything about the driving force of this tremendous
pyre? Logically it cannot, because if Europe was liberated from the land
constraint – even before the onset of the twentieth century – it could no longer
have operated as a causal factor. The supposed breaking of the Ricardian curse
is a one-off event, evaporating as soon as it transpires. The same applies to the
iron industry, the best case for the paradigm: the liberation from land provided
by the conversion from charcoal to coke can explain the initial spike in coal
consumption, but once that liberation had actually occurred, other drivers
must have taken over. As for the Malthusian component, there is precious
little evidence that population growth has been behind subsequent waves of
expanding fossil fuel consumption.163

Adherents of the Ricardian-Malthusian paradigm are, of course, right in
identifying fossil fuels as a necessary precondition for the kind of growth the
world has seen in the past two centuries. But the only clue they can offer for an
analysis of business-as-usual after the industrial revolution is a vague reference
to growth as an innately human pursuit, common to all eras and modes
of production, permanently throbbing if sometimes held back. It begs the
question of what is special with the fossil economy. Nothing new has emerged;
the old has merely been realised. The theory of fossil capital, on the other hand,
appears to have explanatory power for the transition to a fossil economy and
for its continued development. Consider only the case of China. The twenty-
first century explosion in CO2 emissions is centred on China, largely caused
by the relocation of industrial production from advanced capitalist countries.
This process obviously has nothing to do with land constraints or population
growth in those same countries. But it has, as argued elsewhere, very much to
do with the removal of factories to other situations, where labourers are easily
procured and trained to industrious habits.164

This points towards a radical rethinking of the drivers of ecological
destruction in our time. They should not be conceived as archaic yearnings of
the human species, as a timeless growth pursuit bumping into walls of scarcity
and transcending them by substituting abundant goods for scarce ones: a
universal process unfolding through reaction upon specific constraints. The
reverse appears more appropriate. Capital is a specific process that unfolds
through a universal appropriation of biophysical resources, because capital
itself possesses a unique, insatiable appetite for surplus-value extracted from

163. For a debunkning of the myth that population growth drives carbon emissions, see
Satterthwaite 2009.

164. Malm 2012b.

60 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

human labour by means of material substrata. Capital, one could say, is super-
ecological, a biophysical omnivore with its own peculiar social DNA.

Such a theory might, furthermore, provide insights into the stalled shift to
renewable energy sources. It has recently been demonstrated that all energy
consumed in the world could be provided from wind, water and solar power,
without any noticeable share of coal, oil or natural gas, within a few decades,
at little or no extra total cost – if relevant actors only decided to harvest the
abundance of energy surrounding us.165 But there are hurdles in the way. In
a major survey in 2010, Science noted that ‘building solar or wind farms is a
land-hungry process, and the energy they deliver is often intermittent and
hard to store.’ Quoting an ecological economist specialising in the field, it drew
attention to the fact that ‘ “many of the windiest and sunniest regions in the
world are virtually uninhabited” ’.166 Now these inherent properties of wind
and sun – absolute space, concrete time – would perhaps not constitute such
serious handicaps if it were not for the particular form of spatio-temporality
that governs the world.

The problem is not new. One day in the late 1860s, as he sat preparing a
lecture on the economics of coal, William Stanley Jevons’s eyes fell upon a
newspaper report about the Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson, who
‘undertakes to supply a new fuel in the place of coal, and a new motive power
instead of steam. For several years he has been experimenting with a view of
collecting and concentrating the radiating heat of the sun’ in a ‘solar engine’.167
Jevons saved the clip and scribbled down his excitement. It was the ‘most
sound’ of all suggested solutions to what he perceived to be an impending coal
shortage,

and for my part I really do not look upon it as an unlikely notion to be carried
out into practice some day. But if it be carried out, what will be the result for us –
simply that we shall be replaced, and the seats of industry will be removed to the
sunny parts of the earth. In Manchester at any rate we have little sun that we have
to manipulate for light. . . . The tendency of things is such that we are likely to find
coal a source of sunlight [rather] than sunlight a competitor of coal.168

This ‘tendency of things’, Jevons thus intimated, did not inhere in the sun or the
earth themselves, but in the ongoing concentration of industrial commodity
production to the galaxy gravitating around Manchester.

165. Jacobson and Delucchi 2011a; Jacobson and Delucchi 2011b; Leggett and Ball 2012.
166. Kerr 2010 (Cutler Cleveland). Compare the points raised by Trainer 2012.
167. Jevons archive: JA6/9/168, ‘Fuel from the sun’, undated clip from Express.
168. Jevons archive: JA6/9/168, note on the Express clip.

A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68 61

Today, the divergence between the potentials of renewable energy and the
tendency of things – each advancing in their own direction – is, of course, far
wider. Manchester and its twins in the advanced capitalist countries have
lost their lustre, because capital has become even more bent on removing to
locations where the supplies of labour power offer the highest rates of surplus-
value, regardless of any intrinsic qualities of places. Here is a question rarely
asked: is that tendency compatible with a complete cessation of fossil fuel
use, the kind of change climate science tells us is our only chance to avoid a
general breakdown of the ecological foundations of human existence? Even if
a project such as Desertec – filling the Sahara with solar panels and sending
the electricity to Europe – were to be implemented, it would still be impossible
to export that solar energy to, say, the Yangzi Delta, or any other distant place
capital currently might favour for commodity production.169 But oil can be
pumped out of the ground in Alaska or Angola and shipped to any site of
accumulation, from Guangzhou to Ghent. A similar question pertains to the
dimension of time. Are the principles of just-in-time and lean production at all
reconcilable with renewable energy?

Globalisation may be conceived as a process in which the spatio-temporality
of capital is extricated from and made to dominate all other aspects of human
and natural life: a most unpropitious moment, it would seem, for embedding
the world’s energy system in the spatial and temporal matrix of wind, water
and sun. It might well be the case that renewable energy can become as reliable
and all-encompassing as fossil energy – if scaled up massively and assisted by
super-grids, surplus capacity, intercontinental transmission, electricity storage
systems and all the rest – but in the meantime, we may do well to wonder if
the inaction on the most critical issue in the history of humanity is rooted in
the compulsions of self-expanding value.170 For two centuries, it has craved
constantly increasing quantities of energy, whose qualities correspond to its
own mode of existence, both of which moments seem to perpetuate business-
as-usual and deflect alternatives. Will this fire have to be extinguished? What
would that require, given that we have so precious little time to stave off the
worst-case scenarios? Further research on fossil capital may throw light on
the – literally – social nature of this challenge.

169. On Desertec, see for example Clery 2010.
170. Elaborate arguments for such potentials of renewable energy are made in Jacobson and

Delucchi 2011a; Jacobson and Delucchi 2011b.

62 A. Malm / Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013) 15–68

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Today, 18, 2: 4–8.

University of Arizona Press

Chapter Title: Class and Nature in the Oil Industry of Northern Veracruz, 1900–1938
Chapter Author(s):

Myrna I. Santiago

Book Title: A Land Between Waters
Book Subtitle: Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico
Book Editor(s): CHRISTOPHER R. BOYER
Published by: University of Arizona Press. (2012)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt180r1mz.11

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Edward L. Doheny, Cruz Briones Rodríguez, and countless American
drillers met in northern Veracruz in the early 1900s, but their experience
of place differed so much an observer might have never guessed they shared
the same geography. In 1900 Doheny, an oil magnate who multiplied his
fortune many times over in northern Veracruz, for example, was moved by
the “beautiful and awe-inspiring scenery[:] . . . rivers of clear blue-green
water; . . . a forest so dense[;] . . . [and] jungle-covered country which ex –
tends clear to the harbor of Tampico.”1 In 1913 he affirmed categorically
and without a hint of irony that the petroleum companies “have been a
blessing to the communities in which they have operated,” congratulating
himself for paving Tampico’s streets with his asphalt and turning the port
into “one of the happiest communities of any city in the world.”2 Briones
Rodríguez, an oil worker, was more succinct and critical in his recollec-
tions. He described northern Veracruz as “the devil’s collection of plagues.”3
American drillers working in Mexico left little testimony, but their actions
were recorded by photographers and travelers who witnessed a life defined
by risk and danger. The differences were rooted in the class relations that
ruled the industry; that is, class position profoundly shaped how the men
viewed and experienced the natural world around them.

Class is not yet an explicit concern of environmental history. The field
is growing robustly among Latin Americanists, but labor does not figure
much in the literature.4 Similarly, environmental history is not prominent
in labor and working class history.5 But looking at environmental history
from a labor perspective and looking at labor history from an environmental

chapter eight

Class and Nature in the Oil
Industry of Northern Veracruz,
1900–1938

Myrna I. Santiago

173
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perspective is fruitful and rewarding. Insofar as historians are practitioners
of the craft of disaggregating generalizations in favor of specifics, disentan-
gling the “humans” of environmental histories into constituent groups (for
example, classes) sheds light on the very dynamics that explain changes
(or continuities) in the interactions between humans and nature. That is,
although humans as a species modify, destroy, or protect their environments,
not all of them share the same views or experience, wield the same amount
of power, and play the same role in the process. Doheny, Briones Rodríguez,
and nameless American drillers worked and lived in the same place at the
same time, yet they might as well have inhabited separate universes because
the social class they belonged to created wildly divergent realities for each
one. While Doheny’s testimony was plentiful, workers were more circum-
spect about how they felt or what they thought about nature and their place
within it. Their testimony is parsimonious. Yet there is plenty of information
about their fortunes, and that material can help the historian reconstruct
the men’s lives. Doing so with ecology in mind can lead us to see how class
relations are embedded in environmental history, as the occupational lad-
der in the work “environment” becomes the point where workers and the
natural world meet and interact. Thus, a focus on the social organization
of labor reveals that the labor hierarchy determined, in many ways, every-
one’s experience in and of nature.

To be specific: those at the top of the socioeconomic structure wielded
more power over nature than did those at the bottom. Likewise, the upper
classes exerted significant control over the lives and energies of human
beings of the lower classes in any given environment.6 That dual authority
positioned the upper echelons of the companies as masters of nature’s crea-
tures, subordinate men included. Yet there were gradations of domination
down the occupational ladder among workers themselves. Drillers and
craftsmen occupied an intermediate position between the big bosses and
the less skilled bulk of the workforce. They exercised some level of control
over their environment through their skills and supervisory roles, but they
were exposed to extreme bodily danger on a daily basis. Laborers—Mexi-
cans all and the lowest rung on the ladder—were the most vulnerable. They
were subject to high levels of occupational risk, toxic environments, trop-
ical disease, and the vagaries of weather. Those differences underlined the
intense class conflicts that characterized the oil industry for decades, leading
Mexican oil workers to develop a strong sense of nationalism alongside a
blistering critique of foreign capital. In time, the environmental, ideologi –
cal, and class turbulence in oil country became an issue of national impor-
tance. Thus, Mexican oil workers played a crucial if not fully recognized

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role in the single most important display of Mexican nationalist fervor in
the twentieth century—the nationalization of the oil industry decreed by
President Lázaro Cárdenas in March 1938.7 The nexus of labor and envi-
ronmental history, then, deepens and enriches our understanding of both
the Mexican Revolution and modern Mexican history and adds a new,
environmental, dimension to the history of the politics of energy produc-
tion in the world.

A Sense of Place, Before and After

The Mexican oil industry was born at the opening of the twentieth century
in northern Veracruz. The exact location was the Huasteca, so named after
the dominant indigenous population, the Huastecos, or Téenek.8 Until
1900, the Huasteca was a tropical rainforest, the northernmost tropical
rainforest in the Americas. Its most prominent feature was the mass of trees
that covered the territory, but the landscape was composed of more than
just trees. There were streams and waterfalls and the confluence of two of
Mexico’s most important rivers, the Tamesí and the Pánuco. The seasonal
rains, which included hurricanes in the late summer and fall, flooded all
waterways, forming and feeding numerous lakes and lagoons between the
two ports that flanked the Huasteca, Tampico (in Tamaulipas) and Tuxpan.
The precipitation also maintained the marshes and bogs that surrounded
the lagoons and lined the rivers and streams, as well as the mangroves that
hugged the coast along the Gulf of Mexico. Fish, shellfish, and mussels
abounded in that environment. They provided food for numerous species
of birds, both local and migrant, and for amphibians and reptiles, from frogs
and turtles to caimans. Inland, the forest provided habitat for a diverse
population of flora and colorful or fearsome fauna, including guacamayas,
snakes, jabalí, monkeys, jaguars, and insects capable of inflicting much
suf fering upon humans.9

The human inhabitants of the Huasteca were also diverse. Although
their numbers were not great, the population was a mixture of indigenous
farmers, mestizo rancheros, and a few hacendado families of colonial Span-
ish descent trying to transform the rainforest into pasture. That desire had
a history dating to the sixteenth century and had been the cause of incessant
conflict with native peoples. Through the colonial period and the whole
of the nineteenth century, peasant farmers and cattle ranchers had battled
over the ecology of the Huasteca. At the end of the century, they had reached
a stalemate. Then the oilmen landed.10

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In 1900, Texas was awash in oil. That fact persuaded two very astute men
that the neighbor to the south might also be equally rich in fossil fuels.
After all, nature did not recognize fictitious borders drawn by statesmen.
Both men came to the Huasteca as experts in the exertion of power over
nature and workers. Both had a history of causing dramatic ecological
change. The first was Doheny, an American entrepreneur who owed his
millions to the transformation of the Los Angeles scrublands and beaches
into a forest of wooden oil derricks and pools of petroleum. The second
was Weetman Pearson, an Englishman whose profession, by definition,
trans formed the environment: he was a civil engineer. Pearson had already
left a deep ecological imprint in Mexico. He had been the successful direc-
tor of the drainage works for the Valley of Mexico, the man who claimed
to put an end to the floods that had plagued Mexico City since Cortés
destroyed Tenochtitlan in the sixteenth century.11 In four short decades,
the oil companies the two men founded and others that followed altered
the Huasteca forever.

The oilmen were never conflicted about using their power over nature.
They appreciated the landscape before them as unique and beautiful, to be
sure. Pearson, for instance, took friends on tours of the “jungle.”12 Doheny,
meanwhile, built a special herbarium for Huasteca specimens in Los Ange-
les to re-create “the jungle” in his arid backyard.13 For both entrepreneurs,
the very existence of so much foliage was proof of the absence of energetic
men to make the land “productive.” They identified human effort, that is,
labor, with a specific, manufactured landscape, one incompatible with a
rainforest. It never occurred to them that the Huasteca was already a man-
made landscape after thousands of years of human occupation. What the
oil tycoons saw instead was a “wilderness,” a land going to “waste” because
the local population was lacking in ambition, wanting in application and
clearly unacquainted with the notion of “progress.”14 Progress was how the
early twentieth-century oilmen understood capitalist economic development
and what justified ecological change.15

As soon as they incorporated their companies in Mexico, the oilmen
initiated the great transformation of the Huasteca rainforest. Flooding the
forest with thousands of workers from the countryside and abroad, the oil
barons erected an impressive industrial apparatus. It included fourteen re –
fineries, two thousand miles of pipeline, dozens of pumping stations, thou-
sands of storage tanks for crude oil, miles of roads, railways, telegraph and
telephone lines, thousands of wells, one airport, and three full-service oil
ports of different sizes: Puerto Lobos, Tuxpan, and Tampico. As the number
of companies chasing black gold multiplied into the hundreds, the forest

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fell to the workman’s machete, its verdure suddenly replaced by blackness.
Oil spilled from wells and broken pipelines blanketed foliage, waterways,
sand dunes, swamps, and beaches. The “gusher” wells that made Mexico
famous exploded and burst into flames—“blow-outs,” as they were called,
spreading oil, fire, and fear far and wide.16 Fuel-soaked rivers and streams
caught fire, at times reaching oil tankers and detonating them like matches
on dynamite.17 Pollution on that scale had no precedent in the history of
the Huasteca. Neither did that level of environmental destruction. The oil
industry spared no ecosystem. No mangrove, marsh, coastal sand dune, or
estuary escaped its stranglehold. The rainforest was no exception. On the
ground, the industrial apparatus of oil, including extraction, refining, trans –
portation, and shipping, translated into an ecological rampage envisioned
as progress. In forty years of exercising power over nature, the oilmen de –
stroyed the rainforest. In the process, they also enforced a class regime that
determined relations not only among humans but also between human
beings and nature.

Class and Nature

The same men who dictated the fate of the forest designed the system of
class divisions and relations that would rule in the Mexican oil industry
and shape how workers experienced life in the tropical rainforest. The
founders of the industry established a rigid occupational hierarchy embed-
ded with the same racial categories that they used to classify the workers in
the United States and oil fields everywhere.18 The top echelons—execu-
tives and geologists—were white, Americans or Europeans. The half-dozen
Mexican engineers the companies hired were never promoted to executive
status.19 The master craftsmen and the drillers, the indispensable working-
class men of the industry, were also exclusively white, as in the United
States. The oil barons barred Mexicans from these positions. Mexican crafts-
men were hired as assistants, never as masters. The executives reserved the
overwhelming majority of Mexican workers for manual labor. Thus the oil
companies organized and managed some 2,500 to 4,000 foreigners and
possibly upwards of 45,000 Mexicans at the peak of employment in 1921,
to tap Mexico’s black gold.20

The class hierarchy the executives crafted governed not only the orga ni –
zation of the workplace but also the social and environmental spaces outside
work. All facilities in the industry were segregated according to skin color,
with “whites-only” dining halls, dormitories, hotels, housing complexes,

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infirmaries, and recreational clubs. The quality of the physical structures, the
spatial locations, and the services offered in each improved according to the
employment category of the worker. In addition to the sting of social catego-
rization based on artificial constructions, that hierarchical structure meant
vastly different encounters with nature for each occupational layer. For exec-
utives, the tropical rainforest was a malleable location that they could alter
through their control of labor for profit, comfort, and recrea tion. Working-
class men, both foreign and Mexican, by contrast, encountered nature
through work.21 Neither group of workers assumed control over the environ-
ment they inhabited like their bosses did. They interacted with their natural
environment through the course of the day based on their working condi-
tions. Yet their commonalities ended there. As recognized masters of their
craft, foreign workers were steps above in the occupational hierarchy, and
that status afforded them protections laborers lacked. Coupled with the pre-
miums the oil barons conferred upon foreign men be cause of their national-
ity and race, the privilege this small group of men enjoyed was considerable,
extending well beyond substantially higher wages. For the lowest rung on
the occupational ladder, Mexicans all, extracting oil from the Huasteca
never ceased to be a risky proposition, with nature representing a hostile and
dangerous force that battered them in many and often unexpected ways.

Lords of the Fields

The oil executives were confident men accustomed to using and display-
ing power and control over men and nature alike. They celebrated their
prowess thus:

Discovery and development of the known oil fields in Mexico were the
achievement of British and American pioneers, who came into this region
at a time when it was a little-known, pest-infested, tropical wilderness. . . .
In the face of almost insuperable obstacles, they made remarkably rapid
progress. In less than 10 years Mexico had begun to attract worldwide
attention as an oil producer. Development of the famous “Golden Lane,”
one of the world’s greatest known oil fields, discovered in 1910, placed
Mexico in the first rank among oil-producing countries. The transfor-
mation was profound. Tampico, a sleepy little fishing port, became almost
overnight a thriving city. . . . In the oil fields, where formerly the tropical
jungle supported only a few Indians, 50,000 oil field workers, largely Mex-
icans, found immediate, continuous employment.22

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Yet industrial infrastructure did not describe the whole picture. The oilmen
changed the face of the tropical rainforest for other reasons as well. To “make
living bearable” in the tropics, the executives ordered the remaking of the
landscape in the image of the one they had left abroad: company men re –
placed the rainforest with imitations of the English countryside or South-
ern California. Pearson’s firm El Aguila, for instance, surrounded employee
homes with “English gardens” planted with exotic flora such as rosebushes
and begonias.23 The Americans, for their part, assigned Mexican workers
to surround executives’ homes with white picket fences and Los Angeles
landscaping: palm trees uprooted and replanted in neat rows, citrus trees
for shade, and imported seed for green front lawns and grassy backyards.24

To relax from the arduous tasks of bringing progress to tropical landscapes
and peoples, the upper echelons of the oil companies engaged in recre-
ational activities that reaffirmed their mastery over nature. With Mexican
guides and porters to lug equipment, they hunted the fauna already under
pressure from habitat loss as wells replaced trees: jaguars, pumas, ocelots,
wild turkeys, and other aptly named “game.” Alligators were harpooned.
Prize fishing for shark or tarpon, a marine fish that swam upstream through
increasingly oil-polluted river waters to spawn and could weigh over one
hundred pounds, was all the rage. Other sporting activities among oil bosses
entailed hiring laborers to eliminate the habitats of local flora and fauna
and replace it with “slick greens” for golf.25

By virtue of their class position, then, the oilmen reshaped nature to fit
their desires, whether in the form of a profitable industrial site or as a famil-
iar, comfortable, and recreational space. In production and recreation, at
work and at play, oil executives played the role of masters of nature rather
“naturally,” as befit members of a social class accustomed to command.
Elsewhere in the class divide, nature looked and felt considerably different.

Masters of Their Craft

Drillers and craftsmen, the middle rung in the occupational hierarchy of
the oil industry, knew nature intimately but not with the intimacy of dom-
ination their executive bosses manifested. These men were hands-on, imme-
diate agents of environmental change, digging up the earth’s entrails with
their coarse tools, channeling fossil fuels through man-made contraptions
and inventions, and transforming crude oil into usable liquid energy. They
worked in the great outdoors for eight to twelve hours per day (depending
on the decade), wrestling “resources” from the earth through considerable

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physical effort and technical skill, that is, exercising control over their bod-
ies and craft. In the process, they met the forces of nature head-on, and they
were not always the winners. Their value to the oilmen lay in their skill, so
they merited investment in a harsh natural environment. The experience
of this small group of men in the Huasteca rainforest is revealed by looking
at health, safety, and leisure patterns.

Skilled workers from outside the Huasteca did not know necessarily that
health conditions in the tropical rainforest were difficult. The bosses, how-
ever, were well informed and careful about providing protection for the
men who would make them rich. The Huasteca hosted a variety of micro-
scopic life that caused humans trouble: dysentery, malaria, yellow fever,
smallpox, and bubonic plague were all part of the landscape. To combat
them, the executives made sure their craftsmen enjoyed the best sanitation
money could buy at the dawn of the twentieth century: potable water, indoor
plumbing, fans and ice to tame high temperatures and humidity, mos-
quito netting, window screens, clean bedding, and showers and baths. By
all accounts, such public health measures were quite successful in keep-
ing foreign workers as healthy as possible.26

Safety, however, was a separate issue. Oil was an inherently dangerous
enterprise, flammable from extraction to consumption. Accidents routinely
occurred, including many directly related to the natural chemical compo-
sition of Huasteca crude. The petroleum was heavy in hydrogen sulfide, a
gas capable of poisoning any creature that inhales it. Drillers were keenly
aware of the dangers, as the gas hissing was the first sign of having tapped
oil. When the whistling hydrogen sulfide or the gushing oil caught fire,
the risks increased exponentially. American worker testimonials recalled
deaths of foreign and Mexican workers killed under such circumstances.27
The photographs of executives and workers taken when the Huasteca well
Cerro Azul No. 4 came in epitomize the class differences among foreign-
ers in their relationship and interactions with nature. The higher echelons
look very bright in their light-colored and spotless suits and hats, while the
workers, “all white American citizens,” are totally black, drenched in oil
from head to toe, their whiteness limited to their eyeballs.28 For the drillers,
then, nature was unpredictable and dangerous. They did not presume to
be masters of the ecology surrounding them. At work, their position was a
defensive one, where mastery over their craft was not only what made them
a living but also what provided them protection, preventing them from be –
coming the next victims of the nature of crude oil.

The impulse to shield themselves from danger was most obvious in an –
other way: white working-class men transferring risks to Mexican workers.

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The “wages of whiteness” that American social structure conferred on fair-
skinned workers in the United States also applied in Mexico.29 Foreigners
became supervisors in the Mexican oil fields, a position in the labor hier-
archy that allowed them to avoid some dangerous tasks by assigning such
tasks to their Mexican subordinates. Thus, foreign white working-class men
in the Mexican oil industry also received an environmental wage, paid by
the companies’ efforts to keep them disease-free and by the bodies of Mex-
ican men.

Nevertheless, the class differences among the foreigners were deep and
significant in environmental terms. Although the craftsmen and the exec-
utives shared the social privileges of whiteness in Mexico, the two did not
mingle. Craftsmen were entitled to membership in corporate social clubs
by virtue of nationality and skin color, but they did not take advantage of
the opportunity. There is no record that they played golf, joined prize-
fishing expeditions, or engaged in outdoor adventures with their superiors.
By all accounts, they spent their scant off-duty hours in the male entertain-
ment centers that sprang up throughout oil country: casinos, bars, and
brothels.30 Given how hazardous oil extraction was, craftsmen seem to have
decided that indoor recreational activity was more appealing than chasing
tropical rainforest fauna.

Laboring Mexicans

If the occupational status of craftsmen meant some protection from the
natural dangers of oil extraction, the men at the bottom of the ladder en –
joyed no such considerations. Such an assertion may seem contradictory
in light of the fact that Mexican men held nature in their hands, literally
and often. They chopped down the trees, dug up the mangroves, cleared
away the marshes, and filled in the swamps as needed for the infrastructure
of oil extraction and refining. Like the foreign craftsmen, Mexicans knew
nature through work. Yet precisely because their labor entailed sheer phys-
ical exertion in intimate and extensive bodily contact with the natural world,
they were the humans most exposed to the risks and dangers of oil produc-
tion in a tropical environment. If master craftsmen survived the grueling
task of petroleum extraction largely healthy and minimally mutilated, hun-
dreds of Mexicans did not. Work for laborers was a daily struggle against
the weather, injuries and disease, toxic chemicals, fire, and workplace haz-
ards of all types, including those passed on to them by working-class men
steps above in the hierarchy.

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The lowest-ranked workers, for starters, were affected by weather more
than anyone else. Company housing for Mexican workers was consistently
built in the floodplain, as whatever high ground existed was reserved for
lodging foreigners. That location meant that seasonal rains and hurricanes—
an inconvenience and annoyance to those higher up in the labor hierar-
chy and the terrain—were disastrous for Mexicans. Their quarters were
always the first to flood and be carried away by raging rivers.31

Mexican workers also suffered the most from the biological specimens
that crowded the forest they were uprooting. Malaria, the fallout of the rainy
season, downed laborers by the thousands, killing countless every year.
Epidemic disease (including yellow fever, influenza, and bubonic plague)
ravaged Mexicans. In large part, squalid living conditions accounted for
those illnesses: company-issued housing for Mexican workers lacked the
most basic public health necessities, including running water and toilets
that were routine among foreigners. Not until the labor unions and local
authorities instituted basic public health services in the 1920s did epidemic
diseases abate among Mexican working-class men and their families.32

Similarly, the men who did the heavy lifting and menial labor in the
construction process risked life and limb on a daily basis. Demolishing a
rainforest was terribly dangerous work. Broken bones were common as Mex-
ican workers chopped down trees. Being crushed to death under falling
tree trunks or branches was also not unusual.33 Laying pipeline to transport
crude oil from the wells to the refineries or loading docks posed serious
dangers as well. Workers pulled muscles, dislocated shoulders, sprained
ankles, tore ligaments, or twisted joints with regularity in this task. Others,
such as carpenters, blacksmiths, and storage tank builders, reported hand,
foot, and head injuries on a regular basis. Many more men complained of
sore muscles and heat exhaustion from working up to fourteen hours in
high temperatures and humidity.34

Chemical agents also affected low-level workers more than anyone else.
At work, Mexican men, like their foreign working-class brethren, were ex –
posed to the full toxicity of hydrocarbons in all their permutations: crude
oil and distillates such as gasoline, kerosene, solvents, and other refined
products. The “irritating gases” they inhaled on a daily basis affected their
overall health. Refinery workers, for instance, exhibited symptoms of mild
poisoning: nausea, heartburn, headaches, eye irritation, sore throats, trem –
ors, and difficulty breathing.35 But while many craftsmen and virtually all
executives could escape “the stench of petroleum” after the work shift by
living on breezier higher ground, Mexican laborers could not. In the camps,
the companies erected laborers’ quarters next to wells or tanks, exposing

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workers to steady chemical emissions.36 In Tampico the story was similar.
Workers’ houses were next to plants that released toxins into the air and
water, polluting both and endangering the health of workers and their fam-
ilies.37 The location of housing engineering by executives, then, spared
them considerable exposure while they condemned Mexicans to life in toxic
neighborhoods. Pollution, therefore, was a class issue as well.

Although fire was a risk everyone shared, Mexican workers experienced
its dangers most. On the worksite, Mexican laborers were the ones ordered
to become fire fighters whenever a well or a tank ignited. Needless to say,
the men received no training for that job. Equipment for fire control was
all but nonexistent throughout the period of foreign ownership of the indus-
try, so the men confronted the flames with nothing more than shovels,
thin metal chest shields, and “wet sac[k]s around their heads and hands.”38
Exposure to fire, moreover, followed Mexican workers home. Their hous-
ing quarters, by company design, were built in the shadow of storage tanks,
making them susceptible to tank accidents. When one storage tank blew,
there went the neighborhood.39

Lastly, individual Mexican workers were subjected to the dangers for-
eign workers passed on to them. The most common example involved work
in confined spaces, such as measuring the amount of oil in a storage tank
or diving into a recently emptied boiler or still to clean its hydrocarbon
residues. In every instance, containers were extremely hot and exuded poi-
sonous compounds that could kill a man within minutes if vigilant safety
precautions were not followed. There is no evidence that supervisors offered
to Mexican workers the experimental protective respiratory equipment that
circulated prior to nationalization.40 So it was that the men at the bottom
of the occupational hierarchy, Mexican oil workers, were the bull’s-eye for
natural phenomena of every possible kind. Their experience of and in nature
was quite distinct from that of foreign white working-class men and utterly
remote from that of the oil barons. The reality of class was that the unequal
distribution of power among the different groups of men in large part deter-
mined the way those men moved through their common environment. All
of them lived in the same place, but they all inhabited very different spaces.

Environment and Class Warfare

The conditions Mexican workers faced in the oil industry did not go
unchallenged. On the contrary, Mexican workers were notoriously riotous
and militant from the 1910s through the 1938 nationalization. Scholars

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recognize that the petroleum industry was a site of intense class conflict in
the first decades of the twentieth century.41 Labor conditions made Mexi-
can workers quite angry, “naturally.” I suggest that this class struggle had
environmental dimensions. Likewise, the battles between the Mexican rev-
olutionary state and the oil companies, well documented in the historiog-
raphy, were also fights over nature. At issue was who would control nature
and for what ends. The Mexican oil workers were key players in these con –
flicts, which ultimately led to nationalization of the industry in 1938, al –
though the credit does not typically accrue to them.42

Workers did not speak the language of environmentalism, of course. The
times availed them of radical discourses coming out of anarchism and the
nationalism of the Mexican Revolution itself, which coincided with the oil
boom of 1910–21. The language adopted by the oil workers’ movements
assailed oilmen as “bloodsucking” capitalists bleeding workers for profit
and as shameless imperialists bent on extracting every last drop of Mexico’s
petroleum wealth. Such ideas made clear the connection between the ex –
ploitation of nature and the exploitation of men.43 As radicals and nation-
alists, Mexican oil workers denounced the negative effects that oil had on
the land.44 But their militancy was not about the land. It was about eco-
nomic conditions and discriminatory treatment. Yet they also placed con-
cerns over health and safety “very near the surface,” as American workers
did contemporaneously.45 Therein lay the environmental aspects of this
particular labor struggle: the men’s health was affected by the toxic hydro-
carbons they were exposed to at work and at home and the microscopic
rainforest life that produced illness in men living in suboptimal conditions.
Those were the aspects of nature and the interactions with the natural
environment that Mexican oil workers highlighted, the ones that affected
them directly in daily life. Indeed, scholars who have catalogued oil work-
ers’ demands have found that while wages and ill treatment topped the list,
health and safety were next.46

Health and safety issues thus became a hidden environmental battle-
ground ensconced in class relations and labor struggles in the oil industry.
The 1924–26 strikes that won recognition for the unions and the first col-
lective contracts included extensive health and safety issues that revealed a
broad definition of occupational health. Gulf company strikers, for instance,
demanded compensation for accidents that resulted in death or injuries such
as the loss of fingers, legs, eyes, ears, or teeth, as well as face burns; a hos-
pital with “modern comforts and advantages”; and prostheses for those who
lost limbs at work. They also formally requested individual safety equipment:
gloves, helmets, chest shields, and boots. Furthermore, they wanted free

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health care and full pay in case of illness contracted on the job. That
included “even,” as they labeled it, those illnesses contracted on account
of “poor climate.”47 Men from the Pierce refinery made similar demands,
including double pay for work in “unhealthy” locations.48 The men from
Cerro Azul were equally adamant. In 1925, their demands included envi-
ronmental elements: double wages for work inside bodies of water and oil
containers, and when pipelines broke.49 Men at El Aguila’s Potrero del Llano
camp submitted a similar document in 1926, demanding compensation for
accidents, a hospital, safety equipment, and lower temperatures for tank
cleaners or double wages for working inside tanks over 55°C (122°F).50

The companies fought back hard against the workers on all counts.
Forced to sign contracts because of strikes and disruptions in production,
they failed to deliver on contractual obligations. Instead, they fired hundreds
and closed facilities. In 1932 only three refineries remained open in Tam –
pico. Those who kept their jobs endured wage cuts of up to 50 percent.51
They did receive some safety equipment and free care at existing clinics,
but the companies found ways to dismiss claims for health issues, includ-
ing docking pay for sick days and summarily firing injured workers.52 If the
men wanted any compensation for health problems, they had to sue before
the arbitration boards, the official bodies established by the 1917 Consti-
tution to resolve employer-employee conflicts. Arbitration files, as a result,
bulge with such cases in both Veracruz and Mexico City.

The arbitration cases reveal the radically different interpretations that
the workers and the companies had developed regarding health and safety.
While the companies held workers individually responsible for their bod-
ily integrity, workers subscribed to a more complex and integrated approach.
They held the companies responsible for workers’ health and safety on the
job, the neighborhood, and the rainforest in general—in other words, all
the spaces where the men interacted with the natural world. Workers did
not disentangle spaces. Oil effluents permeated all three. Furthermore, the
companies recruited workers from other ecosystems and brought them into
the tropics, in essence leading the men to cross ecological boundaries they
might not have trespassed otherwise. The assaults workers encountered at
work, at home, and in the tropical rainforest were one package, the direct
consequence of oil work. Thus, the men held the companies responsible
for their health and safety throughout. As José Ramírez argued before the
arbiter, “Well, doesn’t the businessman or owner pay from his own pocket
the repairs that have to be done to the machines when these wear out in the
production process?”53 Workers deserved the same treatment as machines,
at the very least.

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All those experiences crystallized in the final confrontation between the
companies and the workers, the November 1936 union contract. The uni –
fied oil unions, representing some 13,000 to 18,000 men, submitted their
most ambitious list of demands ever. Chapter 8 alone, entitled “Of Illnesses
and Medical Care in General,” for example, had forty-three separate clauses,
while chapter 9, “Compensation, Safety and Industrial Hygiene,” demanded
in clauses 56 and 131 that the companies work to prevent industrial acci-
dents and take “all precautions that science demands.”54

The proposed contract illustrated the negative ways in which workers
encountered nature in its many guises. It included clauses that demanded
double salary for dangerous jobs, including work more than ten meters
(thirty-three feet) above ground as well as those involving environmental
hazards, such as temperatures exceeding 100°F or areas of “excess gas,”
pipeline repair, tank and still cleaning, oil spill remediation, and work in
the tropical rain.55 Workers demanded salary-and-a-half for any work that
required handling toxics, corrosives, acids, sulfur, phosphorus, dynamite,
gunpowder, and “similar substances.”56 Furthermore, the men demanded
recognition of certain ailments as occupational diseases, including malaria
and tuberculosis, on top of comprehensive health care not only for active
workers but also for retired men and their families.57

The negotiations were extremely hard-fought, yet ultimately they failed.
After 120 days of talks, the workers went on strike at the end of May in 1937.
They shut down 178 oil installations for 13 days. With gasoline lines stretch-
ing for miles, the president sent the contract to state officials for resolution.
The conflict reached the Supreme Court while wildcat strikes rocked the
industry. In a decision that was heard around the world, the court ruled
against the companies in March 1938. The companies rejected the ruling,
and Mexican petroleum workers called for a general strike, prompting the
president to take drastic action. Cárdenas chose expropriation, closing a
chapter in the history of oil in Mexico and opening another one in the his-
tory of oil companies abroad.58

Conclusion: Hidden Histories of Class and Nature

Humans interact with nature as a species. They utilize, modify, destroy, or
protect nature together. But just as class shapes and molds attitudes, tastes,
worldviews, and relations among humans, it also shapes and molds how
humans experience their natural environments. Taking class into account
in this way complicates and reveals hidden histories of nature and class.

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Thinking about class sharpens our understanding of the relationship be –
tween labor and nature and gives us a more fluid and complex view of nature
itself. The notion also suggests that every class evokes a different definition
of nature rooted in its social practices and relations.59 The oil barons, an
undeniably important group of the upper class in the twentieth century,
showed through their praxis a definition of nature that conforms best to the
American contemporary popular view of it: as wilderness, a place to be
tamed, enjoyed, or exploited, depending on the purpose or occasion. But
the same was not true for working-class men in the oil industry. For them,
nature exhibited additional dimensions: microorganisms, chemical com-
pounds, fire, heat, weather. That is not to say that the great oil capitalists
of the early twentieth century were not aware of those other facets of the
natural world or were not affected or even hindered by them. It is just that
their class position removed them from close proximity to such uncomfort-
able features and sheltered them from the most negative effects. Working-
class men suffered nature differently, in their work exposures, in their safety
and health, in the pollution in their neighborhoods and the shifts of weather
cycles.60 Disassembling class into its occupational hierarchy, moreover,
allows us to see just how such skill-and-power arrangements made nature
operational in the daily life of workers. Thus, finding ways to bridge labor
and environmental history allows us to highlight aspects of nature that would
otherwise be obscured, to participate in the continuous cultural reinvention
and reinterpretation of nature.

Linkages across discrete fields can unveil other hidden histories. The
Mexican oil industry during the period of foreign ownership is a good exam-
ple. Labor, environment, class, and nature intersected in explosive ways,
both literally and figuratively. Mexican workers confronted the oil compa-
nies over wages, hours, and working conditions, as most workers of the world
still do. Those struggles and discourses, nevertheless, had nature imbed-
ded in them, pieces that might not be obvious at first glance but are integral
to such battles and constitute a critical part of the history of how working-
class men and women have lived and interpreted their subjectivity in their
environments. The radicalism and nationalism that Mexican oil workers
embraced and manifested over decades was in fact tinged with environ-
mental concerns. Indeed, the same is true of President Lázaro Cárdenas’s
nationalization decree. As several environmental historians have docu-
mented, Cárdenas was quite conscious of the importance of nature in the
economic life of the nation. He took conservation and what he called “the
salvation and protection of nature” seriously.61 No one would go as far as
calling Cárdenas Mexico’s first “green” president or his ideology a “green

Oil Industry of Northern Veracruz · 187

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nationalism,” but historians have begun to recognize his environmental
sensibilities. A joint labor and environmental history approach shows how
much the oil workers pushed him to deliberate on the relationship between
labor, nature, and nationhood.62 What has yet to be fully explored is how
working-class (and peasant) voices and struggles in general informed Cár-
denas’s praxis regarding the management of nature. Without a doubt, hid-
den histories lie in wait there. The invitation to uncover them is open to
all interested historians.

Notes

1. Doheny quoted in PanAmerican Petroleum and Transport Company, Mexican
Petroleum (New York: PanAmerican Petroleum and Transport Company, 1922), 16–17.

2. Testimony of Edward L. Doheny, United States Senate Committee on Foreign
Relations, Investigation of Mexican Affairs, 66th Cong., 2nd sess. (Washington, D.C.:
Government Printing Office, 1920), 2:236–38.

3. Interview with Cruz Briones Rodríguez, conducted by Lief Adleson on 28
November 1976 in Tampico, Tamaulipas, Proyecto de Historia Oral (PHO), Instituto
Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 4/52.

4. On Latin America, see Steve Marquardt, “‘Green Havoc’: Panama Disease, En –
vironmental Change, and Labor Process in the Central American Banana Industry,”
American Historical Review 106, no. 1 (February 2001): 49–80, and “Pesticides, Para-
keets, and Unions in the Costa Rican Banana Industry, 1938–1962,” Latin American
Research Review 37, no. 2 (2002): 3–36.

5. Christopher Sellers, “ The Dearth of the Clinic: Lead, Air, and Agency in
Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
58, no. 3 (July 2003): 255–91.

6. Elite control over nature and large numbers of humans is one of the hallmarks
of civilization and one of the causes of environmental degradation since antiquity,
according to Sing C. Chew, World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbaniza-
tion, and Deforestation, 3000 BC–AD 2000 (Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press, 2001).
See also Angus Wright, The Death of Ramón González: The Modern Agricultural
Dilemma, 2nd ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005).

7. Myrna Santiago, The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican
Revolution, 1900–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 340–41.

8. Bernardino de Sahagún, “Quiénes eran los huaxtecos?” in Huaxtecos y Totona-
cos: Una antología histórico-cultural, ed. Lorenzo Ochoa, 133–34 (Mexico City: Con-
sejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1984).

9. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 19–27.
10. Ibid., 27–30, 37–57.
11. Ibid., 64–66.
12. Bess Adams Garner, Mexico: Notes on the Margin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,

1937), 118.
13. Margaret Leslie Davis, Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life

of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 88.

188 · Myrna I. Santiago

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14. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 15, 76, 101, 115.
15. Carolyn Merchant refers to the changes that capitalism wrought as an “ecolog-

ical revolution.” See Carolyn Merchant, Ecological Revolutions: Nature, Gender, and
Science in New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).

16. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 102, 108–9, 115, 118–19, 125–29, 133–34.
17. El Mundo, 20, 28, and 30 January 1927.
18. On the United States, see Nancy Lynn Quam-Wickham, “Petroleocrats and Pro-

letarians: Work, Class, and Politics in the California Oil Industry, 1917–1925,” PhD diss.,
University of California, Berkeley, 1994. On the organization of labor in oil fields abroad,
see Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stan-
ford: Stanford University Press, 2007); and Miguel Tinker Salas, The Enduring Legacy:
Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009).

19. Testimony of Edward L. Doheny, Investigation of Mexican Affairs, 220, 228–29.
20. Jonathan C. Brown, Oil and Revolution in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas

Press, 1993), 319; Informe, 18 November 1921, Departamento del Trabajo (hereafter
DT), Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), caja 326, exp. 3.

21. See Robert White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).
22. Huasteca Petroleum Company, Expropriation (New York: Huasteca Petroleum

Company and Standard Oil Company of California, 1938), 1–2.
23. H. S. Wood to DeGolyer, Tampico, 1 November 1917; U. S. Wood to Messrs.

Peter Henderson & Co., Tampico, 11 September 1917; and H. S. Wood to DeGolyer,
Tampico, 11 September 1917, Papers of Everett Lee DeGolyer (hereafter ED), South-
ern Methodist University (hereafter SMU), Box 117, Folder 5377.

24. The irony of the Los Angeles landscape the oilmen reproduced in Mexico is
that it was itself the product of men like Doheny who transformed it from a desert and
semidesert into their own interpretation of a Mediterranean landscape. Boletín del
Petróleo 25, no. 4 (April 1928), photographic section; Boletín del Petróleo 23, no. 4
(April 1927), photographic section.

25. Charles W. Hamilton, Early Day Oil Tales of Mexico (Houston: Gulf Publish-
ing Company, 1966), 47, 130; DeGolyer Diary, 27 and 29 February 1916 and 5 March
1916, SMU, ED, Box 105, Folder 5.

26. John Spender, Weetman Pearson, First Viscount Cowdray, 1856–1927 (London:
Cassell and Company, 1930), 106; Interview, Doheny Mexican Collection, Occidental
College, Los Angeles, California, Labor File I, #958, #2724.

27. Transcribed interview with W. M. Hudson, Oral History of the Texas Oil Indus-
try Collection, 1952–1958, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of
Texas at Austin, Tape 79, p. 35.

28. Mexican Petroleum Company of Delaware, Cerro Azul No. 4: World’s Greatest
Oil Well (New York: DeVinne Press, n.d.).

29. See David Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American
Working Class (London: Verso, 1991).

30. Hamilton, Early Day Oil Tales, 24–25, 34, 40.
31. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 187–88.
32. Ibid., 169–70, 189–93.
33. Aurelio Herrera vs. El Aguila, Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz (hereafter

AGEV), Junta Central de Conciliación y Arbitraje (hereafter JCCA), caja 65, exp. 65,

Oil Industry of Northern Veracruz · 189

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1927; Informe del Inspector del Trabajo A. Araujo, AGN, Departamento del Trabajo
(hereafter DT), C 489, exp. 9, 1922.

34. Gerente General to Presidente Municipal, 20 August 1919, Archivo Histórico
del Ayuntamiento de Tampico (hereafter AHAT), exp. 85-1919; Gerente General to
Presidente Municipal, 24 March 1920, AHAT, exp. 78-1920, no. 1693; Leopoldo Alafita
Méndez, “ Trabajo y condición obrera en los campamentos petroleros de la Huasteca,
1900–1935,” Anuario 5 (October 1986): 187–96.

35. W. A. Jacobs and C. W. Mitchell, “Métodos industriales usados para la elimi-
nación de los gases tóxicos, altamente sulfurosos, desprendidos del petróleo mexi-
cano,” Boletín del Petróleo 21, no. 1 (January 1926): 1–2.

36. Verna Carleton Millan, Mexico Reborn (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press,
1939), 215.

37. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 195–96.
38. Arthur B. Clifford, “Extinguishing an Oil-Well Fire in Mexico, and the Part

Played Therein by Self-Contained Breathing-Apparatus,” Transactions of the Institution
of Mining Engineers 63, no. 3 (1921): 3.

39. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 194.
40. One piece of protective equipment was a gas mask, but the instructions for its

use were in English. “Rules and Precautions to be Observed When Using the Proto-
Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus,” AGN/DT, caja 224, exp. 24, 1919.

41. Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution, vol. 1, Porfirians, Liberals and Peasants
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 406–7.

42. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 330–41.
43. Sagitario, 25 October 1924.
44. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 271–73.
45. David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, eds., Dying for Work: Workers’ Safety and

Health in Twentieth Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), ix.
46. Armando Rendón Corona, Jorge González Rodarte, and Angel Bravo Flores,

Los conflictos laborales en la industria petrolera, vol. 1, 1911–1932 (Mexico City: Uni-
versidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1997), 131–33, 171.

47. Pliego petitorio, “Dificultades: Mexican Gulf, 1924,” AGEV, JCCA, caja 40.
48. Rendón Corona, González Rodarte, and Bravo Flores, Los conflictos, 1:230.
49. Petitions, Huasteca Strike in Cerro Azul, January 1925, AGEV, JCCA, caja 48.
50. Sindicato de Obreros del Petróleo de Potrero del Llano vs. El Aguila, 1927,

AGEV, JCCA, caja 59, exp. 24.
51. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 310–11.
52. Enclosure No. 1, Visit of President Cárdenas to Tampico and Its Effect on the

Local Strike Situation, 11 January 1935, Record Group 59, General Records of the
Department of State, Records of the Department of State Relating to Internal Affairs of
Mexico, 1930–1939, National Archives, College Park, Maryland, 812.001—Cárdenas,
Lázaro/40.

53. José G. Ramírez vs. East Coast Oil Company, AGN, Junta Federal de Concilia-
ción y Arbitraje, C 22, exp. 15/928/130, 1928.

54. Collective contract proposal, AGN, Departamento Autónomo del Trabajo, caja
154, exp. 4, 1937.

55. Ibid., clauses 53–55.
56. Ibid., clause 56.

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57. Armando Rendón Corona, Jorge González Rodarte, and Angel Bravo Flores,
Los conflictos laborales en la industria petrolera y la expropriación, vol. 2, 1933–1938
(Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 1997), 155–58.

58. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 330–39.
59. On the multiple meanings of nature in the United States, see William Cronon,

ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W.
Norton and Company, 1983).

60. The literature on environmental justice addresses the issue of pollution and
neighborhood. See, for example, Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Jus-
tice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998);
and Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002). To examine how the concept is being applied
to Latin America, see David V. Carruthers, ed., Environmental Justice in Latin Amer-
ica: Problems, Promise, and Practice (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008).

61. Quoted in Simonian, Defending the Land of the Jaguar: A History of Conservation
in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 87; Christopher R. Boyer, “Con-
tested Terrain: Forestry Regimes and Community Responses in Northeastern Micho –
acán, 1940–2000,” in The Community Forests of Mexico: Managing for Sustainable
Landscapes, ed. David Barton Bray, Leticia Merino-Pérez, and Deborah Barry, 27–48
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Emily Wakild, “ ‘It Is to Preserve Life, to Work
for the Trees’: The Steward of Mexican Forests, Miguel Angel de Quevedo, 1862–
1948,” Forest History Today (Spring/Fall 2006): 4–14.

62. Santiago, Ecology of Oil, 289–90, 351.

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The Anthropology of Oil: The Impact of the Oil Industry on a Fishing Community in the
Niger Delta
Author(s): Alicia Fentiman
Source: Social Justice, Vol. 23, No. 4 (66), Environmental Victims (Winter 1996), pp. 87-99
Published by: Social Justice/Global Options
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29766976
Accessed: 12-01-2017 19:41 UTC

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Part Two

The Anthropology of Oil:
The Impact of the Oil Industry on a
Fishing Community in the Niger Delta

Dr. Alicia Fentiman

Introduction

THE AIM OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO EXAMINE, WITH SOME PARTICULARITY, THE IMPACT

of oil upon the lives of people in a small fishing community in the Niger
Delta.1 It is hoped that this data will contribute to the scarce literature

available on the Niger Delta and help shed light on the various ways in which oil
has affected the institutions of at least one ethnic group. Although it is a detailed
descriptive study of one community, the basic problems and tensions discernible
in the case study apply to much of the Niger Delta.

Ethnographic Background

My focus is on the village of Oloma, a rural fishing community on the Island
of Bonny in the Eastern Niger Delta. Ethnically, the village’s population consists
almost entirely of the Ibani-Ijo. The population of Bonny Island is centered in
Bonny Town with a number of satellite villages, of which Oloma is one, and
several fishing ports dispersed throughout the meandering creeks and waterways.
The island is situated within the tidal mangrove swamps of the Eastern Niger
Delta. It is bounded by other Ijaw communities, such as those of the Elem Kalahari
to the west, the Okrikans to the north, and the Andoni, Opobo, and Ogoni to the
east. Bonny is located approximately 50 kilometers southeast of the industrial and
commercial center of Port Harcourt. Tributaries of the Bonny River dissect the flat
surface of the island, creating swamps and creeks that are bordered by mangrove
trees. Much of the land is uninhabitable; fresh water resources are scarce.

Dr. Alicia Fentiman is a social anthropologist and Research Associate at the African Studies Centre,
University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 3RE, England. She has done extensive fieldwork in
southern Nigeria and northern Ghana.

Social Justice Vol. 23, No. 4 87

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88 Fentiman

Historical Overview

Traditionally, the Ibani were fisherfolk dependent on the creeks, waterways,
and swamps of the Niger Delta for their livelihood. Fish were found in abundance,
and salt was evaporated from the sea water trapped in the roots of the mangrove
tree. The Ibani traded their fish and salt to the Ibo hinterland in exchange for
agricultural produce. This interzonal dependency created the initial trade routes
between the Ijo fisherfolk and the hinterland agriculturists. This internal trade
network was well established before European contact and provided the mercan?
tile infrastructure on which the success of Bonny’s European trade was founded.

Bonny’s coastal location certainly contributed to her involvement in the
burgeoning trade2 that followed the advent of European adventurers in Bonny as
early as the 15th century. Bonny had a pivotal role as the fulcrum of a two-way
trade between the Ibo hinterland and the Ibani, on the one hand, and the Ibani and

the European traders on the other. Food, livestock, and, most importantly, slaves
that came from the hinterland markets were brought to Bonny to be traded. The
growing European demand for slaves assured the role of Bonny traders as
middlemen in the West African-European trade. This lasted until the 19th century.

In the 19th century, the slave trade was abolished and during this period
Bonny’s merchants turned their attention from slaves to palm oil. The palm oil
trade particularly flourished because this new commodity was easily traded along
the old channels involving the same personnel. Fortuitously, palm oil became at
the same time an important export item because of the Industrial Revolution in
Europe. Palm oil was in great demand as a lubricant for machinery as well as for
making soap and candles. Bonny prospered during the palm oil trade. Such was its
success that the Bonny and Kalahari areas became know as the “Oil Rivers.”

However, in the 20th century, the prosperity of Bonny began to decline.3 The
major factor was the discovery of coal in commercially viable quantities further
inland. A new mainland port was built by the British colonial administration, to
exploit better the new coal fields. In 1913, a new industrial city, Port Harcourt,
located 50 kilometers up Bonny River was opened. Bonny’s pivotal trading role

was bypassed. “Business gradually moved away from Bonny and Bonny only saw
ships passing their way up river. In 1916, there was a great exodus and Bonny faded
away to join the ranks of other ports of the past” (Earl, 1962: 31). Bonny also lost
its leading position with the colonial government as the center for the administra?
tive, commercial, and religious headquarters of the Niger Delta. By 1930, Bonny

was observed to be in a “state of decay and utter stagnation” (Webber, 1931: 52)
and in 1938 moves were made to abolish the third-class township that was
accorded to Bonny.

Bonny became an economically depressed area and its isolation from the
mainland further contributed to her decline. The creation of Port Harcourt

provided the Ibani with two alternatives; one was to remain in Bonny and return

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The Impact of Oil on the Niger Delta 89

to the subsistence economy of fishing; the second option was to migrate to Port
Harcourt and compete for jobs in the urban sector.

Revival of Bonny: Discovery of Oil

Although Bonny declined as a port in the first half of the century, the discovery
of crude oil in commercial quantities led to Bonny’s revival. Evacuation and
production facilities to process the crude oil and move it to world markets were
needed. At first, a temporary export station was built at Port Harcourt; however,
it proved unsatisfactory because only small tankers could visit Port Harcourt and
even then they could load only half their capacity. Bonny became the ideal
alternative because of its strategic location and its ability to cater to both inshore
and offshore loading facilities. By 1961, the Shell Petroleum Development
Company completed the first phase of the Bonny Terminal. Further terminals were
added throughout the 1960s.

The establishment of the oil terminal in Bonny had a tremendous impact on the
infrastructure of Bonny Town. There was an influx of people who migrated there,
and by 1963 the population had risen to 7,740 people. Skilled jobs, however, were
given predominantly to Europeans, whereas the unskilled jobs were given to
Nigerians. A study conducted in Bonny on the spatial organization of the oil
terminal revealed that most migrants to Bonny were from Rivers State, but were
not necessarily Ibani indigenes.4 A large proportion of Bonny people works
outside Bonny due to the lack of employment opportunities within the town and
environs (Green, 1982: 11).

The educational system in Bonny Town was revived. In 1966, Shell helped to
fund new departments in the Bonny secondary school. In 1977, the Finima Girl’s
Secondary School was opened, which provided further education for females. In
addition, a teacher training college was reestablished, and it once again became an
important educational center.

Money generated from the oil industry contributed to new commercial
developments in Bonny. New buildings were constructed, such as a post office, a
divisional office, Pan African Bank, a police station, and maritime clearing and
forwarding houses. In addition, a new hospital was built. Transportation from
Bonny Town to Port Harcourt was improved, thus ensuring better communication
between Bonny and the mainland. An intermittent supply of electricity was
provided by Shell to the main town, but the peripheral Bonny villages still went
without. Indeed, the surrounding fishing villages did not enjoy the benefits that the
inhabitants of Bonny Town experienced.

Although it may appear that Bonny Town improved with the new opportunities
that were a result of the oil industry, there were many detrimental aspects
associated with the establishment of the oil industry in Bonny, which often go
unrecorded. The lives of the average Bonny person, especially those residing in the
fishing villages, have deteriorated because of the impact of oil.

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90 Fentiman

Case Study Oloma, Bonny: The Seen and Unseen Effects of Oil

What of the effect of such changes on a fishing community? The environmen?
tal impact of oil in and around Oloma is clearly visible. Throughout the surround?
ing creeks and waterways, the intrusion of oil and oil excavation are markedly
evident, The canalization and dredging of creeks by oil companies have signifi?
cantly altered the landscape. A flow station is located at the end of the creek. Sea
trucks pass daily to and from the flow station; the gas flares emit light 24 hours per

day. Pipes meander throughout the swamps, and signboards scattered throughout
the area alert the villagers of “danger.” These are the visible effects of oil. The
presence of oil is all pervading.

However there is another aspect of the impact of oil that often goes unrecorded.
This is the way in which the culture of the people has been affected, The
institutions, central to the identity of the Ibani fishing community, need to be
discussed to understand the overall effect of oil. The community has experienced
both environmental and cultural degradation. The former is seen, the latter unseen.

In the course of my research, I frequently asked: How has Oloma changed?
Each respondent mentioned that the oil industry has affected their economic
livelihood and that oil has interfered with many aspects of their lives. The
following interview with a senior male elder vividly portrays the various ways oil
has affected the lives of the people of Oloma. He was asked what impact oil has
had on the inhabitants of Oloma.

It wasn’t until Shell started dredging the creek that everything started to
go badly. For example, erosion of land. Before, there was a beautiful
sandy beach; but look, it no longer exists. In the back of my house there
was a big playground called ogbo-ngelege, but that land has eroded, and
now our houses are eroding. Our traditional livelihood is fishing, but
there are no more fish. We now buy tinned fish or stock fish. The
chemicals from oil spillage have ruined the fish as well as the esem
(periwinkles) and mgbe (mangrove oysters). We receive nothing from
Shell. For example, no electricity, no piped water, no health facilities,
nothing to make us happy. They were supposed to build a fish pond, but
look around you, there is nothing. They destroyed our land and dredged
our creek. Behind Ayaminima, the neighboring village, there used to be
a small creek that was used when there was a storm and during the rainy
season when the Bonny River was rough. But now Shell has closed it;
they dredged it and filled it up with all their oil pipes. They put up a sign
and did not think that many of our people are illiterate. Even if they could
read English, the paint has worn off and the message alerting people of
danger is no longer visible. Our people are told not to go there, so now
we have to go to the main creek every time to get to Bonny. This has
caused great problems because the sea becomes very rough and danger

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The Impact of Oil on the Niger Delta 91

ous during the rains, and we no longer have an alternative route. Shell
promised to fill in our embankment; they came this year and look what
the rains have done. It is already washing away. They put a sign on our
soil saying that Oloma is part of their development project; but we have
suffered. This is not development, but underdevelopment. They don’t
care about us. Some of the mangrove trees used for firewood spark and
blow up. It used to be the village’s major energy source; now women are
scared and are going into the bush to find fuel; this is not traditional, and
it takes so long.

Land where we have our shrines to the gods has been taken away. Parasu,
a sacred area near Oloma where we performed Owu (masquerades and
sacrifices), has been lost. We were forced to give the government our
sacred land and our farmland. Economic trees such as mango, coconut,
banana, plantain, paw-paw, and palm fruit have been taken away by the
government for the oil industry. At the end of our creek there is a
houseboat and flow station; the gas flares scare our fish and the noise of
the sea trucks scares our gods and our fish. Sometimes we fish at night
depending on the tide, and the sea trucks travel very fast up and down our
creek, causing many of us to capsize in our canoes and lose our gear.
Those of us who fish often find our nets destroyed and our traps broken;
it is so hard to find fish. What are we to do?

Such a view highlights many issues that are associated with the impact of oil
on the community. Every aspect of people’s lives has been influenced by oil ?
their economic, political, social, and ritual institutions have all been affected.
Indeed, the very institutions that make them culturally unique are eroding at an
alarming pace.

Changes in the Fishing Economy

A model of the economy of the past would show that the major economic
activity of the inhabitants of the Eastern Niger Delta was fishing. In Oloma, there
was very little farming because the soil was poor and inadequate. Although most
families farmed small plots of land, they did not yield enough for subsistence.
However, fish were plentiful and salt was abundant. As a result, the Ibani
fishermen and women were able to barter their fish and salt with the hinterland

markets in exchange for agricultural produce.
The fishing economy was unique in many ways and was structured very

differently from any agricultural economy. Most obviously, the private owner?
ship of land was unimportant for the village’s prosperity. Instead, the Oloma
villagers’ economic livelihood was dependent on common assets: on the creeks,
waterways, and fishing ports that were owned by the village as a whole rather

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92 Fentiman

than by individuals. Therefore, there was communal ownership of the productive
resources. The village claimed exclusive rights of access to certain waterways
and creeks. This system united village members across lineage boundaries. It
was thus important for it to remain a united community in order to protect its
holdings from competing neighboring villages. The fishing grounds were not
susceptible to demarcation as farmlands were; they were used by all members of
the village without reference to lineage differentiation (see Alagoa, 1970;
Horton, 1969).

However, the fishing economy in Oioma has dramatically changed. There are
two prime reasons for this: one has been outward migration to urban areas in search
of education and wage labor and the other is oil. It was reported:

[In the past] it was not unusual to see young and old beaming with smiles
as they return home with canoe load of fishes of various description. That
was the days of yore when fishing was really a worthwhile venture in this

part of the country (Niger Delta)…. Fishing has become a very poor
economic activity due mainly to rural-urban migration of able-bodied
youths and oil pollution (Tide, February 27, 1982).

Migration from Oloma to Port Harcourt and other urban centers is frequent.
The lack of young men in the community was observed while conducting
fieldwork. A census survey revealed that the composition of the village consisted
primarily of women, children, and the elderly. Men often migrated to Port
Harcourt and other mainland towns in search of wage labor. The men who resided
in the village commented that they can no longer rely solely on fishing as an
economically viable occupation as they had done in the past. They therefore must
leave the village. Those who remain behind encounter many obstacles, often
attributable to the oil industry. Fishing as a way of life is becoming more and more
difficult. Some of the problems they encounter are described below.

Damage by Sea Trucks: One of the major obstacles to traditional fishing
methods in the creeks and waterways is a result of the constant movement of the
sea trucks traveling to and from the flow station located at the end of the creek.
Fishing lines, nets, and traps are often torn; the sea trucks continually destroy
property despite protests from the community. The operators of the sea trucks
appear to have very little concern or compassion for the fishermen, fisherwomen,
and children. Although there are speed restrictions, it appears that they are often
not enforced. Canoes are often capsized as a result of the waves from the sea
trucks. The noise generated by the sea trucks is attributed by the local commu?
nity as a prime reason for scaring away the fish, which is evidenced by low fish
yields.

Oil Pollution: Spillage: Despite arguments that over-fishing and overpopu?
lation are responsible for low fish yields, the community believes oil pollution has
affected their fishing economy. In Oloma, fewer people reside in the community

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The Impact of Oil on the Niger Delta 93

than in the past and fewer people are fishing. As mentioned above, migration to
urban areas has become the sought-after choice and necessity by many. This is
consistent with remarks made in the local Bonny magazine, Ogolo.

Bonny people like other rivering people depend mainly on their water
resources for their livelihood. But in the operation of the oil companies,
all waste products are dumped into the rivers. The water is thus polluted,
fishes are killed, and the fishermen are forced to find alternative sources

of livelihood ? which in Bonny is very difficult. Gradually people
migrate out of the community to other areas to seek beneficial employ?
ment, which has led to increasing depopulation of Bonny (Green, 1982:
10-11).

However, those who are left behind in the communities try to survive by
fishing; there are no alternatives. They are responsible for feeding their house?
holds, but are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet. The catches are
low, and more and more time is spent gathering shellfish. A greater burden has
been placed upon the women because of the massive outward migration of men.
Each day, women spend hours in the mangrove swamps gathering shellfish such
as winkles and mangrove oysters. As one fisherwoman remarked, “my life is my
paddle; without my paddle we do not eat.” It is, however, becoming increasingly
difficult to find enough food. The community feels that chemicals and oil are
affecting the fish production.

Oil spillage is a frequent occurrence in the Niger Delta, and many communi?
ties, in addition to Oloma, in the oil-producing areas have provided descriptive
accounts of the impact of oil spillage on their fishing economy. However,
scientific data examining the impact of oil pollution on the aquatic life is scarce.

A symposium, The Mangrove Ecosystem of the Niger Delta, held in Port Harcourt
in 1980, gathered scholars in different disciplines to discuss and share information
on the changes in the environment; oil was shown to be a major factor contributing
to the destruction of marine life. It was shown that crude oil contains compounds
that are toxic to marine organisms and contribute to extensive mortality in finfish,
shellfish, oysters, and birds. This was observed in the Apoi and Ojobo areas.

A study in Bonny River examined oil pollution and the brackish environment.
An experiment that examined the effect of crude petroleum oil and refined oils on
aquatic organisms confirmed that crude oil and refined petroleum products in high
concentrations were toxic to marine life. By comparing different types of fish and
shellfish, it showed that some species were more resilient than others. Data
revealed that shrimps were more susceptible to pollutants, followed by oysters and
fish. Periwinkles were the most tolerant. Tainting of the flesh confirmed that the
effect of oil spillage was lingering. Even small, though continual, spills affected
the productivity of the water. It also showed that pollutants had a pronounced
effect on the growth and reproductive capacity of organisms (Onuoba, 1985:131).

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94 Fentiman

A recent spillage in Nembe in 1995 illustrates the problems with which oil
producing communities must contend when there is a spillage. It was reported that,

An oil spill had occurred from an Agip oil pipeline. For several days, the
oil flowed freely into the creeks and mangrove forest. The area went up
in flames one night when a woman on a late-night fishing trip mistakenly
set off the fire with her lantern. The fire destroyed much of the aquatic life
in the area. In addition, farm crops were destroyed (Newswatch, Decem?
ber 18, 1995: 12).

A problem that many communities face during oil spillages is that many of the
oil companies are unwilling to pay compensation during spillages because they
believe that they are caused by sabotage. The communities, however, stress that
many of the spillages are “legitimate” ? not caused by sabotage, but instead by
poorly maintained and faulty equipment. It is therefore necessary to monitor the
areas regularly and to act immediately during spillages.

The mangrove fauna and flora are also affected by oil spillages; it was shown
that there can be short- and long-term effects to the mangrove from offshore
spillage (Odu and Imevbore, 1985: 133). Mangrove is an essential part of the
Oloma people’s economy. Mangrove wood has many uses; it is used for fuel
and for making various items such as fish traps, trays, and hats. In Oloma,
women complained that chemicals from the oil have absorbed into the man?
grove wood, which they use for fuel, and that once ignited, it explodes and
causes serious burns.

Gas Flaring and Pollution: Large quantities of methane gas are associated
with oil. During oil production, this gas is burned off at flow stations above the oil
wells. This introduces sulfur dioxide and oxides of carbon and nitrogen into the
atmosphere. The impact of this on the environment has not been substantiated.
However, it is said that this could contribute to global warming.

Land Filling: Another factor responsible for disturbing the way of life in
Oloma is land filling. Nearby creeks and waterways have been filled in because
of oil operations. This has affected the accessibility to surrounding villages and has
taken from the Oloma villagers an alternative route to reach Bonny Town. The

Oloma community complained about the landfill because they relied on a specific
water route to reach Bonny Town during the rainy season, which has subsequently
been filled in. The alternative route was preferred during the rainy season because
the Bonny River becomes very rough and dangerous.

Canalization also damages the environment. Oil companies create canals to
either drain out an area for drilling and pipe laying or create channels to transport
drilling and other oil production equipment to the site. The channels alter the
ecology of the area; they can also alter the flood pattern of the delta by resulting
in perennial flooding of the otherwise well-drained plains as was observed in many
areas in the Niger Delta (Ekoriko, 1996: 31).

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The Impact of Oil on the Niger Delta 95

Erosion: The community believes that the continual movement of sea trucks
up and down the creek and the dredging of the land and waterways have
significantly contributed to the erosion of the land. In Oloma, several households
lost their property due to erosion. Recollections by villagers mention the sandy
beach area that use to be in front of the village; it has eroded away, and a sand-bank

was designed to prevent further erosion. The embankment was promised for
several years; finally, in 1984 a contractor constructed an embankment, but it did
not last. It quickly washed away during the rainy season. The community feels this
was done in a substandard way. Interviews with the contractor at the time of the
job revealed that his company had won the contract with the cheapest bid, and he
admitted that the job was not going to be sufficient to endure the rainy season. As
he rightfully predicted, the embankment gave way, and it became a hazard to the
community. Instead of benefiting and improving the situation, it worsened the
situation. Gaps in the embankment became dangerous for children and adults
walking on the sandbags. One child fell in the gap and broke his leg.

Dredging: Indigenous fishing methods such as dragging a net along the creek
bottom is very difficult to perform because the creeks have been dredged during
oil exploration, and the water is now too deep to stand in, making this form of
fishing obsolete. Dredging also destroys valuable freshwater and mangrove
vegetation, which can cause an imbalance in the ecosystem because aquatic
organisms depend on them for food and shelter during part or all of their life cycles
(Wilcox and Powell, 1985). In addition, during the dredging process, oil is spilled
into the water and the burning of fuel releases carbon, sulfur, and nitrogen oxides
into the aquatic environment (Odu and Imevbore, 1985: 142).

Oloma and Social Change: Under the Land Decree Act of 1978, many
communities throughout the Niger Delta lost valuable farmland. In addition, oil
production contributed to the contamination of the land. Although Oloma suffered
in many ways when parts of their land were taken away, they have suffered more
by losing the access and rights of way to their creeks and waterways. Further, the
destruction and contamination of their productive resources have contributed to
vast changes within the economic, political, and social structure of the community.
As members of the community are forced to migrate because their resources are
destroyed, various changes are taking place within these institutions.

Ritual, Belief, and Oil

Another institution affected by oil in Oloma is the villager’s belief system. The
stability and continuity of village life are maintained by participation in a series of
ritual practices. These ritual activities are a means by which the community retains
their social identity and social stability in times of radical changes. Both rural
villagers and urban migrants have in common a shared adherence to such practices
and the beliefs associated with them. The principal type of ritual activity is the
masquerades of the owu-ogbo society, which displays elaborate masquerades in

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96 Fentiman

honor of the water spirits. The owu-ogbo society is central to the social cohesion
of the Oloma people. It is a time-honored institution and the practice of the
masquerade was brought to Bonny by the Oloma descendants. The Oloma people
are known throughout the Delta for their expertise in the owu-ogbo plays.
Traditionally, when the Ibani engaged predominantly in fishing, the fishermen
would return to Oloma during a period called Fongu-Mini, the break in the rains
in August, to be reunited with their families. The masquerade serves two essential
purposes. First, it honors the water spirits, upon whom the fishing economy is
thought to be dependent. It is believed that by performing masquerades, the
fisherfolk will be rewarded with a successful fishing season. Second, the
masquerades are used as a means to unite all village members no matter where
they may be.

The rationale of the masquerades is derived from the belief that they represent
the imitation of the movements of the water spirits. It is believed that fishermen

would spy on the spirits in the water and then return to the village and imitate the
dances and songs learned from them. There are several types of masquerades
performed in Oloma. Each masquerade headpiece is different, and each represents
a specific spirit. The person who plays the part of the masquerade is possessed by
the spirit he is imitating. The masquerade society is strictly male. Although the
owu-ogbo society has undergone many changes due to the impact of Christianity
and migration, community members still return to Oloma every holiday season to
participate in the masquerades. The masquerades provide a means of social
cohesion and reunification of dispersed kin members.

Despite the stability and continuity of the masquerade society, it is clear that
some rituals can no longer be performed because sacred shrines used for sacrifices
can no longer be accessed. They have been taken over by the government under
the Land Decree Act of 1978. The fishermen and women in Oloma are also

concerned about the constant flare in the creek; they believe it causes great distress

to the water spirits. This is an important consideration because the water spirits are
an essential aspect to their belief system.

Little is known about the impact of oil on indigenous ritual beliefs. It is not only
the physical destruction of oil, but also the metaphysical aspect that equally needs
to be acknowledged.

Oil and Health

One aspect of the impact of oil upon the inhabitants of the Niger Delta that has
received little attention is whether there are any health risks directly associated
with oil. Data are scarce and research needs to be done to see whether there is any

significant long-term impact. The villagers complain about rashes and other skin
ailments, but very little is known as to whether this is attributable to oil.

While conducting field research, it was observed that women and children
suffered from skin problems as a result of oil and chemicals in the water. The

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The Impact of Oil on the Niger Delta 97

women who spend several hours in the water are engaged in the labor-intensive
gathering activities of collecting shellfish. Most fisherwomen rub their bodies
with palm oil before they fish in order to prevent rashes and other skin ailments.
Elderly women mentioned that this is a recent precaution because they did not
suffer from these skin conditions in the past. It been written that a variety of skin

conditions might be attributed to contact or exposure to oil. Acne, warts, boils,
skin cancer, and photosensitization dermatitis have all been cited (Afiesiama,
1985: 169).

It has been reported that those living close to gas flaring sites may be at risk
from respiratory illnesses (Newswatch, December 18, 1995: 15). In addition, it
was reported that there are complaints of sterility by persons living near the flares
(Ekoriko, 1996: 31).

Contamination of drinking water because of oil spillage or oil production
activities is of great concern. It is feared that oil from spillage can seep into the
freshwater drinking supplies. Procedures such as canalization or dredging can
affect the freshwater drinking supplies by draining the water in the area that can
then alter the ecosystem.

Some questions need to be considered: What are the health risks to the people
who eat fish and shellfish contaminated with oil? Can swimming and bathing in
the polluted creeks be dangerous to the health of the people? Can living near a gas
flaring area be dangerous? Can the freshwater contaminated by toxic waste be
hazardous? Research needs to be done to find out precisely what the dangers are
to communities. It is also important that consistent guidelines be established and

monitored to examine the impact of oil on the health of the local inhabitants.

Conclusion

There exists widespread concern with the unfairness of the Nigerian
political system towards Rivers State and other states in which the oil
wealth of the nation is derived. And within such states, the communities

in whose home areas oil is mined suffer neglect from federal and state
governments, and the oil companies. Their environment is damaged, and
their sources of livelihood destroyed through oil pollution. The oil boom

which has done so much for and to the Nigerian economy has, therefore,
been little short of a disaster for oil producing states, and even worse for
oil producing communities (Alagoa and Tamuno, 1989: 220-221).

This case study of Oloma shows how one community has been affected by oil;
this community is not unique. The problems encountered there are shared by other
communities throughout the oil-producing area and are representative for the
whole Niger Delta. The inhabitants feel that they have not benefited from the oil
industry. Although oil is extracted from their areas, causing environmental

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98 Fentiman

degradation and disrupting their way of life, they have not been compensated.
They are environmental victims.

It is paradoxical that in the past the communities within the Niger Delta who
wielded great power, authority, and wealth are now labeled as “minorities”
struggling to survive in Nigeria. The Nigeria they helped to create, it appears, is
currently destroying them. The minority groups in the Niger Delta are, as a result,
seeking fair representation and compensation from the government as the Ogoni
experience has so aptly symbolized. Ken Saro-Wiwa fought for the rights of his
people. With the establishment of MOSOP (Movement for the Survival of Ogoni
People), he attracted international awareness to the position of those living in the
oil-producing communities.

The executions of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow Ogonis on November 10,
1995, provided a catalyst for nations worldwide to condemn the situation in

Nigeria. In particular, the alleged human rights abuses by the military government
have sparked a fierce debate about the current political and economic climate in
Nigeria. Worldwide condemnation of the executions has highlighted the need to
understand the underlying issues that ignited the problem. In particular, confusion
over the roles and responsibilities of the government and multinational corpora?
tions operating in the Niger Delta has led many oil-producing communities to
speak out. Concern relating to environmental degradation has also been voiced
within the country and outside by international organizations. Against this
background of political and humanitarian debate it is, however, important not to
lose sight of the fact that the environment must be seen in cultural as well as
physical terms.

NOTES

1. Data for this article were collected while conducting anthropological fieldwork in Olorna
Village, Bonny, for 12 months in 1983 to 1984.

2. For a model of an Eastern Delta fishing community before European contact, see R. Horton
(1969: 37-58). See also EJ. Alagoa (1970: 319-329; 1971: 269-278).

3. See A. Jewett, Chapter Two, in Change and Continuity Among the Ibani (unpublished Ph.D.
thesis, Cambridge University) for an overview of the decline of Bonny in the 20th century.

4. See Tumini Dagogo Waribor (June 1976).

REFERENCES

Afiesiama, S.
1985 “Medical Aspects of the Mangrove Environment,” (Abstract) B. Wilcox and

C. Powell (eds.), The Mangrove Ecosystem of the Niger Delta. Nigeria:
University of Port Harcourt.

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The Impact of Oil on the Niger Delta 99

Alagoa, EJ.
1971 “The Development of Institutions in the States of the Eastern Niger Delta.”

Journal of African History 12,2: 269-278.
1970 “Long Distance Trade and States in the Niger Delta.” Journal of African

History 11:319-329.
Alagoa, EJ. and T. Tamuno (eds.)

1989 Land and People of Nigeria: Rivers State. Nigeria: Riverside Communications.
Earl, K.

1962 “Bonny.” Nigeria Field.
Ekoriko, M.

1996 “How Safe Are We?” Special Report. Newswatch (January 8).
Green, K.

1982 “Oil and Gas Industries in Bonny: A Critical Appraisal.” Ogolo Magazine 1.
Horton, R.

1969 “From Fishing Village to City-State: A Social History of New Calabar.” M.
Douglas and P. Kaberry (eds.), Man in Africa. London: Tavistock Publications.

Jewett, A.
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Onuoba, G.
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Waribor, T.
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Webber, H.
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Wilcox, B.H.R.
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“A Contemporary Ethnography: Change and Continuity Among the Ibani-Ijo
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A.M.A. Imevbore
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The Mangrove Ecosystem of the Niger Delta. Nigeria: University of Port
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(eds.), The Mangrove Ecosystem of the Niger Delta. Nigeria: University of
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“Spatial Implications of the Oil Terminal in Bonny.” Unpublished B.A. thesis,
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• Contents

p. 87
p. 88
p. 89
p. 90
p. 91
p. 92
p. 93
p. 94
p. 95
p. 96
p. 97
p. 98
p. 99

• Issue Table of Contents

Social Justice, Vol. 23, No. 4 (66) (Winter 1996) pp. 1-185
Front Matter
Editorials: Environmental Victims: An Introduction [pp. 1-6]
Final Statement to the Tribunal [pp. 7-8]
Poetry in Honor of Ken Saro-Wiwa
Defiance Unfurling [pp. 9-10]
The Disgrace of Shell Oil [pp. 10-10]
Periodic Table [pp. 10-11]
Shell Game and Salsa [pp. 12-12]
Presente! [pp. 12-13]
Mario Savio, The Heart of an Activist [pp. 14-15]
An Environmental Victimology [pp. 16-40]
Environmental Victims and State Sovereignty: A Normative Analysis [pp. 41-61]
Reflections on Environmental Justice: Children as Victims and Actors [pp. 62-86]
The Anthropology of Oil: The Impact of the Oil Industry on a Fishing Community in the Niger Delta [pp. 87-99]
The Movement in Bhopal And Its Lessons [pp. 100-108]
Ecocide, Industrial Chemical Contamination, and the Corporate Profit Imperative: The Case of Bougainville [pp. 109-124]
Environmental Security and Displaced People in Southern Africa [pp. 125-133]
Good Neighbor Agreements: A Tool For Environmental and Social Justice [pp. 134-151]
The Occupational Health Needs Of Workers: The Need for a New International Approach [pp. 152-163]
Introduction to the “Charter of Rights Against Industrial Hazards”: For Communities, Workers, and Protection of Their Environment [pp. 164-166]
Charter of Rights Against Industrial Hazards [pp. 167-181]
Publications Received [pp. 182-185]
Back Matter

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Environmental Justice and Economic Degrowth:
An Alliance between Two Movements1

Joan Martı́nez-Alier*

Ecological Economics, Social Metabolism, and Political Ecology

The flows of energy and materials in the world economy have never been as large
as they are today. This increased metabolism causes more and more conflicts on
resource extraction and waste disposal and is giving rise to a movement for
environmental justice around the world (Agyeman, et al. 2003; Carruthers 2008;
Pellow and Brulle 2005; Pellow 2007; Roberts 2007; Walker 2009). Even an
economy without growth, if based on fossil fuels, would need to obtain new sources
of energy at the ‘‘commodity frontiers’’ (Moore 2000) because energy is not recycled.
The words ‘‘environmental justice’’ were initially used in the United States in the
early 1980s for local complaints against ‘‘environmental racism,’’ i.e., the
disproportionate pollution burdens in areas primarily inhabited by disadvantaged
ethnic groups (Bullard 1990, 2005; Pulido 1996; Camacho 1998; Cole and Foster
2001; Carmin and Ageyman 2010). Now the term is applied to spontaneous
movements and organizations that resist extractive industries and organize against
pollution and climate change (Martı́nez-Alier 2002) anywhere in the world. It also
includes the networks or coalitions they form across borders (Bandy and Smith
2005). Environmental justice speaks to both intragenerational and intergenerational
distribution. It addresses non-distributional dimensions of justice, such as recogni-
tion of the legitimacy of social actors to speak out in protest (Schlosberg 2007) and
inclusion of all who are affected by resource extraction and pollution (Agarwal
2001).

EJOs (environmental justice organizations) are potential allies of the environ-
mental groups in rich countries that criticize the obsession with the narrow economic
measure of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth, which defines economic growth
in the mainstream and permeates the political sphere. These groups form the
degrowth movement (Latouche 2007), whose origins partly lie in the field of
ecological economics.

Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary field born in the 1980s (Costanza
1991, 1996; Ropke 2004; Martı́nez-Alier and Ropke 2008; Spash 2009) from a

1CES conference on The Revival of Political Economy, Coimbra, October 21!23, 2010. I am grateful to
Patrick Bond and Larry Lohman for information and comments.
*joanmartinezalier@gmail.com

ISSN 1045-5752 print/ISSN 1548-3290 online
# 2012 The Center for Political Ecology www.cnsjournal.org
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2011.648839

CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM VOLUME 23 NUMBER 1 (MARCH 2012)

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confluence of interests between ecologists, who studied the use of energy in the
human economy (Odum 1971; Jansson 1984), and dissident economists (Daly
1968, 1973, 2007), who followed Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s (1966, 1971) and
Kenneth Boulding’s (1966) teachings. Work by K.W. Kapp on social costs (1950)
and by Kneese and Ayres (1969) on the pervasiveness of externalities was also
influential. Ecological economics takes a comprehensive view of the interaction
between economy and ecology. As such, it encompasses the physical study of the
economy (social metabolism), the study of the effect of property rights on the
environment and the relation between institutional change and environmental
management, the study of the environmental sustainability of the economy (e.g., can
manufactured capital substitute for so-called ‘‘natural capital?’’), and the economic
valuation of positive environmental services and negative ‘‘externalities.’’ It also
employs multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) methods to rank alternatives in the
presence of incommensurable values. Thus, instead of reducing all values to money
by doubtful assumptions and controversial discount rates as is done in Cost-Benefit
Analysis, participatory MCE methods (Munda, 2008) are able to establish and rank
alternatives while accepting a plurality of values.

Social metabolism refers to the flows of energy and materials in the economy.
The study of social metabolism overlaps with industrial ecology. Sometimes it is
called social ecology (as in the Sozial Ökologie institute in Vienna led by Fischer-
Kowalski); it measures the links between economic growth and use of energy (Warr
and Ayres, et al. 2010) and tests the absolute or relative dematerialization of the
economy (relative to GDP) by studying material flows.

Energy flows in the economy have been analyzed for a long time (Cottrell 1955;
Martı́nez-Alier and Schlüpmann 1987, Martı́nez-Alier 2007; Haberl 2001a, 2001b;
Cleveland 2008a, 2008b; Hall, et al. 1986; Sieferle 2001; Debeir, et al. 1991). One
main point of interest is the rise or decline in the EROI (energy return on energy
input), the inverse of the energy cost of obtaining energy. Accounts of material flows
are now done as a matter of course by Eurostat, the E.U. statistical office. They are
also calculated for Southern countries, with results often emphasizing the existence of
large physical trade imbalances (Russi, et al. 2008; Perez-Rincon 2006, 2007; Vallejo
2010; Vallejo, et al. 2010), where exports in tons are larger than imports in tons (and
also often more energy intensive).

Political ecology (Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Robbins 2004; Peet and Watts
1996; Rocheleau, et al. 1996; Bryant and Bailey 1997) studies ecological
distribution conflicts and the use of power to gain access to environmental
resources and services, or to shift the burdens of pollution according to ethnic
origin, social class, caste, or gender. It focuses on local and international resource
extraction and waste disposal conflicts (of which climate change is arguably the
largest), and it analyzes the power struggles on the procedures for decision-making
in environmental issues, including the allowing or banning of different valuation

52 JOAN MARTÍNEZ-ALIER

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languages. Political ecology also studies environmental movements, as does
environmental sociology.

This article builds on the knowledge provided by these sustainability sciences.

Trends

Nearly 20 years after the first Earth Summit, the United Nations conference in
Rio de Janeiro in 1992 that drew more than 100 heads of state, the environmental
trends are alarming. The E.U. and UN objective of halting the loss of biodiversity by
the year 2010 has not only failed, it has been abandoned in practice. The HANPP
(human appropriation of net primary production), a measure of the consumption of
natural materials such as food, paper, wood and fiber and how this consumption
‘‘alters the composition of the atmosphere, levels of biodiversity, energy flows within
food webs, and the provision of important ecosystem services’’ (SEDAC n.d),
indicates increasing pressure on biodiversity (Vitousek, et al. 1986; Haberl, et al.
2009). Biodiversity loss is sometimes seen (as in the TEEB [The Economics of
Ecosystems and Biodiversity] reports) as a market failure to be corrected by suitable
pricing. At other times bad governance, unsuitable institutions, and neoliberal
policies that promote trade and guarantee foreign investments are also (rightly)
blamed. However, the main underlying cause of the disappearance of biodiversity is
the increased social metabolism of the human economy. This driving force would be
similar under social-democratic Keynesian policies*or indeed under the failed
communist economic systems of the 20th century*if the technologies and per capita
consumption we see today remained under those systems.

Thus, the production of the main greenhouse gases continues to grow because of
the increased metabolic flows in the economy. Until 2007 emissions of CO2 were
increasing by 3 percent per year. After a halt in the increase in 2008!09 due to the
global economic recession, they are now bound to increase again. Yet, according to
the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), greenhouse gases
should decrease as soon as possible by 50 or 60 percent. Cementing the failure of the
Kyoto Protocol, which was initiated in 1997 and called for countries to agree to
binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, the UN climate talks in Copenhagen in
December 2009 resulted in no agreement. The United States never ratified the
Kyoto Protocol, and President Obama has not succeeded in getting the U.S. Senate
to agree to carbon caps or taxes*measures that would result in emission reductions.
Instead, Obama is focussing blame for global climate destabilization on China,
which has surpassed the U.S. in CO2 emissions, although its per capita emissions are
still four times less than the United States.

CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was about 300 ppm when Swedish scientist
Svante Arrhenius (1896) first conceptualized the enhanced greenhouse effect in 1895.
Now it is nearly 400 ppm and increasing 2 ppm each year. As is well known, CO2

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND ECONOMIC DEGROWTH 53

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emissions by the human economy primarily result from burning fossil fuels. Since
peak oil is now very near, or perhaps already reached, and peak extraction of natural
gas will likely occur in 20 or 30 years, a substantial amount of CO2 emissions will
continue to come from coal and ‘‘unconventional’’ sources of oil and natural gas,
which are much dirtier and more energy-intensive to extract (Charman 2010).

Therefore, taking into account other negative trends or events like the drop in
the availability of many edible species of fish, the accidents at Fukushima in 2011
and the risks of nuclear military proliferation, the local scarcities of water, and the
approaching ‘‘peak phosphorous,’’ it is time to go back to the debates of the 1970s
on the desirability in rich countries of a steady-state economy and, indeed, of a
period of degrowth in the use of energy and materials in the economy (Schneider,
et al. 2010). Degrowth in rich economies should lead to a steady state economy
(Daly 1973), which in turn raises the issue of which variables should remain steady.
Daly would be the first to acknowledge that the economy cannot be properly
described by one single unit of measurement. Ecological economics rests on the
notion of incommensurability of values (Martı́nez-Alier, et al. 1998, 1999).

The small movement for degrowth in the North focuses on both physical
variables and new social institutions. It breaks with the unquestioned assumption
that the economy should grow forever. The proliferation of environmental justice
movements of the South complaining against ecologically unequal exchange and
environmental liabilities attest to the need for degrowth (Bunker 1984, 1985, 2007;
Hornborg 1998, 2009; Hornborg, et al. 2007, 2010; Muradian and Martı́nez-Alier
2001; Muradian, et al. 2002; Rice 2007; Roberts and Parks 2007).

Peak Population: Love One Another More, and Do Not Multiply

Among all the alarming trends and impending ‘‘peaks’’ signalling distributional
conflicts, one welcome trend is the rapid decrease in the rate of growth of the human
population, also known as the world demographic transition. Peak population might
be reached around 2045 at perhaps 8.5 billion people. As population stabilizes or
declines slightly, the proportion of old people increases. Hence, European women are
exhorted to produce more children who will become workers who will pay for
the pensions of so many old people. This is ridiculous (Latouche 2007), since the
workers would also become pensioners in due course. The pyramid of population
(still taught at schools) should be drawn as a rectangle (admittedly with a little
pyramid on top). The debates between Malthusians and Marxists, and Malthusians
and some economists who favor population growth, are still relevant today, as are the
doctrines of the feminist Neo-Malthusians of 1880!1920, e.g., Emma Goldman,
Madaleine Pelletier, Nelly Roussel, Margaret Sanger, and Maria Lacerda de Moura
(Ronsin 1980; Martı́nez-Alier and Masjuan 2005).

The world demographic transition is expected to help usher in a socio-ecological
transition defined by lower usage of energy and materials, especially if after peaking, the

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global population goes down to 6 billion, as some projections expect (Lutz, et al. 2001).
During the 20th century, global population increased four times from 1.5 billion to
6 billion. The importance of population growth in environmental impacts was
recognized in Paul Ehrlich’s equation I”PAT (Impacts”Population#Affl-
uence#Technology).

Environmental awareness is now influencing birth rates. There was a large
difference between the original Malthusianism of T.R. Malthus and the neo-
Malthusianism of 1900 that in France took the name of la grève des ventres, focusing
on what today is called ‘‘women’s reproductive rights.’’ Between 1880 and 1914, an
international network of Neo-Malthusian activists engaged in strong debates,
including on the question of how many people the Earth could feed. Much later,
Françoise d’Eaubonne (1974) when introducing the word ‘‘eco-feminism,’’ again
made the link between women’s freedom and the need to stop population growth for
environmental reasons. In the current context, it is useful to revisit the different
varieties of Malthusianism, which are summarized below.

. MALTHUSIANISM of Malthus posited that population undergoes exponential
growth unless checked by war and pestilence, or by chastity and late marriages.
Food grows less than proportionately to the labor input because of decreasing
returns. Hence, subsistence crises result. Helping the poor is useless because they
immediately would have more children.

. NEO-MALTHUSIANISM OF 1900 held that human populations could
regulate their own growth through contraception. Women’s freedom was
required for this, and desirable for its own sake. Poverty was explained by social
inequality, but ‘‘conscious procreation’’ was needed to prevent low wages and
the pressure on natural resources. This was a successful bottom-up movement in
Europe and America against States (which wanted more soldiers) and Churches.

. NEO-MALTHUSIANISM AFTER 1970 was a doctrine and practice sponsored
by international organizations and some governments. Population growth is seen
as a main cause of poverty and environmental degradation. Therefore it advocates
States introduce contraceptive methods, even without women’s prior consent.

. ANTI-MALTHUSIANISM is a view that assumes that human population growth
is no major threat to the natural environment and that it is conducive to economic
growth. Esther Boserup (1965) and other economists promoted this argument.

The Environmentalism of the Poor

Recognizing the need to halt the increase in global population (and the impact
of population on ecosystems and biodiversity) and the growth of environmentalism

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are both positive trends. The growing environmentalism of the poor and of
indigenous peoples (Guha and Martı́nez-Alier 1997; Dunlap and York 2008) is a
particularly important development. Activists and communities at the commodity
frontiers are sometimes able, together with the EJOs, to stop the extraction of
minerals and destruction of habitats and human livelihoods. One celebrated victory
took place in August 2010 when citizens succeeded in defeating the plans of
transnational mining giant, Vedanta Resources, to mine bauxite at Niyamgiri Hill in
Odisha (Padel and Das 2010). Initiatives of the environmentalism of the poor
include exercising the right to previous consent under Convention 169 of the ILO,
which applies to indigenous communities (when they are recognized as such) (Urkidi
2010b), introducing measures such as local referendums against mining in Latin
America (as in the gold mining conflicts of Esquel in Argentina and Tambogrande in
Peru; Walter and Martı́nez-Alier 2010; Muradian, et al. 2003; Haarstad and
Floysand 2007), and developing new plans for leaving fossil fuels in the ground, as
occurred in the Yasunı́ ITT oilfields in Amazon territory in Ecuador (Martı́nez-Alier
and Temper 2007; Finer, et al. 2010; Larrea and Warnars 2009). Successful attempts
have been made to prosecute companies like Shell for its activities in the Niger Delta,
or Chevron-Texaco for the damage it caused in Ecuador (Clapp and Utting 2009).
Women are often in the lead in such movements (Veuthey and Gerber 2010).

The EJOs of the South defend local identities and territories (Escobar 2001);
however, their growth is explained not only by the strength of identity politics but
also by the conflicts erupting from the social metabolism of the world economy now
reaching the last frontiers. The EJOs and their networks are, then, a main force
working to make the world economy less unsustainable. They are more trustworthy
than the old conservationist movement (represented by organizations like the WWF
[World Wildlife Fund] and the IUCN [International Union for Conservation of
Nature]), which is compromised under its present leadership by the substantial
financial support it gets from the extractive industries in exchange for its complicity
in ‘‘greenwashing.’’ For instance, the IUCN booklet Transition to Sustainability,
written by Bill Adams and Sally Jeanrenaud and launched at the World Conservation
Congress in Barcelona in October 2008, proposed a link between the conservationist
movement and the environmentalism of the poor. This went nowhere because of the
very visible cooperation of Shell and Rio Tinto with the IUCN. John Muir would
have been horrified.

Meanwhile, the traditional Left still sees environmentalism as a luxury of the rich
rather than a necessity for everybody*particularly for the poor and the indigenous,
as illustrated by victims such as Chico Mendes in 1988 and Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995.
New green politics are gaining fertile ground in some Southern countries. Brazil’s
former Environment Minister, Marina Silva, a longtime labor, environmental, and
indigenous rights activist, ran for president in 2010, and the Peruvian human rights
and environmental activist and former Catholic priest, Marco Arana, also tried to
make a bid for president of that country in 2011.

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The environmental justice movements are fighting a wide variety of abuses over
their land, air, and water in traditional indigenous territory to urban environments.
These include the unsustainable extraction of biomass (e.g., deforestation, defending
mangrove forests, the imposition of monoculture tree plantations, agro-fuels, land
grabbing, overfishing); mining (for gold, bauxite, iron ore, copper, uranium, and
other minerals); oil and gas exploration and extraction; and the appropriation of
water, such as the construction of dams, the diversion of rivers, and the pollution of
aquifers, to name the most important causes of conflicts (Carrere and Lohman 1996;
McCully 1996; OCMAL 2010; Bebbington, et al. 2007; Bridge 2004; Martı́nez-
Alier 2001a, 2001b; GRAIN 2007; Gerber 2011; De Echave, et al. 2009; Svampa
and Antonelli 2009; Urkidi 2010a; Urkidi and Walter 2011; Orta-Martı́nez et al.
2008; Orta-Martı́nez and Finer 2010). There are also conflicts over transport and the
infrastructures required for transport. Conflicts on waste disposal in cities, the
countryside, or overseas include fights over waste dumps or incinerators, air and soil
pollution, electronic waste exports, and ship-breaking (Demaria 2010). The largest
waste disposal conflict is over the property rights to the oceans and atmosphere to
dump the excessive amounts of CO2 generated by burning fossil fuels. There are also
many conflicts on the application of new technologies (cyanide in open pit gold
mining, genetically modified organisms [GMOs,] nuclear energy) that distribute
uncertain risks unfairly (EEA 2002; Pengue 2005; Pereira and Funtowicz 2009).

Against Cheap Exports and in Favor of Renewable Energy and
Local People

Movements in countries or regions that are net exporters of raw materials are
calling for taxes on those exports to help address the environmental damage
associated with extracting them (Giljum and Eisenmenger 2004; Muñoz, et al.
2009). For example, in Ghana, Pará in Brazil, Surinam, and Orissa in India, the
aluminium export industry has profited from incredibly cheap rates for electricity
from dams that have harmed both the environment and the people (Padel and Das
2010). The demand to do away with subsidies for fossil fuels and metal exports
would make these activities much less attractive to the exporters.

One current case in South Africa arose from opposition to a World Bank loan of
US$3.75 billion to the electricity company Eskom for the Medupi power plant,
slated to be the world’s fourth largest (Bond 2011, 10). South African EJOs
articulate the problem:

[W]e see renewable energy, not coal-fired power stations (or nuclear power), as
the optimal development path for Southern economies, creating more jobs,
building local manufacturing capacity, and avoiding the environmental mistakes
of Northern countries. As in South Africa, most World Bank coal power projects
are designed to supply industry, not people. They do not necessarily increase per
capita access to energy. The industries in turn are mostly geared for export in line

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND ECONOMIC DEGROWTH 57

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with the World Bank’s promotion of export-oriented production. The goods are
then consumed primarily in developed countries. Further, many industries are
established with foreign direct investments. In the process, much of the heavy
industry in developed countries has relocated to developing countries in search of
cheaper energy and cheaper labor. . . (SA and African Civil Society 2010).

The South African EJOs propose instead a demand-side management
alternative, beginning by phasing out cheap electricity to ‘‘enclave’’ smelters that
have little linkage with the economy and that are capital- rather than jobs-intensive.
They contend that the freed-up energy should be redistributed to provide for a much
larger ‘‘lifeline’’ supply of universal Free Basic Electricity to consumers, with a rising
block tariff to encourage conservation and help the switch into renewable energy
technologies.

Controversies on Climate Justice

Energy cannot be recycled, therefore even a non-growing economy that uses
large amounts of fossil fuels would need ‘‘fresh’’ supplies coming from the
commodity frontiers. The same applies to materials, which in practice can
be recycled only partially. For example, only 40 to 60 percent of commodities like
copper, aluminium, steel, and paper can be salvaged for use in recycling. When the
economy grows, the search for materials and energy sources is even greater. This vast
search for resources results in ‘‘accumulation by dispossession’’ (Harvey 2003) or
Raubwirtschaft (a phrase used by some geographers, meaning ‘‘plunder economy’’).
There is also ‘‘accumulation through contamination,’’ meaning that capitalist profits
increase by the ability to dispose of the ‘‘effluents of affluence’’ and other waste at
zero or low cost. This does not indicate so much a market failure as a (provisional)
cost-shifting success (Kapp 1950).

In addition to Climate Justice activists (Bond 2010a), many governments of
relatively poor countries now call for the repayment of the ecological debt, a slogan
first raised in Latin America among EJOs in 1991 (Robleto and Marcelo 1992;
Smith 1996; Simms 2005; Peralta 2009). The United States, the European Union,
and Japan refuse to acknowledge this debt. However, in Copenhagen in December
2009 at least 20 heads of government or ministers explicitly mentioned the ecological
debt (or climate debt) in their speeches, and some used the loaded word
‘‘reparations.’’

According to Pablo Solón, then Bolivia’s ambassador to the United Nations,

Admitting responsibility for the climate crisis without taking necessary actions to
address it is like someone burning your house and then refusing to pay for it. Even
if the fire was not started on purpose, the industrialized countries, through their
inaction, have continued to add fuel to the fire. . . It is entirely unjustifiable that

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countries like Bolivia are now forced to pay for the crisis. This creates a huge draw
on our limited resources to protect our people from a crisis created by the rich and
their over-consumption. . . Our glaciers dwindle, droughts become ever more
common, and water supplies are drying up. Who should address this? To us it
seems only right that the polluter should pay, and not the poor. We are not
assigning guilt, merely responsibility. As they say in the U.S., if you break it, you
buy it.

The background to Solón’s speech was Todd Stern’s statement (as U.S. negotiator) at
a press conference in Copenhagen on December 10, 2009: ‘‘We absolutely recognize
our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere up there. . . But the sense of
guilt or culpability or reparations*I just categorically reject that.’’ (Bond 2010b,
also in http://www.climate-justice-now.org/bolivia-responds-to-us-on-climate-debt-
if-you-break-it-you-buy-it/).

A rejoinder to this controversy came from an unexpected author, economist
Jagdish Bhagwati (2010). Apparently unaware of the activist and academic debate on
the ecological debt since 1991, he wrote that the U.S. in addressing domestic
pollution created the Superfund legislation in 1980 after the Love Canal accident
that requires hazardous waste to be eliminated by the offending company.

This tort liability is also ‘‘strict,’’ such that it exists even if the material discharged
was not known at the time to be hazardous (as carbon emissions were until
recently). In addition, the people hurt can make their own tort claims. Rejecting
this legal tradition in U.S. domestic pollution, Todd Stern, the principal U.S.
negotiator, refused to concede any liability for past emissions . . . Evidently, the
U.S. needs to reverse this stand. Each of the rich countries needs to accept a tort
liability which can be pro rata to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change-estimated share of historic world carbon emissions. Since the payment
would be on the tort principle, the idea that the funds would substitute for
normal aid would be outrageous: you do not take away the pension of a person
who has won a tort settlement.

In the E.U., the Environmental Liability Directive entered into force in April
2004, though not all countries have yet enacted the corresponding internal
legislation. It is meant for application inside the E.U. only, and moreover does
not apply to the climate debt. However, the claims for compensation for such climate
debts 20 years after Rio 1992 are now audible to anybody witnessing the
international negotiations. At the UN climate talks in Copenhagen in December
2009, Fánder Falconı́, then Foreign Relations Minister of Ecuador, likened poor
countries to ‘‘passive smokers,’’ while explicitly pointing out the failure to apply the
‘‘polluter pays principle’’ to the climate problem. He also asked for repayment of the
climate debt due to the historical liabilities for climate change. Parikh (1995)
calculated the climate debt owed from Northern to Southern countries at about
US$75 billion per year. She counted the costs saved by the rich by not carrying out

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http://www.climate-justice-now.org/bolivia-responds-to-us-on-climate-debt-if-you-break-it-you-buy-it/

http://www.climate-justice-now.org/bolivia-responds-to-us-on-climate-debt-if-you-break-it-you-buy-it/

the necessary reductions in emissions. Srinivasan, et al. (2008) quantified the
accumulated ecological debt*a large part of which is climate debt*from North to
South at US$2 trillion. This study was published in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences, signalling the academic credibility of the concept of ‘‘ecological
debt.’’ In other publications, Paredis, et al. (2008) and Goemmine and Paredis
(2009) provide a conceptual discussion and quantification of the ecological debt, a
grassroots concept that, as they say, has ‘‘matured.’’

Vı́a Campesina: Peasant Agriculture Cools Down the Earth

In the early 1970s, taking up H.T. Odum’s view of modern agriculture as
‘‘farming with petroleum’’ (Odum 1971), several researchers did accounts of the
output-input ratio of agricultural systems. The best-known calculations were by
Pimentel (Pimentel, et al. 1973) published in Science (also Pimentel and Pimentel
1979). It was striking to realize that the energy output-input ratio of corn production
in Iowa or Illinois was lower than that for the traditional milpa corn production
system of rural Mexico or Guatemala. From an economic point of view, modern
agriculture increased productivity per unit of labor and to some extent per hectare,
but from a physical point of view, it lowered the energy efficiency (Leach 1975;
Naredo and Campos 1980). The energy accounts were a challenge to conventional
economic accounting, and they helped give birth to ecological economics.

Vı́a Campesina, a peasant and small farmer international coalition (Desmarais
2007; Borras, 2008; Martinez-Torres and Rosett 2010), is now very much present in
the climate change debate with its thesis that ‘‘sustainable peasant agriculture cools
down the earth’’ (WRM 2008), an argument partly based on the fact that modern
industrial agriculture is ‘‘no longer a producer of energy but a consumer of energy.’’
Studies calculating the EROI (the energy return on energy input) in agriculture since
the 1970s back this position. Ecological agrarianism or ecological neo-Narodnism (as
I called it in 1987) is growing (Martı́nez-Alier 2011).

Socially Sustainable Economic Degrowth

A small social movement for sustainable economic degrowth appeared around
2002 in some rich countries of the North. It emanated from civil society groups, but
it also has support from some academics. So far, two conferences, one in Paris in
April 2008 and one in Barcelona in March 2010, have been devoted to the
movement (see www.degrowth.eu) and another conference is planned in Montreal in
May 2012. In Italy it is called the decrescita movement and in France the décroissance
movement.

Socially sustainable economic degrowth (Martı́nez-Alier 2009; Martı́nez-Alier,
et al. 2010) is both a concept and a small social grassroots movement (particularly in

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http://www.degrowth.eu

France and Italy) with its origins in the fields of ecological economics, social ecology,
economic anthropology, and in environmental and social activist groups. It was born
out of the critiques of uniform economic development and the imposition of market
values linked to Karl Polanyi’s critique in The Great Transformation (1944) and,
later, in economic anthropology where Polanyi’s school (Polanyi, et al. 1957)
explored the forms of exchange in different economic systems (reciprocity,
redistribution, peripheral markets, and the generalized market system).

In the same spirit, ecological economists have regularly referred back to the
distinction by Aristotle in Politics between oikonomia and chrematistics, between human
ecology (how to provision the oikos) and the study of market prices. Daly and Cobb
(1989) wrote that a shift was needed from economics conceived as chrematistics (the
study of price formation in markets with the aim of maximizing monetary gain) back
to the sort of economics that Aristotle called oikonomia (management of a household*
or a community*aimed at maintaining or sustainably increasing use values over the
long run). Ecological economists recall Otto Neurath’s defense of incommensurability
of values against Von Mises and Hayek in the Socialist Calculation Debate of the
1920s and 1930s (Martı́nez-Alier and Schlüpmann 1987; O’Neill 1993, 2007).
Commensuration means the imposition of a common metric, and it requires an
exercise of power (Espeland and Stevens 1998).

In France, the MAUSS school was influential on the degrowth movement. This
was a group of scholars against utilitarianism in the social sciences that made its
acronym coincide with the name of the anthropologist who authored The Gift
(Mauss’ book explicitly considered different economic systems: Essai sur le don.
Forme et raison de l’échange dans les societés archaı̈ques). The degrowth movement thus
implies a cultural critique of the generalized market system and the ‘‘economicism’’
imposed by capitalism (Latouche 2007); it also claims other ancestors from the
1970s, particularly the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins (1972).2 The economist
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906!1994), a founding father of ecological econom-
ics, published The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971) selection of his
writings was translated into French by Grinevald and Rens in 1979 with the title
Démain la décroissance (Grinevald and Rens 1995). Other influences on the degrowth
movement came from Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, published in 1973, and
indirectly from Gandhian economics (as developed by Kumarappa in Economics of
Permanence).

Not surprisingly, degrowth activists in France and Italy are keen on one concept of
industrial ecology and ecological economics: the Jevons’ paradox or ‘‘rebound effect’’
(Jevons 1865; Polimeni, et al. 2007). They have read economic anthropologists such as

2Sahlins made two main points. The first, in primitive stateless societies (based on the ‘‘domestic mode of
production’’), material and ritual needs can be satisfied with few hours of work. Second, and in the same
direction, peasant societies (if left alone) function according to Chayanov’s rule, i.e., the higher the ratio of
workers to consumers in families, the less the workers need to work. Sahlins’ ideas were immediately influential
in France because of his 1968 article in Le Temps Modernes (Sahlins 1968).

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Latouche (2007), and they are inspired by environmental thinkers of the 1970s such as
André Gorz and Ivan Illich. They also could have read A Prosperous Way Down by H.T.
and E. Odum (2001), but they probably have not. Regardless, the European degrowth
movement is not based on iconic writings. It is a small social movement born from
experiences of co-housing, squatting, neo-ruralism, reclaiming the streets, alternative
energies, waste prevention, and recycling. Besides being a new movement, it has
become a new research area that could be called ‘‘economic degrowth studies’’ and is
closely related to ‘‘socio-ecological transition studies’’ (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl,
eds. 2007; Krausmann, et al. 2008; Krausmann, et al. 2009). The keyword term
‘‘economic degrowth’’ has been introduced in academic journals in English since the
Paris conference of 2008, and special issues have been published or are forthcoming in
2011!12 in the Journal of Cleaner Production, Ecological Economics, Environmental
Values, and in this issue of Capitalism Nature Socialism. Research is needed on the
environmental, technological, demographic, social and socio-psychological aspects of
socially sustainable economic degrowth that would lead to a steady-state economy
(Kerschner 2010), in alliance with the environmental justice movements of the South.

Beyond GDP lies Economic Degrowth

For poor rural people involved in resource extraction conflicts, the threat to their
livelihood in the form of water pollution and land grabbing is obvious. They draw
environmental resources and services directly from nature, outside the market. When
displaced, they cannot afford to buy a house and land. They cannot even pay for
water in plastic bottles when their rivers and aquifers are polluted by mining. This
fact has given rise to the notion of the ‘‘GDP of the poor.’’ These lost amounts of
welfare are not subtracted from the economic accounts. This is one of the reasons
why we should mistrust national macroeconomic accounting and go ‘‘Beyond
GDP.’’

Moreover, GDP growth goes together with increasing pressure on biodiversity,
climate change, and the undermining of human livelihoods at the commodity
frontiers. Excessive consumption by rich and middle-class people is not only a
menace for other species and for future generations of humans. It deprives poor
people a fair share of resources and environmental space now (Spangenberg 1995).
Environmental activists appreciate the academic critiques of GDP. Actually, feminist
activists and academics (Waring 1988) long ago made a convincing argument against
GDP because it ‘‘forgot’’ not only to count nature’s services but also unpaid
domestic work. Another critique of GDP accounting, the so-called Easterlin
Paradox, is updated by work by social psychologists. According to the Easterlin
Paradox, increases in happiness correlate with increases in income only below a
certain level of per capita income.

The expression, Beyond GDP, recently became fashionable in Brussels among
some European civil servants and politicians (http://www.beyond-gdp.eu/news.html)

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http://www.beyond-gdp.eu/news.html

40 years after European Commission President Sicco Mansholt, in 1972, criticized
GDP and proposed an end to economic growth in rich countries. A sad lack of
scholarship hampers the debate. Authors (dead or alive) who thoroughly criticized
GDP from environmental and feminist perspectives since the 1970s are expurgated.
The cheerful slogan in Brussels is ‘‘the greening of the economy: beyond GDP.’’

The criticisms against the methods and relevance of GDP accounting should go
far beyond introducing complementary measurements of social performance such as
the HDI (human development index), which correlates very closely with GDP per
capita. They should also go beyond the idea of simply ‘‘greening the GDP’’ or
introducing satellite accounts.

Among the physical indices of sustainability, the best known is the Ecological
Footprint (EF), which made its debut in 1992 at an ecological economics conference
(Rees and Wackernagel 1994). The WWF publishes the EF results regularly. The EF
translates into a single number in hectares measuring the use per capita of land for
food, fiber, wood, plus the built environment (paved space for houses and roads),
plus the hypothetical land that would absorb the carbon dioxide produced by
burning fossil fuels. For rich industrial economies, the total comes to 4 or more
hectares per capita, of which over half is the hypothetical carbon dioxide absorption
land. The representation in hectares is easy to understand, and many people like it.
However, we know that the carbon dioxide produced by human beings goes to the
oceans (about one third, resulting in the acidification of the oceans), and that half the
amount produced remains in the atmosphere where it causes the enhanced
greenhouse effect. The EF calculations also assume that humans have a right to
use most of the planet.

Going beyond GDP accounting means something different from ‘‘greening the
GDP,’’ or at the other extreme, genuflecting before one single environmental index
such as the EF. It should mean to go into a participatory and deliberative multi-
criteria assessment of the economy, working with ten or twelve indicators of socio-
cultural, environmental, and economic performance (Shmelev and Rodriguez-
Labajos 2009; Zografos and Howarth 2008). The inclusion or exclusion of various
indicators will reflect the social and political strength of different interests and social
values. Perhaps all indicators improve together in some period, or, more likely, some
improve while some deteriorate. ‘‘Beyond GDP’’ should mean to set objectives for
the reduction in the use of energy and materials and going beyond the single
imperative of economic growth, even when this means to leave some financial debts
unpaid.

Conclusion: An Obvious Alliance

National debts can be paid by squeezing citizens (to a certain extent only)
through taxes and wage reductions, by inflation, or by economic growth. But

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economic growth, especially in the high-consumption countries of the North, is not
compatible with environmental sustainability. The continuing effort to boost the rate
of economic growth in OECD countries in order to be able to repay private and
public financial debts (in the United States, in Japan, in several European countries)
is in direct conflict with the availability of exhaustible resources and the capacity of
waste sinks. Ecological economists rightly refer on this point to Frederick Soddy,
who 90 years ago, pointed out that economic growth could not be permanently
‘‘fuelled’’ by debts because in fact it was literally fuelled by the fossil fuels (Daly
1980; Kallis, et al. 2009).

Instead of becoming obsessed with economic growth in order to repay the
accumulated financial debt and supposedly bring happiness to all, rich countries
should (at the very least) change their behavior so as not to add to their ever-
increasing ecological debt. A program of moderate economic degrowth (implying a
lower social metabolism) in the rich industrial economies is a plausible objective to
meet this goal. Furthermore, degrowth activists in the North would likely find
willing allies in the EJOs and their networks in the South that are fighting in
ecological distribution conflicts against ecologically unequal exchange and the
ecological debt.

Marx was not an agronomist, but he used the word ‘‘metabolism’’ to describe
how capitalist agriculture promoted exports that deprived the soil of nutrients. He
had read Liebig’s agricultural chemistry. The solution that Liebig proposed for
the day when guano from Peru would run out was industrial fertilizers. In the 1980s,
the word ‘‘metabolism’’ was re-introduced into economics by Robert Ayres and
Marina Fischer-Kowalski. Accounts of material flows show that an average citizen of
the European Union uses (not counting water) about 15 tons of materials*biomass,
material for metals, materials for building, and fossil fuels*per year. The average in
India is still under 4 tons. What comes in accumulates as stock (in buildings, for
instance) or comes out as exports or waste. Exports of materials from the E.U.
amount per capita to about 1 ton per year, while imports are 4 tons or more. This is
in contrast to regions or countries specializing in the exports of raw materials. In
many Latin American countries, exports exceed imports (in tonnage) by six times. In
South and Western Africa, in Odisha and other mining states in India, they follow
what some Colombians call ‘‘the rule of San Garabato, compre caro y venda barato’’*
buy expensive and sell cheap. Saint Garabato did not care about declining terms of
trade, the resource curse, or the depletion of natural capital.

The planet is being plundered because of economic growth, the search for
profits, and the high levels of consumption by parts of the population using current
technologies. This has been coupled with nearly a five-fold increase in population
since 1900. Population growth is fortunately now rapidly slowing down, and ‘‘peak
population’’ will be likely reached by 2045 at less than 9 billion, after which it may
decline a bit. Nevertheless, the frontiers of resource extraction and waste disposal are
reaching the farthest corners of the planet. The movement to impose market values

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and increase profits by expanding the frontiers of capitalism is resisted by a
countermovement (Polanyi 1944) to protect nature and humans. The protagonists
are sometimes labor unions (caring for workers’ health and safety at the work place)
or nature conservation societies (caring about wilderness). They are more often the
EJOs, or indigenous groups, citizens and peasant groups, and women activists. They
deploy their own values against the logic of profit making. Sometimes they merely
ask for monetary compensation for damages (‘‘externalities,’’ in the language of
economics), but at another times they demand respect for human rights to life and
health, they insist on indigenous territorial rights, and they claim that rivers or
mountains and certain trees are sacred and cannot be traded off.

Industrialists, economists, and governments defend strategies (that go back to
Uslar Pietri’s 1936 recommendation in Venezuela of ‘‘sowing the oil,’’ sembrar el
petróleo) based on ‘‘weak sustainability’’*that is, money compensation for damages
and substitution of the lost environment by manufactured capital. World Bank and
Oxford University economist Paul Collier is a new arrival to this tradition of
thought. In Collier’s view (2010), energy and material exports from the South should
not slow down so long as local inhabitants receive generous compensation for
unavoidable environmental damage so that receipts can be invested in domestic
development. He argues that the capacity to invest in the exporting countries or
regions should be increased. Collier convincingly emphasizes the existence of
corruption and ill governance in the current squandering of revenues, but he shows
no serious consideration for limits to growth or irreversible socio-ecological damages
that cannot be compensated for.

The defining element in Political Ecology is the presence of power in the ecology
of humans. Humans have modified ecosystems by their technological ability to
increase the availability and exosomatic use of energy and materials including
biomass and water. Such changes, we realize now, are not sustainable in the long run.
They change the climate (as announced by Arrhenius in 1895), and they are
destroying biodiversity at a rapid pace. The increase in the flows of energy and
materials (the social metabolism of advanced economies) has been achieved at heavy
social and environmental costs, not only for future generations but for those living
now. There are enormous inequities in the world, both between North and South,
but also within the South and within the North. Some people annually use 300 GJ
(gigajoules) of energy, most of which comes from oil and gas, while other people
manage with less than 20 GJ, including their food energy and some wood or dried
dung for cooking. To maintain such unequal ecological distribution of access to
resources and the inequities of waste disposal (including unequal access to the carbon
dioxide sinks), the powerful have effectively exercised their power by disguising it
within market relations and unjust property rights. Power is at other times brute
force. Sometimes it is the ability to set the agenda (e.g., ‘‘let’s go at least for a green
economy and weak sustainability’’) and to impose decision-making procedures that
exclude whole classes of people, as has been the case in the international negotiations
on biodiversity and climate change.

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The optimistic views regarding ecological modernization, absolute ‘‘demater-
ialization’’ of the economy, and the downward slopes in the Kuznets environmental
curves run headlong into the reality of increased inputs of energy and materials into
the world economy, increasing production of waste including carbon dioxide, and
increased displacement of environmental costs. The EJOs of the South are one main
force fighting against socio-environmental injustices and moving the world economy
towards sustainability. They do their own research and produce the most
comprehensive available data on environmental conflicts over mining, tree
plantations, fossil fuel extraction, water use, and illegal waste disposal. They are
active at scales from local to global, but they do not have a position against economic
growth in their own countries, which would be very unpopular and indeed untenable
in Latin America, Africa, or the poor countries of Asia. Nevertheless, they are helping
to introduce new concepts such as the Buen Vivir, ‘‘Good Living’’ (Sumaq Kawsay in
Quechua), which (together with the Rights of Nature) was put into the 2008
constitution of Ecuador, moving that country away from a fixation on growth. They
criticize the notion of a uniform transition from underdevelopment to development.

The Southern EJOs’ potential alliance with the small degrowth movement in
Europe cannot mandate an agreement to stop economic growth everywhere. Rather,
the alliance must be based on a common perspective against ‘‘debt-fuelled’’ economic
growth and the hegemony of economic accounting in favor of a pluralism of values
(as recommended by ecological economics; Martı́nez-Alier, et al. 1998 1999), the
acceptance and support of bottom-up feminist neo-Malthusianism, the defense of
human rights and indigenous territorial rights along with the rights of nature, the
recognition of the ecological debt, and the critique of ecologically unequal exchange.
The export trade in commodities is not seen as virtuous. On the contrary, it is linked
with increased social metabolism, and therefore, environmental damage. Against the
thesis that even Oxfam regularly puts forward (open borders to exports from the
South), the alliance between the environmental justice and degrowth movements is
based on what Latin American economists and politicians such as Alberto Acosta in
Ecuador call ‘‘post-extractivism,’’ a rejection of both ‘‘enclave economies and the
resource curse’’ and ‘‘redistributive extractivism’’ (Gudynas 2010). The demand that
the North repay the climate debt to the South and that this debt should increase no
further reinforces the degrowth movements in the rich countries.

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“Speaking of Annihilation”: Mobilizing for War Against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914-
1945
Author(s): Edmund P. Russell
Source: The Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Mar., 1996), pp. 1505-1529
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American Historians
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2945309
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“Speaking of Annihilation”:
Mobilizing for War against Human
and Insect Enemies, 1914-1945

Edmund P. Russell III

In 1944 and 1945, two periodicals with very different audiences published similar
images. Both showed half-human, half-insect creatures, talked of the “annihilation”
of these vermin, and touted modern technology as the means to accomplish that
end. One piece, a cartoon in the United States Marines’ magazine Leatherneck,
showed a creature labeled “Louseous Japanicas” and said its “breeding grounds
around the Tokyo area . . . must be completely annihilated.” (See figure 1.) A
month after the cartoon appeared, the United States began mass incendiary bomb-
ings of Japanese cities, followed by the atomic blasts that leveled Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Although the Leatherneck cartoon was surely intended to be humorous
and hyperbolic, calls for annihilation of human enemies had, by the end of the
war, become realistic.

So too with insect enemies. The second cartoon, an advertisement in a chemical
industry journal, promoted perfumes to eliminate insecticide odors. (See figure
2.) Tapping the rhetoric that pervaded World War II, the text began, “Speaking
of annihilation.” The accompanying image showed three creatures with insect
bodies, each with a stereotypical head representing a national enemy. The Italian
creature lay on its back, an allusion to Allied victory over the Italian army. The
German and Japanese creatures remained standing, as guns blasted all three with
chemical clouds. Like human enemies, the advertisement implied, insect enemies
could and should be annihilated. That possibility, too, had come within reach
by the end of World War II. The Allies killed disease-bearing lice and mosquitoes
over wide areas using a powerful new insecticide called DDT (dichlorodiphenyltri-
chloroethane), and entomologists called for the extermination of entire species.

Edmund P. Russell III is assistant professor of technology, culture, and communication at the University of Virginia.
I am grateful for comments by Susan Armeny, Brian Balogh, Amy Bentley, Amy Bercaw, Paul Boyer, Alan

Brinkley, Craig Cameron, W. Bernard Carlson, Pete Daniel, Thomas Dunlap, Paul Forman, Brett Gary, Barton
Hacker, Pamela Henson, Michael Holt, Linda Lear, Gerald Linderman, Allan Megill, David Nord, Peter Onuf,
Katherine Ott, John Perkins, Beverly Rathcke, Terry Sharrer, Merritt Roe Smith, David Thelen, Richard Tucker,
John Vandermeer, Earl Werner, Donald Worster, Susan Wright, an anonymous reviewer, and scholars who
attended presentations at the 1993 meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, the Johns Hopkins
University, the University of Virginia, and the Smithsonian Institution. I am also grateful for a predoctoral
fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution and grants from the University of Michigan and the National Science
Foundation (SBR 9511726). I thank Paul Milazzo for help with research. This article draws on Edmund P. Russell
III, “War on Insects: Warfare, Insecticides, and Environmental Change in the United States, 1870-1945” (Ph.D.
diss., University of Michigan, 1993).

The Journal of American History March 1996 1505

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Ann

Ann

1506 The Journal of American History March 1996

Louseous Japanicas
The first serious outbreak of this lice epidemic was officially noted on Dmber 7,
1941, at Honolulu, T. H. To the Marine Corps, especially trained in combating this
type of pestilence, was ased the gigantic task of extermination. Extve e ri-
ments on Guadalcanal, Tarawa, and Saipan have shown that this louse inhabits coral
atolls in the South Pacific, particularly pill boxes, palm trees, caves, swamps and jungks.

1wfrrr

Flame throwers, mortars, grenades and bayonets have proven to be an effective –
edy. But before a complete cure may be effected the origin of the plague, the bredin
grounds around the Tokyo area, must be completely annihilated.

Figure 1. In 1945, United States Marine Sgt. Fred Lasswell praised efforts to annihilate
“Louseous Japanicas.” Fred Lasswell, “Bugs Every Marine Should

Know,” Leatherneck, 28 (March 1945), 37.
Printed with permission of Leatherneck magazine.

Most Americans welcomed technology that brought “total victory” over national
and natural enemies. They felt grateful for a bomb that saved the lives of American
soldiers and for a chemical that enabled people to “bomb” insect pests. As time
passed, however, many came to wonder whether human beings had struck a Faustian
bargain. Did “weapons of mass destruction” threaten, rather than promote, human
welfare? Opponents of chemical and nuclear weapons thought so. Had the ability
of human beings to conquer nature surpassed some limit, threatening not only
human well-being but the planet itself? After Rachel Carson published Silent
Spring in 1962, many feared that DDT exemplified this threat.’

Although war and concerns about the impact of human beings on the environ-
ment have been among the most important forces shaping the twentieth century,
scholars have tended to analyze these issues separately. Several historical fields
illustrate this tendency. Military historians have pushed beyond studies of battles
and armies to examine the impact of military institutions on society, politics,
and economics- but rarely on the environment. Environmental historians have
emphasized the role of nature in many events of our past – but rarely in war.
Historians of technology have analyzed the impact of military technology on

‘ Rachel Carson, Silent Sping (New York, 1962).

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Ann

Ann

War against Human and Insect Enemies 1507

Wa~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~7 ….. …..

.. . =..~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ … .

Speak.ng of annIh ton – th odors created

tiid. slay the. kiln agent presto and

quiety departo Ikekiti spent No wasb is.

* ‘ ‘ !;. ‘ . , j . ……………. i. :, : ; i .; : .~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~. . …. ..

– we – -to hew PM
whet weumhwdw a pet.

* .:..:::
.; : . – . . . ‘! . . .~~~N -i N. Y.’ :

Figure 2. This 1944 advertisement, which appeared in a journal that served the National
Association of Insecticide and Disinfectant Manufacturers, took it for granted

that national and insect enemies required annihilation. Reprinted from
Soap and Sanitary Chemicals (April 1944), 92.

society -but rarely on the environment. Cultural historians have emphasized the
impact of war on interactions among people-but rarely its impact on people’s
interactions with the environment.2

2 Although war and military institutions are different, I follow the practice among British historians and use
the former term to encompass the latter. For a sample of works in military, environmental, technological, and
cultural history, see Peter Paret, “The New Military History,” Parameters, 21 (Autumn 1991), 10-18; William
H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (Chicago, 1982);
Carolyn Merchant, ed., Major Problems in American Environmental History (Lexington, Mass., 1993); Jeffrey
K. Stine andJoel A. Tarr, “Technology and the Environment: The Historians’ Challenge,” Environmental History

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1508 The Journal of American History March 1996

The tendency to separate war from environmental change (or military from
civilian affairs) has deep roots. Isaiah’s metaphor, “They shall beat their swords
into plowshares,” suggests that people have long seen one of the most important

ways they change the environment – agriculture – as the opposite of war. In Carte-

sian philosophy, relations among human beings belong to a separate sphere from
relations between human beings and other species. Observers have argued that
Americans in particular “are inclined to see peace and war as two totally separate
quanta. War is abnormal and peace is normal and returns us to the status quo ante. ” 3

Historians of insecticides have shown, however, that efforts to control human
and natural enemies have not proceeded independently. Between them, Emory
Cushing, Vincent Dethier, Thomas Dunlap, and John Perkins have pointed out
that manufacturing of explosives in World War I produced a by-product called
PDB (paradichlorobenzene), which entomologists then developed into an insecti-
cide; that entomologists often used military metaphors; that World War II stimu-
lated development of DDT; and that some insecticides were related to nerve gases.
Historians of chemical weapons, too, have noted this last point.4

These events were, I believe, part of a larger pattern. The ability of human
beings to kill both national and natural enemies on an unprecedented scale, as
well as fears about those abilities, developed in the twentieth century partly because
of links between war and pest control. This article focuses on three such links:
science and technology, institutions, and metaphor.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the science and technology of pest
control sometimes became the science and technology of war, and vice versa.
Chemists, entomologists, and military researchers knew that chemicals toxic to
one species often killed others, so they developed similar chemicals to fight human

Review, 18 (Spring 1994), 1-7; Merritt Roe Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change: Perspectives
on the American Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1985); Barton C. Hacker, “Military Institutions, Weapons, and
Social Change: Toward a New History of Military Technology,” Technology and Culture, 35 (no. 4, 1994), 768-
834; Elaine Tyler May, HomewardBound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988); and Paul
Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Ltght: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New
York, 1985).

On war and the environment, see Susan D. Lanier-Graham, The Ecology of War: Environmental Impacts
of Weaponry and Warfare (New York, 1993); Seth Shulman, The Threat at Home: Confronting the Toxic
Legacy of the U.S. Military (Boston, 1992); J. P. Robinson, The Effects of Weapons on Ecosystems (Oxford,
1979); Arthur H. Westing and Malvern Lumsden, Threat of Modern Warfare to Man and His Environment:
An Annotated Bibliography Prepared under the Auspices of the International Peace Research Association (Paris,
1979); Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, Eng., 1989); and Alfred W.
Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (New York, 1986).

3 Isa. 2:4; Joseph A. Wildermuth to editor, Washington Post Book World, Feb. 20, 1994, p. 14. See also
Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York, 1983). For the
suggestion that neoclassical economics (which views the military as an “externality”) and “the peculiarly American
blindness to the presence of the military” contribute to the view that civilian and military enterprises are separate
endeavors, see David F. Noble, “Command Performance: A Perspective on the Social and Economic Consequences
of Military Enterprise,” in Military Enterprise and Technological Change, ed. Smith, 329-46, esp. 330-31.

4 John H. Perkins, Insects, Experts, and the Insecticide Crisis: The Quest for New Pest Management Strategies
(New York, 1982), 4-10; John H. Perkins, “Reshaping Technology in Wartime: The Effect of Military Goals
on Entomological Research and Insect-Control Practices,” Technology and Culture, 19 (no. 2, 1978), 169-86;
Thomas R. Dunlap, DDT: Scientists, Citizens, and Public Policy (Princeton, 1981), 36-3 7, 59-63; Emory C.
Cushing, History of Entomology in World War II (Washington, 1957); V. G. Dethier, Man’s Plague? Insects
and Agriculture (Princeton, 1976), 112; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, The Problem of
Chemical and Biological Warfare: A Study of the Historical, Technical, Military, Legal, and Political Aspects
of CBW, and Possible Disarmament Measures, vol. I: The Rise of CB Weapons (New York, 1971), 70-75.

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Ann

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1509

and insect enemies. They also developed similar methods of dispersing chemicals
to poison both.

Ideas and hardware moved between civilian and military spheres partly because
of institutional links. The two world wars stimulated nations to mobilize civilian
and military institutions to achieve military victory. They also catalyzed the found-
ing of new organizations that coordinated civilian and military efforts. Peace also
catalyzed links among institutions. When guns fell silent on battlefields, military
and civilian institutions worked together to apply military ideas and technology
to farm fields as a way to survive and meet their institutional goals.

Shared metaphors helped military and civilian institutions shape and express
the way people experienced both war and nature.5 As figures 1 and 2 show,
publicists described war as pest control, pest control as war, and the two endeavors
as similar. On the one hand, describing war as pest control transformed participation
in war from a potentially troubling moral issue to a moral virtue. Comparing
chemical weapons to insecticides made it easier to portray poison gas as natural
and humane. (Ironically, opponents of poison gas used the same metaphor to
argue that chemical warfare was inhumane because it treated human beings like
insects.) On the other hand, describing pest control as war helped entomologists
portray nature as a battlefield, elevate the status of their profession, and mobi-
lize resources.

The evolution of a word used for both human and insect enemies, exterminate,
suggests that these metaphors appealed to long-standing values. The Latin root
meant “to drive beyond the boundaries.” People and insects that did not respect
the boundaries of nations, farms, and homes were enemies, this meaning implied,
and could or should be driven out. Often, however, twentieth-century publicists
used exterminate with a connotation that emerged in the fourth century: “to
destroy utterly,” or annihilate. Since people had previously imagined (and some-
times succeeded in) annihilating enemies, what set the twentieth century apart?
The scale on which people could plan and carry out killing stands out. Technology,
industry, and governments grew large enough to enable us to wage “total war” –
not just against armies, but against insects and civilians. People could plan, carry
out, and (even when it did not come to pass) fear annihilation on a breathtaking
scale across geographic and phylar boundaries. Zygmunt Bauman has suggested
that modernity aimed to make the world into a garden in which some organisms
belonged and from which others, which did not belong, were extirpated. The story
told here complements his argument. Warfare resembled gardening, gardening
resembled warfare, and both were attempts to shape the world to long-standing
human visions.6

I Military metaphors have been used to describe a variety of civilian endeavors, so the events described here
are part of a larger pattern. I use the term metaphor to include simile, analogy, and imagery. On the role of
metaphor in thought and communication, see David E. Leary, “Psyche’s Muse: The Role of Metaphor in the
History of Psychology,” in Metaphors in the History of Psychology, ed. David E. Leary (New York, 1990), 1-78;
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago, 1980); and Mary B. Hesse, Models and
Analogies in Science (Notre Dame, 1966).

6 Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s.v. “Exterminate.” On imagination, technology, and the expansion
of war in the twentieth century, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1989); Craig M.
Cameron, American Samurai: Myth, Imagination, and the Conduct of Battle in the First Marine Division, 1941-

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1510 The Journal of American History March 1996

This article explores only some aspects of the topic. It focuses more on alliances
among institutions than on conflicts, more on institutional politics than on econom-
ics, more on harms than on benefits, and more on similarities than on differences.
Noting similarities does not mean equating. In World War II, for example,
Germans, Americans, propagandists, and entomologists all talked of annihilating
enemies. However, the actions of the United States and entomologists differed
in critical moral ways from those of Germany and of the architects of the horrors
of the Holocaust.

This story prompts two reflections about the ways we write history. First, we
often talk about the impact of one aspect of life (war, science, politics) on another
(the state, culture, the environment). This framework tells us a great deal, but
is it complete? Few forces are monolithic, and two-way interactions may be more
common than one-way impacts. War changed the natural environment, and the
environment changed war. Metaphors shaped human understanding of the material
world, and the material world shaped metaphors. Second, we may tend to tell
stories of progress or decline, but life is a mixture of the two.7 For some people
insecticides and chemical weapons were blessings; for others they were curses; and
for some they were both. The world gets both better and worse, and we have yet
to exterminate either good or evil.

World War 1: Chemistry and War, 1914-1918

On April 22, 1915, Germany initiated a new chapter in the evolution of war.
That day, Allied troops huddled in trenches near Ypres, France, found themselves
enveloped in a greenish yellow cloud of chlorine gas released by German troops.
Allied soldiers futilely tried to outrun the cloud, which reportedly killed 5,000
soldiers and injured 10,000 more. German military leaders lost the initial advantage
when they failed to mount a large-scale attack, but they succeeded in demonstrating
the military power that flowed from knowledge and control of nature.8

Knowledge about nature came in many forms, including scientific understanding
of molecules, and Germany’s preeminence in chemistry underpinned its initial
success with chemical weapons. This preeminence depended both on the brilliance
of civilian scientists such as Fritz Haber, the chemist who oversaw development
of chemical weapons at the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (institute) in Berlin, and

1951 (New York, 1994); and Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon
(New Haven, 1987).

7 For examples of the impact of the weak on the strong, see Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The
World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974); and James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of
Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985). On stories of progress and decline as master narratives, see William
Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History, 78 (March 1992),
1347-76.

8 See Hugh R. Slotten, “Humane Chemistry or Scientific Barbarism? American Responses to World War I
Poison Gas, 1915-1930,” Journal of American History, 77 (Sept. 1990), 476-98; Robert Harris and Jeremy
Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Chemical and Biological Warfare (New York, 1982);
L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford, 1986); and Daniel
Patrick Jones, “The Role of Chemists in Research on War Gases in the United States during World War I”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1969).

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1511

on Germany’s huge chemical industry. Haber relied on chlorine for Germany’s
first gas attack partly because Germany had an ample supply of this dyestuff inter-
mediate.9

Other nations followed Germany’s lead in turning civilian science and industry
to military research and production. Great Britain set thirty-three laboratories to
work testing 150,000 compounds as chemical weapons. In the United St~ates, the
National Research Council (an arm of the National Academy of Sciences) organized
academic, industrial, and governmental scientists to work on offensive and defensive
aspects of poison gases. In 1918 the United States Army incorporated this mammoth
civilian enterprise into its new Chemical Warfare Service. Other nations created
similar organizations, and tons of poison gases wafted across Europe. By the end of
the war, gas reportedly had killed 90,000 people and caused 1.3 million casualties.
Observers dubbed World War I “the chemist’s war.” 10

Chemists relied on their knowledge of laboratory curiosities to find some new
chemical weapons. The most heavily used gas in World War I, chloropicrin,
followed this route. Russia introduced chloropicrin in battle in 1916, and other
nations soon followed suit. Although sometimes lethal to human beings in its
own right, chloropicrin found wide use primarily because it penetrated gas masks.
The compound induced tearing and vomiting, which led soldiers to rip off their
masks and expose themselves to less penetrating, but more lethal, gases mixed
with chloropicrin. ByJanuary 1, 1919, the United States Chemical Warfare Service’s
arsenal at Edgewood, Maryland, could produce 3 million pounds of chloropicrin
per month. I

Chemical warriors also relied on compounds already known to kill organisms,
including insects. French soldiers demonstrated this approach at the battle of the
Somme in 1916, when they fired artillery shells containing hydrogen cyanide.
Since the nineteenth century, farmers and entomologists had used hydrogen cyanide
to fumigate insects in orchards and buildings. Arsenic, too, made its way from
farm fields to battlefields. In the United States, the Chemical Warfare Service
turned a third of the country’s arsenic supply into the poison gas diphenylchloroar-
sine, causing shortages of arsenical insecticides used to kill orchard pests.’2

9 Harris and Paxman, Higher Form of Killing, 9-11.
10 In 1915, combatants released 3,600 tons of gas; in 1916, 15,000 tons. In 1916, the National Academy

of Sciences created the National Research Council (NRC) to promote the “national security and welfare” by
organizing scientific research in government, industry, and educational institutions for the federal government.
In 1917, the council created a Subcommittee on Noxious Gases with members from the army, navy, and the
NRC Chemistry Committee. The civilian researchers became part of the Gas Service of the army, which became
the Chemical Warfare Service three days later. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order
asking the National Academy of Sciences to perpetuate the NRC. Rexmond C. Cochrane, The National Academy
of Sciences: The First Hundred Years, 1863-1963 (Washington, 1978), 209, 231-36; Leo P. Brophy, Wyndham
D. Miles, and Rexmond C. Cochrane, The Chemical Warfare Service: From Laboratory to Field (Washington,
1959), 1-27; W. A. NoyesJr., “Preface,” in Chemistry: A History of the Chemistry Components of the National
Defense Research Committee, 1940-1946, ed. W. A. Noyes Jr. (Boston, 1948), xv-xvi; and Harris and Paxman,
Higher Form of Killing, 22-23, 34.

” Williams Haynes, American Chemical Industry, vol. III: The World WarI Period, 1912-1922 (New York,
1945), 111; R. C. Roark, A Bibliography of Chloropicrin, 1848-1932 (Washington, 1934), 1-2.

12 Hydrogen cyanide (also called hydrocyanic acid and prussic acid) dispersed in open air too quickly to kill
soldiers effectively, and only the French persisted in using it during World War I. (To kill insect pests in orchards,

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1512 The Journal of American History March 1996

War prompted scientists not only to convert insecticidal chemicals into chemical
weapons but also to reverse the process. Lice, which sometimes carried deadly
typhus, infested American troops in France. Military and civilian researchers alike
hoped that war gases might offer a way to conquer this plague of war. In a
collaborative experiment, researchers from the Chemical Warfare Service and the
Bureau of Entomology of the United States Department of Agriculture tested four
chemical weapons on lice. They hoped to find “a gas which can be placed in a
chamber and be experienced safely for a short period of time by men wearing
gas masks and which in this time will kill all cooties and their nits.””13

These experiments stimulated tests of other chemical weapons as insecticides.
The Chemical Warfare Service, the Bureau of Entomology, and other agencies of
the Department of Agriculture researched the efficacy of war gases against dozens
of species of insects. Most of the gases fell short, but chloropicrin, the compound
that chemical warfare had lifted from obscurity, killed insects effectively. Chloropic-
rin harmed civilian exterminators as readily as enemy soldiers, of course, but
entomologists found it less dangerous (as a tear gas, chloropicrin had good “warning
properties”) or more effective than other fumigants. The battlefields of Europe
approximated, albeit unintentionally, laboratory experiments on a massive scale,
and entomologists took note. American Miller magazine reported that the “scarcity
of insect pests around Rheims is attributed to the use of poisonous gases in that
region during the World War,” and French researchers tested chloropicrin as an
insecticide on grain in closed rooms. 14

While scientists researched ways to use pest control technology in war, soldiers
and publicists in World War I, like their predecessors in previous wars, described
military enemies as animals, including insect pests. A British soldier, for example,
described German soldiers as running around like “disturbed earwigs under a
rotten tree stump.” By dehumanizing enemies, animal metaphors reduced the
sense of guilt about killing human beings in battle. The “lower” the phylum,
the lower the sense of guilt, and few phyla ranked lower than insects. Moreover,
Europeans had long regarded nature, defined as everything on earth other than
humans and their creations, as something that human beings not only could but

fumigators enclosed trees in tents before releasing the gas.) Arsenic found use against insects after it was known
to be poisonous to humans. Haber, Poisonous Cloud, 62-63, 117-18; Brophy, Miles, and Cochrane, Chemical
Warfare Service, 55-56; Haynes, American Chemical Industry, III, 111-12; L. 0. Howard, “Entomology and
the War,” Scientific Monthly, 8 (Jan.-June 1919), 109-17; and Dunlap, DDT, 20.

13 Surviving records do not indicate whether experimenters tested gases on humans in chambers. W. Dwight
Pierce to L. 0. Howard, n.d., Correspondence on Body Lice, Vermin, Cooties, in Army, Tests and Recommenda-
tions 1918, Correspondence and Reports Relating to a Study of Body Lice 1918, Records of the Bureau of
Entomology and Plant Quarantine, RG 7 (Washington National Records Center, Suitland, Md.); “Report on
Experiments Conducted on October 16, 1918, Testing the Effect of Certain Toxic Gases on Body Lice and Their
Eggs,” ibid.

14 “Killing Weevils with Chloropicrin,” abstract, in Roark, Bibliography of Chloropicrin, 3. The Bureau of
Chemistry, the Bureau of Plant Industry, and the Federal Horticultural Board helped conduct research at Chemical
Warfare Service laboratories at American University. “The Chemical Warfare Service in Peace,” n.d., file 029.0611:
Articles and Speeches-Peacetime Activities, Station Series, 1942-1945, Security Classified, Records of the
Chemical Warfare Service, U.S. Army, RG 175 (Washington National Records Center); I. E. Neifert and G. L.
Garrison, Experiments on the Toxic Action of Certain Gases on Insects, Seeds, and Fungi (Washington, 1920);
Haynes, American Chemical Industry, III, 111.

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1513

should conquer. Describing war as an exercise in control of nature helped define
war as not just morally permissible, but morally necessary.15

While soldiers found insect metaphors useful in minimizing the significance
of killing human beings, entomologists found war metaphors useful in elevating

the significance of killing insects. L. 0. Howard, chief of the Bureau of Entomology,
for example, described his bureau as waging “warfare against insect life.” Military
rhetoric was not new to science. Francis Bacon had described science as an antagonist

of nature, and Darwinian rhetoric had portrayed nature as a giant battlefield. But
such rhetoric took on added resonance in wartime. It implied that insects threatened
the nation much as human armies did, associated scientific activity with patriotic
national priorities, imbued the Bureau of Entomology with the prestige of the

armed forces, and provided a rallying cry to mobilize resources against nonhu-
man threats.16

“Peaceful War” in the United States, 1919-1939

Links between military and civilian endeavors forged in World War I bent, but

did not always break, after the Treaty of Versailles. In the United States, the
Bureau of Entomology and the Chemical Warfare Service continued to borrow each

other’s technology and metaphors, a process facilitated by explicit collaboration. On
the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Germany surged ahead in the search for
new chemical weapons by uniting research on poison gases and insecticides. Out

of these alliances came technology that shaped campaigns against both human

beings and insects in World War II.
For L. 0. Howard of the Bureau of Entomology, the cessation of the war in

Europe set the stage for escalating “the war against insects.” Long worried about
public and congressional tendencies to view entomologists as engaged in “trivial”

studies, Howard chose his December 1921 address as retiring president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science to promote a new image.
Titled “The War against Insects,” the speech sounded like propaganda from the

just-completed war in Europe. Ignoring the benefits insects provided – which he had
praised earlier in his career-Howard portrayed his enemy in only one dimension.

Quoting Maurice Maeterlinck, Howard said that insects seemed to have a quality
born of “another planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insensate, more
atrocious, more infernal than ours.” How was the nation to protect itself from

15 For the descripton of soldiers as “earwigs” and other animal metaphors used in World War I, see Paul
Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975), 77. On views of enemies, see Sam Keen, Faces
of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (San Francisco, 1986), 60-64; Peter Paret, Beth Irwin
Lewis, and Paul Paret, Persuasive Images: Posters of War and Revolution from the Hoover Institution Archives
(Princeton, 1992); andJ. Glenn Gray, The Warimors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York, 1970). American
pioneers talked of wilderness as an “enemy” to be “conquered,” “subdued,” and “vanquished” by a “pioneer
army.” See Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, 1982), 27.

16 Howard, “Entomology and the War,” 117. On bellicose traditions in science and entomology, see Carolyn
Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, 1980); and
Dunlap, DDT, 36-37. On the use of metaphor to mold public image, see JoAnne Brown, The Definition of a
Profession: The Authority of Metaphor in the History of Intelligence Testing, 1890-1930 (Princeton, 1992).

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1514 The Journal of American History March 1996

this threat? Federal entomologists, “a force of four hundred trained men,” fought
a “defensive and offensive campaign” against these hordes.17
With this speech, Howard moved military metaphors -which had jostled with

public health metaphors in entomological discourse -to the center of his agency’s
public rhetoric. Other entomologists repeated Howard’s warning that insects threat-
ened human survival. After quoting Howard’s bellicose rhetoric to a 1935 meeting
of exterminators, R. C. Roark, chief of the Insecticide Division of the Department
of Agriculture, identified the mix of altruism and self-interest that led entomologists

to promote insects as enemies: “People must be taught that insects are enemies
of man; and as the public becomes insect conscious the opportunities for service
by the entomologist, the insecticide chemist, the chemical manufacturer and the
exterminator will increase. ” Chemical companies, too, called on martial and cultural
traditions to promote their products. (See figure 3.) As Thomas Dunlap has
suggested, it is difficult to resist the idea that the appeal of insecticides arose partly
from their promise of victory over, rather than coexistence with, insect enemies.’8

Howard could not have asked for a better symbol of “the war on insects” than
the airplane, the technology that epitomized martial glory in World War I. The
text of Howard’s “War against Insects” speech appeared in Chemical Age with a
photograph of an airplane dusting a farm with insecticides. This technique was
so new that it went unmentioned in Howard’s speech; Howard praised airplanes
for their usefulness in scouting for insect infestations. But three days after Howard’s
talk, entomologist J. S. Houser announced that, in collaboration with Army Air
Service researchers, he had converted a military airplane to disperse insecticides.19

Chemical warfare may have inspired this development. McClure’s Magazine
reported that a colonel returning from France to his job as an Ohio entomologist
“knew that near the close of the war preparations were being made to sprinkle
poison gas and liquid fire by airplane on soldiers in the trenches and he thought
something like this could probably be used against caterpillars.” The New York
Times suggested a more mundane origin of the idea, saying that birds inspired
aerial dispersal. Whatever the inspiration, the availability of military airplanes
and the willingness of the Army Air Service to work on this technique made aerial

17 Since insects were already considered lowly, perhaps describing them as creatures from another world was
one of the few ways to portray them as unworthy of “fraternity.” L. 0. Howard, “The War against Insects: The
Insecticide Chemist and Biologist in the Mitigation of Plant Pests,” Chemical Age, 30 (no. 1, 1922), 5-6. On
how World War I helped entomologists argue that they were not engaged in “trivial studies,” see Howard,
“Entomology and the War,” 109, 117.

18 Howard identified the 1921 address as a turning point in his representation of insects and hoped that
appreciation for the “insect war” would lead to support for entomology. L. 0. Howard, The Insect Menace
(New York, 1931), ix; Howard, “U.S. Wages Insect War”; R. C. Roark, “Household Insecticides,” Soap and
Sanitary Chemicals, 11 (Nov. 1935), 117 (emphasis added); Dunlap, DDT, 37. Similarity of rhetoric suggests
that Howard may have been influenced by entomologist Stephen Forbes, who in turn was influenced by Charles
Darwin and Herbert Spencer, but Howard’s practice of rarely citing sources makes it difficult to trace intellectual
debts. On Forbes, see Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology
(Chicago, 1985), 12-17. On preventive and remedial measures for pest control, see, for example, C. L. Marlatt,
The Princtpal Insect Enemies of Growing Wheat (Washington, 1908); and W. D. Hunter, The Boll Weevil
Problem, with Special Reference to Means of Reducing Damage (Washington, 1909).

19 Eldon W. Downs and George F. Lemmer, “Origins of Aerial Crop Dusting,” Agricultural History, 39
(July 1965), 123-35, esp. 126.

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1515

dispersal of insecticides feasible. J. A. Truesdell, a newspaperman impressed by
Houser’s experiments, in 1922 told a congressional committee that the Army
Air Service wanted to combine experiments on crop-dusting with pilot training.
Truesdell thought the growth of commercial aviation, including crop-dusting,
would create an auxiliary to the air service. The hearings led to a policy of coopera-
tion between the Army Air Service and the Bureau of Entomology, which in turn
led to the development of aerial dusting of cotton.20

Collaboration between military and civilian institutions also transferred airplanes
from experimental farms to commercial agriculture. In March 1923, acting Secretary
of War Dwight F. Davis declared that the United States Army should do whatever
possible to help crop-dusting “in a commercial way.” The Huff-Daland Corpora-
tion, which built experimental planes for the air service, sent representatives to
a Bureau of Entomology laboratory in 1923 to work on a special dusting plane.
In 1924, Huff-Daland formed Huff-Daland Dusters. Lt. H. R. Harris of the Army
Air Service, formerly chief of the flying section at McCook Field, became the
company’s chief of operations. The air service temporarily released Harris, who
selected twelve pilots and about eighteen mechanics from army airfields to join
Huff-Daland Dusters. In 1925, Huff-Daland Dusters began large-scale dusting
in Louisiana. In 1926, Harris resigned from the military to work full-time for
Huff-Daland. Before long, commercial crop dusters became important symbols
of wars on insects, especially on the boll weevil.2′

Despite Howard’s predictions, and unlike airplanes, most chemical weapons
did not prove immediately impressive in fighting insects. Howard told the 1924
meeting of the Entomological Society of America that postwar collaboration be-
tween the Chemical Warfare Service and the Bureau of Entomology had produced
mountains of data of “undoubted value,” but the Chemical Warfare Service was
keeping almost all of the results secret. But in 1931 Howard laconically reported
that the experiments were “not promising, on account of the resultant damage
to vegetation,” which ended the Bureau of Entomology’s public discussion of the
war gas experiments. The exception was chloropicrin, which became a popular
fumigant for clothing, households, and grain elevators.22

The disappointing results did not derive from lack of effort. For its own reasons,
the Chemical Warfare Service devoted resources in the 1920s to the search for
insecticidal uses of war gases. Because poison gases had symbolized, for many, the
brutality and senselessness of modern warfare, post-World War I peace movements
focused much of their energy on chemical weapons. International conventions
twice almost banned use of chemical weapons in the 1920s, and even within the

20 Corley McDarment, “The Use of Airplanes to Destroy the Boll Weevil,” McClure’s Magazine, 57 (Aug.
1924), 90-102, esp. 91-92; Downs and Lemmer, “Origins of Aerial Crop Dusting,” 124, 127.

21 Ina L. Hawes and Rose Eisenberg, eds., Bibliography on Aviation and Economic Entomology (Washington,
1947), 8-9; Downs and Lemmer, “Origins of Aerial Crop Dusting,” 130-32, esp. 130; Douglas Helms, “Technolog-
ical Methods for Boll Weevil Control,” Agricultural History, 53 (Oct. 1979), 286-99.

22 L. 0. Howard, “The Needs of the World as to Entomology,” Smithsonian Institution Annual Report,
1925 (Washington, 1925), 355-72, esp. 370; Roark, Bibliography of Chloropicrin; Howard, Insect Menace, 283.

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1516 The Journal of American History March 1996

AMBUSHED ARMY

Figure 3. Old Testament writers described insects as invading armies, and subsequent
generations updated the metaphor. In 1938, an advertisement for a chemical

company suggested that rifle-toting insects stood no chance against
snipers spraying scentless insecticides. Reprinted from
Soap and Sanitary Chemicals, 14 (Feb. 1938), 80.

United States Army powerful individuals wanted to eliminate the Chemical Warfare
Service and to transfer its responsibilities to other units.213

The Chemical Warfare Service and its allies responded by emphasizing the
humanity of poison gas (which killed a smaller proportion of casualties than did
bullets and bombs) and the civilian uses of war gases, including their use as
insecticides. Borrowing a metaphor from Isaiah, the journal Chemical Warfare

23 Frederic J. Brown, Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints (Westport, 1968), 52-96; Daniel P. Jones,
“From Military to Civilian Technology: The Introduction of Tear Gas for Civil Riot Control,” Technology and
Culture, 19 (no. 2, 1978), 151-68.

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1517

reported in 1922 that chemical warriors had beaten “the sword into the plowshare.”
By emphasizing agricultural uses of war gases, the service tried to reverse its image

from agent of war to agent of peace. According to the Pittsburgh Gazette Times,
Amos Fries, chief of the Chemical Warfare Service, described his agency as doing

“peace work principally.” Since conquest of nature had long been seen as a morally

uncontroversial endeavor, insecticide projects provided an ideal way to place chemi-
cal warfare in a more positive light. An article in Chemical Warfare, for example,

stated, “Efficient offensive warfare must be developed against animal, bird and

insect life.” In 1922 the Boston Transcrzpt captured the Chemical Warfare Service’s
dissonant message in an oxymoron: “‘peaceful’ war.”24

One of the most heavily publicized “swords into plowshares” projects involved

the search, in collaboration with the Bureau of Entomology and state experiment
stations, for insecticides to kill the boll weevil. For seven years, the Chemical
Warfare Service held out hope for a solution to “the boll weevil problem, the
curse of the cotton states of the South,” to the public and Congress. In the end,
however, it had little to show. In 1926, H. W. Walker and J. E. Mills of the

Chemical Warfare Service reported that toxic gases were “ineffective against the
weevil due to its apparent ability to suspend breathing more or less at will.”25

Although of little use to farmers, the research project did help the Chemical
Warfare Service. The advantages grew partly out the service’s ability to conduct
military research while publicizing civilian applications. Substances toxic to insects

stood a good chance of being toxic to human beings, and the Chemical Warfare
Service could learn about the physiology of poisoning in human beings by studying
the effects of chemicals on insects. The Chemical Warfare Service lauded this side
of the boll weevil investigations in its 1927 report, saying that the project had
“extended our knowledge of the fundamental facts concerning the toxicity of
compounds which will prove beneficial to certain investigations undertaken with
a view to the solution of specific Chemical Warfare problems. “26

Similarly, projects on aerial dispersal of insecticides helped develop aerial dis-
persal of poison gases, which chemical warriors expected to be a prominent feature
of future wars. A 1921 pamphlet issued under the auspices of the National Research
Council predicted, “Armed with such [poisonous] liquids and solids the airman
of the next war will not need a machine gun or even bombs to attack the enemy

underneath. . . . All he need do is to attach a sprayer to the tail of his machine

24 “Chemical Warfare Making Swords into Plowshares,” Chemical Warfare, 8 (no. 2, 1922), 2-5, esp. 2; “Its
Greater Service to Peace: From Gazette Times, Pittsburgh, Pa., November 24, 1924,” ibid., 11 (no. 2, 1925),
22; “Chemical Warfare: Editorial in ‘Army and Navy Register,’ January 7, 1922,” ibid., 8 (no. 1, 1922), 20-
21, esp. 20; “Gassing the Boll-Weevil: Editorial from Boston Transcript, September 19, 1922,” ibid. (no. 10,
1922), 11; “Chemists Protest Ban on Poison Gas,” ibid., 11 (no. 8-9, 1925), 13.

25 Amos A. Fries, “Chemical Warfare Inspires Peace,” ibid., 6 (no. 5, 1921), 3-4, esp. 3. See also Amos
A. Fries, “Chemical Warfare and Its Relation to Art and Industry,” ibid., 7 (no. 4, 1921), 2-8, esp. 6-7. H. W.
Walker andJ. E. Mills, “Progress Report of Work of the Chemical Warfare Service on the Boll Weevil Anthonomus
Grandis, ” Journal of Economic Entomology, 19 (Aug. 1926), 600-601.

26 H. W. Walker, “A Brief Resume of the Chemical Warfare Service Boll Weevil Investigation,” Chemical
Warfare, 13 (no. 12, 1927), 231-37, esp. 233. Emphasis added.

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1518 The Journal of American History March 1996

and rain down poison on the earth beneath as the farmer kills the bugs on his
potato field.”27

Insecticide projects allowed the Chemical Warfare Service not only to equate
chemical weapons and insecticides but also to portray the targets of those chemi-
cals-human beings and insects-as similar. Fries made this comparison explicit
in 1922 when he said “that the human pest is the worst of all pests to handle.”

Others saw parallels between gassing insects and gassing human beings but resisted
the implication that such similarities were desirable. A 1921 piece in the New
York Herald criticized a report of potential use of poison gas against moonshiners,
saying, “In the great war the world saw too much of human beings killed or
tortured with poison gas. . . . Ordinary killing is bad enough, but that man should
treat his fellow as he treats a rat or a cockroach is inherently repugnant to all
from whom decent instincts have not fled. “28

The Chemical Warfare Service’s projects on insecticides and other civilian applica-
tions for war gases faded away in the late 1920s, perhaps because the need for
improved public relations declined after the United States rejected the 1925 Geneva
Protocol.29 Although neither the Chemical Warfare Service nor the Bureau of
Entomology discovered powerful new chemicals in the 1920s, they made heavy
use of each other’s metaphors. Portraying insect control as war built up the practical
significance of entomology, while portraying war as insect control played down
the political and moral issues associated with chemical weapons.

Mobilization in Germany, 1935-1939

In Germany, too, researchers in the interwar period saw the value of linking
research on insecticides and chemical weapons. But while heavy publicity and

meager results marked the American efforts, the opposite held true in Germany.

Out of a laboratory in the giant chemical combine I. G. Farben came little publicity
and big discoveries, including a new family of chemicals called organophosphates
with tremendous lethality to insects and human beings.

The difference in outcomes arose largely from differences in attitudes toward
mobilization. While Americans struggled with the legacy of World War I – Con-

gress went so far as to hold hearings on whether corporations stimulated the war
in order to boost profits – and the economic distress of the Great Depression,
Germany prepared its civilians and industry for war. In 1936 Adolf Hitler ordered
the armed forces to be ready for war within four years. Politicians used poison

27 “Chemistry and War: The Following Was Printed in a Pamphlet Issued under the Auspices of the National
Research Council,” ibid., 6 (no. 6, 1921), 13-15, esp. 14. This was not mere rhetoric. As entomologists developed
aerial dispersal of insecticides in the 1920s, the Chemical Warfare Service developed aerial dispersal of chemical
weapons. Brophy, Miles, and Cochrane, Chemical Warfare Service, 32.

28 Amos A. Fries, “Address before Chemical Industries Exposition, New York City,” Sept. 12, 1922, file
029.0611: Articles & Speeches-Peacetime Activities, Station Series, 1942-1945, Security Classified, Records of
the Chemical Warfare Service, U.S. Army. On the piece in the New York Herald, see “Not Poison Gas!,”
Chemical Warfare, 9 (no. 2, 1921), 22.

29 This hypothesis is the author’s. Documents searched for this study, both at the National Archives and in
journals, are silent as to why the insecticide projects ended.

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1519

gas and gas-dispersing airplanes as icons of the threat posed by other nations, and
drills with gas masks reinforced the need for discipline and technology to protect
the nation.30

Similarly, the central government mobilized chemical technology to protect the
nation from insect enemies. In 1937, the German government mandated that
farmers use insecticides. Unfortunately for this program, Germany imported most
of its insecticides. The country’s reliance on expensive imports stimulated the
German chemical industry to search for cheaper synthetic insecticides.31

The giant German chemical combine I.G. Farben developed a working relation-
ship with the Nazi leadership and became involved in the chemical warfare program.
In November 1936, I.G. Farben officers urged the military economic staff to
produce and stockpile chemical weapons. Poison gas, they argued, could determine
the outcome of the next war if it were used against civilian populations, who
would be panic-stricken and find “every door-handle, every fence, every paving
stone a weapon of the enemy.” I.G. Farben officials thought Germans were too
disciplined and technically equipped to collapse should an enemy retaliate.32

The search for new insecticides and poison gases came together in the laboratory
of I.G. Farben’s Gerhard Schrader. In fact, all German chemical laboratories
became de facto parts of the country’s chemical warfare program in 1935, when the
central government mandated the reporting of all toxic substances. The definition of
toxicity issued by the War Ministry – substances that killed when inhaled in low
concentration – left little doubt about the reason for the order. When Schrader
sprayed chemicals on insects, he was in fact screening chemical weapons. Schrader
began with a compound, chloroethyl alcohol, known to be toxic to human beings
and dogs, varied the atoms on the molecule, and screened the resulting compounds
on insects. A series of substitutions led him to a little-studied family of compounds
called organophosphates, which killed insects effectively. Schrader and a colleague
patented the generic blueprint of the molecule in 1939.53

Few people knew about this patent, for it was declared “top secret.” The basic
molecule constituted the basis not only for new insecticides but also for highly
lethal new nerve gases. On December 23, 1936, Schrader had attached cyanide

30 Rolf-Dieter MOller, “World Power Status through the Use of Poison Gas? German Preparations for Chemical
Warfare, 1919-1945,” in The German Military in the Age of Total War, ed. Wilhelm Deist (Dover, N.H.,
1985), 171-209, esp. 183; Peter Fritzsche, “Machine Dreams: Airmindedness and the Reinvention of Germany,”
American Historical Review, 98 (June 1993), 685-709.

31 “Chemicals-Use of Agricultural Insecticides Compulsory in Germany,” Commerce Reports, May 1, 1937,
p. 354; A. Buxtorf and M. Spindler, Fifteen Years of Geigy Pest Control (Basel, 1954), 8.

32 Originally, the trust emphasized quantitative superiority in traditional chemical weapons, especially mustard
gas. For the argument that German chemical companies promoted the use of poison gas because they expected
to win large contracts, see MUller, “World Power Status through the Use of Poison Gas?,” 184-86, esp. 186.
For the argument that I. G. Farben executives held ambivalent views toward Nazi war preparations, see Peter
Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era (New York, 1987), xvii.

33 The War Ministry defined an inhalation toxicity index: (death time in minutes) x (concentration in mg.
per cubic meter). The War Ministry was interested in compounds with values less than 10,000. Combined
Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee, “A New Group of War Gases, No. 23-7,” n.d., p. 7, Library Project
Files 1946-1951, Records of Assistant Chief of Staff (G-2) Intelligence, Administrative Division, U.S. Army,
RG 319 (Washington National Records Center); British Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee, “The Development
of New Insecticides, Report No. 714 (Revised),” n.d., pp. 13-14, 21-24, ibid.

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1520 The Journal of American History March 1996

to his basic organophosphate molecule. The compound killed plant lice at a
concentration of only 1 part per 200,000. When inhaled in small doses, it also
killed human beings. I.G. Farben patented the substance in February 1937 and
sent a sample to the chemical warfare section of the Army Weapons Office in
May. Schrader traveled to Berlin to demonstrate its effects. Later named tabun,
the compound was the first organophosphate nerve gas.34

In 1938, Schrader found a related compound whose potential “as a toxic war
substance” he judged to be “astonishingly high.” On animals, the substance tested
ten times as toxic as tabun. Schrader dubbed it sarin. Other nerve gases followed.
Through his superiors at I.G. Farben, Schrader reported between one and two
hundred highly toxic compounds to the government in the late 1930s and early
1940s. In 1939, Germany set up a tabun pilot plant at Munster-Lager (Heidkrug)
to make gas for the army.”

At the same time that Schrader’s work demonstrated biochemical similarities
between human beings and insects, Nazi propagandists promoted metaphorical
links between human and insect enemies. Nineteenth-century German theologians
had described Jews as “vermin, spiders, swarms of locusts, leeches, giant parasite
growths, poisonous worms.” Nazis capitalized on such long-standing metaphors,
with Hitler calling Jews a “pestilence,” “typical parasites,” and “carriers of bacilli
worse than Black Death.” As Nazis grew in power, so did their propaganda. Joseph
Goebbels said that “since the flea is not a pleasant animal we are not obliged to
keep it, protect it and let it prosper so that it may prick and torture us, but our
duty is rather to exterminate it. Likewise with the Jew.” Metaphor and “reality”
blurred in Nazi rhetoric: Jews were to be exterminated as deliberately, and literally,
as insects.36

World War II: War on Human Beings and Insects, 1940-1945

World War II, scientific discoveries, and a massive bureaucracy offered Nazi Ger-
many the chance to put the rhetoric of extermination into practice on a massive
scale. Heinrich Himmler organized ss troops to begin mass slaughter when German
armies conquered Poland, and Germany set up the first extermination center at
Chelmno, Poland, in the fall of 1939. Himmler’s troops relied on carbon monoxide
from the exhaust of vans to gas the first victims, and the center became efficient

34 Harris and Paxman, Higher Form of Killing, 57; Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Problem
of Chemical and Biological Warfare, I, 71-72; British Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee, “Development of
New Insecticides,” 23; Robert L. Metcalf, “The Impact of Organophosphorous Insecticides upon Basic and
Applied Science,” Bulletin of the Entomological Society of America, 5 (1959), 3-15.

35 Gerhard Schrader worked with Eberhard Gross, who did toxicology testing. Gross forwarded results to
Heinrich Hoerlein, director of I. G. Elberfeld, who forwarded them to Berlin. Combined Intelligence Objectives
Subcommittee, “A New Group of War Gases, No. 23-7,” pp. 3-7; Harris and Paxman, Higher Form of Killing,
58-59, esp. 58.

36 In 1884, Theodor Fritsch saw “a clear distinction between the human being and the Jew.” Eugen Duhring
had urged that “the better peoples” use “the right of war. . . . against the anti-Aryan, nay anti-human attacks
by alien parasites.” See C. C. Aronsfeld, The Text of the Holocaust: A Study of the Nazis’ Extermination
Propaganda: 1919-1945 (Marblehead, 1985), 2, 12.

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1521

enough to kill 1,000 people per day. When Himmler ordered Commander Rudolf
Hess to begin gassing Jews at Auschwitz in June 1941, Hess set up similar gas
chambers, but he found carbon monoxide too slow.37

Greater efficiency came about when the 8s began using technology more closely
suited to its rhetoric. Hess later said that fumigation of insects in the concentration
camp inspired him to try gas on prisoners in the fall of 1941, and that he used
crystals of an insecticide, Zyklon B, left by an extermination company, for the
first experiments on human beings. Zyklon B was hydrocyanic acid, one of the
substances called an “insecticide” in civilian settings and a “chemical weapon” in
military settings. During World War I, the compound had been used for both
purposes; Germany had developed hydrocyanic acid to kill lice that transmitted
typhus and used it to fumigate submarines, barracks, and prison camps. Hess first
tested Zyklon B on Soviet prisoners of war.38

The “fit” between insecticide technology and Nazi “extermination” rhetoric did
not escape notice. When the manager of the insecticide manufacturer asked the
8s procurement officer the purpose of Zyklon B shipments, he learned that the
insecticide would be used to “exterminate criminals, incurable patients, and inferior
human beings.” Much of the company’s 1943 sales of Zyklon B went to Auschwitz,
where members of the 8s crowded human victims into “shower rooms,” then
climbed onto the roof and released Zyklon B into the chambers below. According
to a Nuremberg prosecutor, a chemical firm called Degesch (which stood for
German vermin-combating corporation) shipped enough Zyklon B to Auschwitz
to kill millions of human beings.39

Indirectly, 1.G. Farben supported and profited from the 8s campaign against
Jews. I. G. Farben manufactured Degesch’s Zyklon B at its Leverkusen plant. I. G.
Farben owned 42.5 percent of Degesch, as well as one-third of Degussa, which
owned another 42.5 percent of Degesch. Several members of Degesch’s supervisory
board came from 1.G. Farben. Partly as a result of increased sales of Zyklon B,
dividends to the owners of Degesch in 1942, 1943, and 1944 were twice those in

7 They used the same method at Treblinka, near Warsaw, built in early 1941. Joseph Borkin, The Crime
and Punishment of I. G. Farben (New York, 1978), 121-22. On debates over the origins and dates of Nazi
extermination policies, see Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley, 1984); and Michael R.
Marrus, ed., The Nazi Holocaust: Historical Articles on the Destruction of European Jews, vol. III: The “Final
Solution”.’ The Implementation of Mass Murder (Westport, 1989). On the Holocaust, see, among other works,
Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army. Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York, 1991); Gerald Reitlinger,
The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945 (Northvale, 1987); and Yehuda
Bauer, A History of the Holocaust (New York, 1982).

38 Experiments in the use of hydrocyanic acid on people may have begun as early as July 1941. Reitlinger,
Final Solution, 146. Zyklon B was tested on 500 Russian prisoners of war in August 1941, according to Borkin,
Crime and Punishment of I. G. Farben, 121-22. Zyklon B was first tested on “about 850 Soviet prisoners of
war and sick inmates in September 1941,” according to Hayes, Industry and Ideology, 362.

39 The Degesch manager, Gerhard Peters, is quoted as making the comment about extermination. According
to Josiah E. DuBois Jr., a Nuremberg prosecutor of I.G. Farben defendants, in 1943, Zyklon B accounted for
70% of Degesch’s business; 90 % of that 70% went to Auschwitz; and enough gas was shipped to Auschwitz
to kill 20 million people. See Josiah E. DuBois Jr., The Devil’s Chemists: 24 Conspirators of the International
Farben Cartel Who Manufacture Wars (Boston, 1952), 213-16, esp. 214; Borkin, Crime and Punishment of
I. G. Farben, 123. Another account estimates 3.3% of Zyklon B production going to Auschwitz in 1943; 52%
of Degesch’s earnings coming from Zyklon B in 1943; and enough gas shipped to Auschwitz to gas 5.6 million
people (after subtracting the amount used on insects). See Hayes, Industry and Ideology, 361-62.

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1522 The Journal of American History March 1996

1940 and 1941. I.G. Farben was linked to the horrors of the death camps in
another way. Tabun and satin, the nerve gases developed along with insecticides
by Schrader, offered Germany new weapons of great but unmeasured power.
Guinea pigs and white rats seemed inadequate for testing the effects of nerve
gases on human beings, so, after ill-fated attempts with apes, experiments began,
using concentration camp Jews.40

Some observers believed that metaphorical redefinition of human enemies as
animals, including insects, also facilitated bloodletting in the Pacific theater. When
describing Japanese soldiers and civilians, American propagandists and soldiers
employed vermin metaphors more often than when describing Germans. Ernie
Pyle noted this difference in 1945, when he visited the Pacific after seeing some
of the worst fighting in Europe: “In Europe we felt our enemies, horrible and
deadly as they were, were still people. But out here I gathered that the Japanese
were looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people
feel about cockroaches or mice.” Claire Chennault, a retired United States Army
officer and adviser to the air force of Chiang Kai-shek, later said that in 1940 he
had wanted to “burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks
on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu. ” In GodIs My Co-Pilot,
Col. Robert Scott Jr. of the United States Army Air Force wrote that every time he
killed a “Jap” he felt he “had stepped on another black-widow spider or scorpion. ” 41

Why did Americans describe theJapanese as insects and other vermin? Historians
have noted that Americans had previously feared a “yellow peril” and discriminated
against Asians, and that in World War II they found the Japanese approach to
war brutal and irrational. Japanese treatment of prisoners of war (symbolized by
the Bataan death march) contributed to the view that the Japanese behaved in
subhuman ways.42

Whatever the cause, seeing enemies as vermin must have made it seem “natural”
to talk of extermination. Adm. William F. Halsey congratulated troops who
captured Peleliu in 1944: “The sincere admiration of the entire Third Fleet is
yours for the hill[-]blasting, cave[-]smashing extermination of 11,000 slant-eyed
gophers.” The novelist Herman Wouk, who experienced World War II aboard a
destroyer in the South Pacific, later wrote:

This cold-bloodedness, worthy of a horseman of Genghis Khan, was quite
strange in a pleasant little fellow like Ensign Keith. Militarily, of course, it was
an asset beyond price. Like most of the naval executioners at Kwajalein, he

40 DuBois, Devil’s Chemists, 213. I.G. Farben had five of eleven seats, according to Borkin, Crime and
Punishment of I. G. Farben, 121, 132. I.G. Farben had three seats on the administrative committee (perhaps
the supervisory board described by Borkin), according to Hayes, Industry and Ideology, 361-62. Production of
Zyklon B rose from 242 short tons in 1940 to 321 in 1942 and 411 in 1943; it declined to 231 in 1944. See
ibid., 362.

41 John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York, 1986). For Ernie
Pyle’s remark, see Cameron, American Samurai, 1; for Claire Chennault’s and Robert Scott’s, see Sherry, Rise
of American Air Power, 101-2, 134.

42 Dower, War without Mercy, 77-180; Cameron, American Samurai, 98-129. How much weight to attach
to various factors in causing American contempt for Japanese continues to be debated, for example, in a conflict
over a scuttled Smithsonian Institution exhibit. Washington Post, Sept. 26, 1994, p. Al.

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1523

seemed to regard the enemy as a species of animal pest. From the grim and
desperate taciturnity with which the Japanese died, they seemed on their side
to believe they were contending with an invasion of large armed ants. This
obliviousness on both sides to the fact that the opponents were human beings
may perhaps be cited as the key to the many massacres of the Pacific war.43

American forces did not rely on poison gas against the Japanese; other weapons
(such as artillery and mortar fire) made “methodical extermination” of Japanese
soldiers feasible. Some tacticians held out the hope, however, that use of poison
gas would raise fears of “extermination” among Japanese civilians. An Army
Operations Division report noted, “Mass employment of gas throughout Japan
will bring home with great force to the Japanese people the hopelessness of
continuing the war and emphasize to them that their only choice is between
capitulation and extermination.”44

Metaphorical comparisons of insects to human enemies and of insecticides to
military weapons laced the speech of civilians as well as soldiers. The Rohm &
Haas Company, for example, published an advertisement in 1945 that implicitly
compared “Japs” to flies, bullets to insecticides, and rifles to spray guns. In other
cases, chemical companies urged consumers to see insecticides, not as bullets, but
as chemical weapons. Monsanto, for example, advertised that “chemical warfare
defeats moths and larvae.” In a more lighthearted vein, a chemical perfuming
company, van Ameringen-Haebler, published an advertisement showing a woman
spraying insecticides on a mask-wearing man in the “war on the home front.”45

Combatants (except, probably, Japan) did not use gas against human enemies
on battlefields in World War II. On the insect front, however, technology made
it feasible to annihilate enemies. In 1939, a chemist at the Swiss chemical company
Geigy had found that DDT killed insects at low doses for long periods and had
low acute toxicity to humans. In 1941, Geigy offered DDT to its subsidiary in the
United States, but the subsidiary did not find it of much interest. DDT’s only
known use was to kill the Colorado potato beetle, which the subsidiary considered
well controlled with lead arsenate. Then World War II prompted the (renamed)
United States Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine to search for chemicals
to protect soldiers from louse-borne typhus. Geigy gave a sample of DDT to the
bureau in 1942, and entomologists found DDT powder ideal for killing lice. With
help from the War Production Board, Geigy and other companies began making
DDT in the United States for the armed forces. After it helped quell a typhus

4 Cameron, American Samurai, 1; Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny (Garden City, 1951), 240. On the
importance of Herman Wouk’s World War II experience for The Caine Mutiny, see Washington Post, May 16,
1995, p. C1.

4 The phrase “methodical extermination” is from an official history of the Guadalcanal campaign quoted
in Cameron, American Samurai, 122. Operations Division, “U.S. Chemical Warfare Policy,” n.d., quoted in
John Ellis van Courtland Moon, “Project SPHINX: The Question of the Use of Gas in the Planned Invasion of
Japan,” Journal of Strategic Studies, 12 (Sept. 1989), 303-23, esp. 305.

4 Rohm & Haas, “Japs or Flies,” advertisement, Soap and Sanitary Chemicals (May 1945), 110; ibid. Monsanto
Chemicals, “Chemical Warfare Defeats Moths and Larvae,” advertisement, ibid., (Sept. 1944), 4; van Ameringen-
Haebler, “War on the Home Front,” advertisement, ibid. (Aug. 1944), 79.

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1524 The Journal of American History March 1996

outbreak in war-torn Naples in the winter of 1943-1944, DDT became known as
the miracle chemical of World War II.46

The campaign against another insect-borne disease, malaria, revitalized links
between insect control and chemical warfare. Entomologists at the Bureau of
Entomology and Plant Quarantine found that DDT killed mosquitoes well, but
the standard way to disperse insecticides from the air-as dusts-worked poorly
with DDT. The entomologists then tried spraying DDT from the air as a liquid.
This method was new to entomology, but not to chemical warfare. The Bureau
of Entomology and Plant Quarantine began working with the United States Army
Air Forces in 1943 to adapt chemical warfare tanks and nozzles to DDT. By 1945
the armed services could blanket “thousands of acres” with DDT using airplanes,
from small combat planes to large transports. Chemical Warfare Service pilots
and planes sprayed DDT to control mosquitoes in the malaria-ridden Pacific. As
in other campaigns, propagandists unified images of insect and human enemies.
One anti-malaria cartoon portrayedJapanese soldiers and mosquitoes as two aspects
of a common enemy, with mosquitoes causing eight times as many casualties as
did Japanese soldiers.47

Military success against insect enemies during World War II inspired entomolo-
gists to call for similar wars on insects at home. E. 0. Essig used his December
1944 presidential address to the American Association of Economic Entomologists
to call for “An All Out Entomological Program.” Noting that the world had never
been so conscious of insect control as during World War II, Essig urged that
entomologists seize “the great opportunities” and create “a new day” for entomol-
ogy. He thought one of the “most promising prospects” was “the strong emphasis
being placed on the complete extermination of not only newly introduced pests
but also those of long standing in the country. “48

46 Scholars trace restraint in the use of gas to deterrence (both sides feared retaliation in kind) and dislike
of gas by military officers (who found it hard to control and use decisively). Reports charged that Japan used
poison gas in China in the 1930s and 1940s. Brown, Chemical Warfare, 288-89; Harris and Paxman, Higher
Form of Killing, 148-49; Jeffrey W. Legro, “Cooperation within Conflict: Submarines, Strategic Bombing,
Chemical Warfare, and Restraint in World War II” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1992);
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Problem of Chemical and Biological Warfare, I, 147-57. On
DDT, see Victor Froelicher, “The Story of DDT,” Soap and Sanitary Chemicals (July 1944), 115; E. F. Knipling,
“Insect Control Investigations of the Orlando, Fla., Laboratory during World War II,” in Annual Report of the
Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, 1948 (Washington, 1948), 331-48, esp. 335-37; R. C. Roark
to P. N. Annand, Jan. 6, 1945, History of Developments-Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine-
World War 2, 1945, History of Defense and War Activities, 1941-50, Correspondence and Reports, Records
of the Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine; “Publications,” Soap and Sanitary Chemicals (May 1944),
107; and Dunlap, DDT, 62.

47 Knipling, “Insect Control Investigations,” 338; Brooks E. Kleber and Dale Birdsell, The Chemical Warfare
Service: Chemicals in Combat (Washington, 1966), 319; P. A. Harper, E. T. Lisansky, and B. E. Sasse, “Malaria
and Other Insect-Borne Diseases in the South Pacific Campaign,” American Journal of Tropical Medicine,
Supplement, 27 (no. 3, 1947), 1-67, esp. 36. Civilian and military researchers were linked by the Office of
Scientific Research and Development Committee on Insect and Rodent Control and the National Academy of
Science-National Research Council Coordinating Committee on Insect Control. See Leo Finkelstein and C. G.
Schmitt, History of Research and Development of the Chemical Warfare Service in World War II (1 July
1940-31 December 1945), vol. XIX, pt. 1: Insecticides, Miticides, and Rodenticides (Army Chemical Center
[Edgewood?], Md., 1949), 26-27.

48 E. 0. Essig, “An All Out Entomological Program,” Journal of Economic Entomology, 38 (Feb. 1945),
1-8, esp. 6, 8.

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1525

Sczence News Letter summarized Essig’s talk as calling for “Total war against
man’s insect enemies, with the avowed object of total extermination instead of
mere ‘control.”‘ Although Essig had not mentioned DDT, Science News Letter
emphasized that DDT was a “powerful agent in these postwar wars to make crops
less costly and personal life safer, more comfortable.” Popular Mechanics also
thought that the home front would become more like a battlefront. In an article

titled “Our Next World War-Against Insects,” it reported that “Uncle Sam,
fighting one World War, is preparing for the next -and this one will be a long
and bitter battle to crush the creeping, wriggling, flying, burrowing billions whose
numbers and depredations baffle human comprehension.”49

Publicists for chemical companies showed no doubt that DDT would bring
enormous benefits to civilians, but entomologists tempered their hopes with con-
cern. They believed DDT was appropriate on battlefronts, where risks of insect-borne
diseases ran high, and they hoped that DDT could be used in agriculture. But
they found that DDT could create as well as solve problems, by killing off predators
and parasites that normally kept pests under control. Results of military tests lent
credence to concerns about DDT’s effects on other “non-target” species. A naval
medical officer reported that the first use of DDT in the Pacific had led to “complete
destruction of plant and animal life.”50

Worries found expression in metaphors that echoed criticisms of chemical war-
fare. Col. J. W. Scharff, a British malariologist who praised the role of DDT in
protecting troops from malaria, complained, “DDT is such a crude and powerful
weapon that I cannot help regarding the routine use of this material from the air
with . . . horror and aversion.” The nature writer Edwin Way Teale shared Scharff’s
distress: “Given sufficient insecticide, airplanes and lackwit officials after the war,
and we will be off with yelps of joy on a crusade against all the insects.” Teale
was sure of the result of this “bug-blitz binge”: a “conservation headache of historic
magnitude.” The Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine’s H. H. Stage
and C. F. W. Muesebeck fretted, “Biological deserts may be produced by heavy
treatments of DDT and these would be, of course, highly undesirable.”51

49 “Total Insect War Urged,” Science News Letter, Jan. 6, 1945, p. 5 (emphasis added); “Our Next World
War-Against Insects,” Popular Mechanics, 81 (April 1944), 66-70, esp. 67.

50 Subcommittee on Dispersal, Minutes of the Fourth Meeting, Feb. 18-19, 1946, p. 18, Miscellaneous
Minutes and Conferences, Insect Control, Committee on Insect Control (OSRD), Minutes (Bulletins) and Reports
(Drawer 7), Committees on Military Medicine, Division of Medical Sciences, 1940-1945, Records of the National
Research Council (National Academy of Sciences Archives, Washington, D.C.); Frederick S. Philips, “Medical
Division Report No. 13, A Review of the Biological Properties and Insecticidal Applications of DDT,” Nov. 22,
1944, p. 2, USA Typhus Commission-DDT- General, USA Typhus Commission, Records of the Army Surgeon
General, RG 112 (Washington National Records Center).

51Special Joint Meeting of the Army Committee for Insect and Rodent Control and the Office of Scientific
Research and Development, Insect Control Committee, Minutes, Jan. 12, 1945, p. 7, Report 39, OSRD Insect
Control Committee Reports, vol. 1, Minutes (Bulletins) and Reports (Drawer 7), Committees on Military Medicine,
Division of Medical Sciences, 1940-1945, Records of the National Research Council; Edwin Way Teale, “DDT,”
Nature Magazzine, 38 (March 1945), 120; H. H. Stage and C. F. W. Muesebeck, “Insects Killed by DDT Aerial
Spraying in Panama,” July 1, 1945, p. 1, National Research Council Insect Control Committee Report 108,
osRD Insect Control Committee Reports-Numbered-vol. 2, Minutes (Bulletins) and Reports (Drawer 7),
Committees on Military Medicine, Division of Medical Sciences, 1940-1945, Records of the National Re-
search Council.

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1526 The Journal of American History March 1996

Although federal entomologists thought it premature to recommend DDT for

unrestricted civilian use, no peacetime government agency had the authority to
keep DDT off the market. On August 1, 1945, the War Production Board allowed

manufacturers to sell DDT, once military needs were met, without restriction. The
United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima five days later, then another
on Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered. (A woman from Milwaukee used an animal
metaphor to express her wish that destruction had been more thorough: ‘.’When
one sets out to destroy vermin, does one try to leave a few alive in the nest?
Certainly not!”) The War Production Board soon lifted all restrictions on DDT
sales. Declaring that “the war against winged pests was under way,” Time magazine
announced DDT’s release for civilian use on the same page where it published
photographs of the first atomic explosion.52

A postwar “insecticide revolution” began, with DDT and its relatives leading
the way. Meanwhile, intelligence teams combing through records of the German

chemical industry uncovered Schrader’s work on organophosphates. They publi-
cized information about insecticides while keeping secret news of the closely related
nerve gases. Even as organophosphates opened a new chapter in the history of
chemical weaponry, such organophosphates as parathion joined DDT in revolution-
izing pest control in agriculture. Sales of insecticides soared, replacing earlier
methods of pest control that relied on preventing insect attacks.53

The rhetoric of war pervaded this revolution. On the first anniversary of the
bombing of Hiroshima, Rohm & Haas, which earlier had compared “Japs” to
flies, used a full-page photograph of a mushroom cloud to publicize DDT. Industrial
Management Corporation sold a war-developed technology for dispersing DDT
called “bug bombs” (forerunners of aerosol cans). The name of the DDT bomb,
“Insect-O-Blitz,” alluded to the German term for fast, mechanized warfare and

to bombing of English cities. As Modern Packaging noted, “The Bug Bomb derives
its name both from its devastating effect on insect life and its appearance.” Coupled
with DDT, this new weapon promised to play a central role in the “postwar wars”
on insects: “One malaria authority has stated that, given sufficient aerosol bombs
and unlimited funds, he can wipe malaria off the earth within 20 years after the

52 In July 1945, federal entomologists said they wanted to wait for results of that summer’s experiments
before making a recommendation about civilian uses of DDT, but the War Production Board, which controlled
distribution, left it up to manufacturers to decide DDT’s fate. They decided to lift restrictions. “WPB Lifts
Restrictions on DDT,” Soap and Sanitary Chemicals (Aug. 1945), 125; “DDT Insecticides Rushed on Market,”
ibid. (Sept. 1945), 124A-C; DDT Producers Industry Advisory Committee Meeting Summary, July 25, 1945,
pp. 3-4, file 535.61105, Policy Documentation File, Records of the War Production Board, RG 179 (National
Archives, Washington, D.C.); Leonie M. Cole to editor, Milwaukee Journal, Aug. 16, 1945, quoted in Boyer,
By the Bomb’s Early Light, 185; “War on Insects,” Time, Aug. 27, 1945, p. 65.

53 Biology-based methods of preventing insect attacks included biological control (importing insect predators
and parasites) and cultural control (changing crop patterns to disrupt the life cycles of pests). Whether chemical
insecticides “triumphed” over alternative methods of pest control before 1920 or after World War II is debated.
See Thomas R. Dunlap, “The Triumph of Chemical Pesticides in Insect Control, 1890-1920,” Environmental
Review, 1 (no. 5, 1978), 38-47; and Perkins, Insects, Experts, and the Insecticide Crisis, 11-13. On organophos-
phates, see Metcalf, “Impact of Organophosphorous Insecticides.” There are two versions of the official British
report on Gerhard Schrader’s research, with the nerve gas information censored from the “revised” version.
British Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee, “Development of New Insecticides.” On intelligence teams, seeJohn
Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford, 1990).

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1527

war.” In its advertisement for DDT, S. B. Penick & Company called for women to
join a domestic version of World War II, “the continued battle of the home front.”54

Condusion

Publicists for S. B. Penick and other advertisers surely saw their cries for a “battle
of the home front” as metaphorical. Human beings waged “real” war against each
other, after all, not against bugs. But the frequent use of military metaphors in
insecticide advertisements, like the use of insect metaphors in warfare, highlighted
similarities in ways that human beings dealt with two-legged and six-legged enemies
in the first half of the twentieth century.

Wars on human and insect enemies both focused on enemies, and especially
enemies that did not respect boundaries. Once erected, international borders,
fencerows, and the walls of homes created the rights of citizens, farmers, and
homeowners to protect their land and homes against “invading” enemies – includ-
ing, ironically, some longtime residents. In Europe, Nazis blamed Jews for almost
all of the nation’s ills, deported them, and killed them. The United States confined
American citizens of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps. American farmers
referred to insects in fields as “trespassers,” even though most insects had arrived
long before the farmers.55 The emphasis on protection against outsiders helps
explain the popularity of extermination, or driving beyond boundaries, as a term
for dealing with both human and insect enemies.

Like physical structures, mental divisions between human beings and nature
created useful boundaries, especially because one could move human beings and
animals from one side of the boundary to the other. Describing insects as national
enemies elevated them from the category of nuisance to that of national threat.
This was not always an exaggeration. In the Pacific, for example, malaria-carrying
mosquitoes caused more casualties than did enemy soldiers, making them important
dangers for armies. Movement of people into the category of animal had conse-
quences of far more horrifying significance. Wouk emphasized that the ability to
redefine a human being as an insect was an “asset beyond price” in a military
setting, but an asset that resulted in “massacres.” And Nazis surely knew exactly
what they were doing when they used “extermination” to describe their campaign
against Jews.

Not coincidentally, human beings developed similar technologies to kill human
and insect enemies. In many cases, farmers and armies used identical chemicals
(chloropicrin and hydrogen cyanide) to kill their enemies. In others, closely related
chemicals (arsenicals and organophosphates) served both purposes. For chemical
warriors, at least, these similarities came as no surprise. William Porter, chief of the

5′ Rohm & Haas, “Fastest Action,” advertisement, Soap and Sanitary Chemicals (Aug. 1946), 134; Industrial
Management Corporation, “Insect-O-Blitz,” advertisement, ibid. (Dec. 1946), 146; “Bug Bomb,” Modern Packag-
ing, 18 (Oct. 1944), 98-102, esp. 98.

55 U.S. Entomological Commission, First Annual Report of the United States Entomological Commission
for the Year 1877 Relating to the Rocky Mountain Locust (Washington, 1878), 115.

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1528 The Journal of American History March 1996

Chemical Warfare Service, noted in 1944, “The fundamental biological principles of
poisoning Japanese, insects, rats, bacteria and cancer are essentially the same.”56
The development of common technologies relied on alliances, usually organized

by nation-states, between civilian and military institutions. In the United States,
the Bureau of Entomology collaborated intermittently with the Chemical Warfare
Service from World War I through World War II. In Germany, I.G. Farben
conducted research for the German army. The world wars forged especially close
links between military and scientific institutions, and the effort to maintain such
links became a hallmark of the post-World War II era.

Although linked metaphorically, technologically, and institutionally, wars on
insects and human beings differed in several respects. First, control of poisons
rested in different hands. Almost anyone could use insecticides, but chemical
weapons remained a monopoly of military institutions. Moreover, in the 1920s
many nations signed international agreements designed to limit the use of poison
gas in warfare. No international agencies tried to limit the use of insecticides
during this period.57

Second, insecticides and chemical weapons followed different trajectories in
World War II. Insecticides became “miracle chemicals” used widely to halt insect-
borne diseases. With the probable exception of Japan, however, combatants did
not use poison gas on battlefields. The primary use of chemicals for extermination
of human beings came in the death camps of the Holocaust. After World War
II, nuclear weapons eclipsed chemical weapons as the primary target of international
arms control efforts.

Third, morality never entered into discussions of killing insects, while morality
often figured in debates about human warfare. In fact, moral concerns help to
explain the popularity of insect metaphors for human enemies. Western thought
has long regarded conquest of nature as a moral duty, rather than a moral dilemma,
and conquest of insects offered an especially useful metaphor for human warfare.
The implicit appropriateness of eliminating natural enemies entirely, exemplified
in the moral neutrality of the term extermination, suggests that ideas about
complete conquest of nature contributed to the ideology of war on human beings.

The rhetoric of exterminating or annihilating enemies-whether insect or hu-
man -antedated the twentieth century. The first half of this century, however,
saw the development of technology and institutions that enabled nations to kill
enemies with chemical compounds more quickly, and over a wider area, than ever
before. In practice, insecticides found far wider use than did chemical weapons,
but chemicals played a central role in extermination of human beings in the
Holocaust. And, as the United States Army document about potential use of gas
in Japan suggested, chemical weapons could elicit fears of “extermination.”58

56 William N. Porter to Vannevar Bush, Sept. 30, 1944, file 710, Office of Scientific Research and Development,
Miscellaneous Series, 1942-1945, Records of the Chemical Warfare Service, United States Army.

17 England briefly threatened to ban import of American apples because of fears about residues of arsenical
insecticides. James Whorton, Before Silent Spring: Pesticides and Public Policy in Pre-DDT America (Princeton,
1974), 133-35.

S8 Chemical weapons continue to be feared as weapons of mass destruction, and efforts to eliminate them
continue. See Washington Post, Jan. 14, 1993, p. A24.

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War against Human and Insect Enemies 1529

Similar in some ways, Germany and the United States were in contrast in others.
In the 1930s, they differed in their commitment to mobilization, which contributed

to Germany’s success in finding new chemical weapons. During World War II,

Nazi Germany employed chemicals on a horrific scale to exterminate human beings
but had little success with new insecticides. The United States, on the other hand,

did not use chemical weapons to kill human beings in World War II (except
accidentally) and did not make genocide a national policy. It did develop an
effective new insecticide (DDT).59

By the end of World War II, then, lines between human and insect enemies,
military and civilian institutions, and military and civilian technology had all been

blurred. Annihilation of national and natural enemies had become realistic on a
large scale, a reality both comforting and disturbing to people who lived in
the post-World War II era. The twin insecurities raised by military and civilian
technology illustrated that war and environmental change were not separate endeav-
ors, but rather related aspects of life in the twentieth century.

59 In 1943, German airplanes attacked an American ship in the harbor at Bari, Italy. Mustard gas in the
ship’s hold escaped and killed about 1,000 Americans and Italians. Institute of Medicine, Veterans at Risk: The
Health Effects of Mustard Gas and Lewisite (Washington, 1993), 43-44.

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• Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

The Journal of American History, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Mar., 1996) pp. 1385-1780
Volume Information [pp. ]
Front Matter [pp. ]
Unrest: Manorial Society and the Market in the Hudson Valley, 1780-1850 [pp. 1393-1424]
Substituting Law for the Lash: Emancipation and Legal Formalism in a Mississippi County Court [pp. 1425-1451]
German Weltpolitik and the American Two-Front Dilemma: The “Japanese Peril” in German-American Relations, 1904-1917 [pp. 1452-1477]
Soldiers of Democracy: Black Texans and the Fight for Citizenship, 1917-1921 [pp. 1478-1504]
“Speaking of Annihilation”: Mobilizing for War Against Human and Insect Enemies, 1914-1945 [pp. 1505-1529]
Book Reviews
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Research and Reference Tools: Reviews
Review Essays: Recent Reference Works in Women’s History
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Research and Reference Tools
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Annotations [pp. 1687-1691]
Book Notices [pp. 1691-1692]
Letters to the Editor [pp. 1693-1699]
Announcements [pp. 1700]
Recent Scholarship [pp. 1701-1740]
Back Matter [pp. ]