accurate definition of everything that man extracts from the surface or the bowels of the earth.
2 * This idea, with reference to The King’s Two Bodies by Ernst Kantorowicz, was first formulated by Fernando Coronil in his study of Venezuela, where oil becomes the state’s ‘second body’ (Coronil, The Magical State).
Notes
1 1 Tacitus, The Annals, Book 6, secs 13, 19; Panchenko, ‘Tiberius i finansovyi krizis v Rime’.
2 2 Auty, Resource Abundance and Economic Development; Dunning, Crude Democracy.
3 3 Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities.
4 4 On the staple theory, see Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada, and Watson, Marginal Man: The Dark Vision of Harold Innis; on the fetishism of commodities, see Marx, Capital, and Pietz, ‘Fetishism and materialism’.
5 5 Latour, Politics of Nature, p. 33.
6 6 Hardin, ‘The tragedy of the commons’.
7 7 Cannan, ‘The origin of the law of diminishing returns’; Rainert, How Rich Countries Have Been Enriched; Saito, Karl Marx’s Ecosocialism.
8 8 Keynes, Economic Consequences of the Peace, in Collected Writings, Vol. 2, p. 6.
9 9 Two books were the most significant for the material turn: Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel, and Mitchell, Carbon Democracy. See also Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Miller, Cultural Histories of the Material World; LeCain, The Matter of History.
10 10 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 784.
11 11 Benjamin, ‘On the concept of history’, in Selected Writings, p. 389.
12 12 Ibid., p. 405.
13 13 Voltaire, Candide, p. 2.
PART ONE HISTORY OF MATTER
Good history writing has always interwoven different peoples and disciplines. The link between resources and institutions lies at the deepest level of this interweaving. Social history aspires to reconstruct ‘history from below’, but it has usually ignored the very lowest level – raw materials. Endowed with their own life, each and every one of these commodities makes a rich and fascinating subject for historical study. Together with people, they have also been agents of our joint history. ‘For men and commodities are the real strength of any community,’ wrote David Hume.1 Agency is always partial. No single agent is completely autonomous – neither man, nor nature, nor a sovereign ruler. A sack of grain, a bale of cotton, a barrel of oil – they all have their agency. The history of resources is the real history from below: you can’t go any lower. And this history is full of its own distinctive agency. It is not a reductive explanation of human experience. On the contrary, I wish to learn how to find partners in a grain of wheat, a fibre of hemp or a lump of coal.
Addressing a huge variety of natural resources, I will explore their economic, cultural and political lives from the bottom up – from the earth to the state. Each chapter takes four steps in this upward movement. First, we look at the inherent characteristics of the raw material. Second, we learn about the methods of processing it, which define the specifics of the labour required. Third, we switch our attention to the institutions which organise this labour and which derive income from this material. Fourth, we engage with the political features of the state which depends on the given resource.
Note
1 1 Hume, Political Essays, p. 124.
ONE Cry Fire
Our forebears migrated from the African savannah about 70,000 years ago. Hairless skin and the ability to sweat from all parts of the body allowed them to adjust to living in the subtropics. They were not particularly swift but had stamina: over a long distance, a man could catch up with almost any mammal. Having settled in the wetlands and coastal areas, humans learnt to make use of sticks and stones and to domesticate animals. Climate change forced people to migrate in search of new spaces. They soon learnt to cross open water, to catch fish and to seek a better life.
Not slash, but burn
Human migration northward was made possible by a revolutionary technology – the mastery of fire. Having learnt to walk upright, this particularly successful primate could now use his hands to strike a spark from a flint and set fire to dry grass. By gathering and burning the first non-edible resources – brushwood and reeds – people were able to control the temperature in their lairs or caves. Now that they were able to cook food over a fire, people consumed seeds, beans and bones that they couldn’t digest raw. Practically everything that humans have made subsequently – terracotta and brick, bronze and iron, salt and sugar, petrol and plastic – they have made in collaboration with fire. In the myth of Prometheus, the hero steals fire from the gods, hides it in the hollow centre of a reed and carries it to humanity. The gods’ revenge is long-drawn-out and cruel. All the details of the myth are significant – from the hero on the frontier between two worlds to the humble reed, with which the whole story begins.
The mastery of fire was the first practical act in which brain was more important than brawn. After a fire, forests were more productive, there was more game and the predators disappeared. A fire in the hearth tamed humankind. Armed with fire, humankind could tame nature. These hunters, whose only weapons consisted of cudgels or sticks, burnt forests to create great swathes of natural golf courses. This is how the American prairies were created, and probably the Eurasian steppes as well. For their physical survival, each human being needs to consume between 2,000 and 4,000 kilocalories per day. The production of a daily portion of the modern, meat-rich diet takes approximately 10,000 kilocalories of solar energy. Human muscles convert food into work, but most of the energy we use comes from elsewhere. In ancient Rome the consumption of non-food energy, most of it through the burning of wood, reached 25,000 kilocalories per person. In the modern world the energy consumption per person is 50,000 kilocalories per day, and in developed countries it is five times higher.1 In 1943, the anthropologist Leslie White defined culture as the harnessing of energy with the help of technology.2 Solar energy, which reaches our wicked world straight from the nearest star, is available to human beings in various forms: wind, water currents, firewood, fossil fuel and food. No energy is produced by human beings; it all comes from the sun. The only exception to this rule of thumb is nuclear energy; perhaps that’s why it is difficult for humans to harness it.
We learnt to cut wood and plough the earth once we had acquired the ability to attach a stone tip to a wooden handle. Wood was abundant, but rare flint was needed for the tip. In axes, crude stone was replaced with flint in about 4000 bce. Found all over Europe, flint axes and knives were produced in great quantities – about half a million every year. But there were very few flint mines. Axe heads originating from one flint deposit in the Alps have been found all over Western Europe. Axes from central Poland have been discovered 800 kilometres away.3 So the earliest human tool, the flint axe, already combined two types of raw material – the easily replaceable stick and the precious flint, which was handed down from one generation to another, travelling huge distances on its way. The owners had to protect the sites where flint was found, and the first property rights developed. Others had to produce something of value to exchange: a flock of sheep, for example, or cured hides. This is how trade began.
For almost all of history, people lived in autonomous groups, communities or tribes. They fed themselves from the land on which they lived. When they had exhausted it they moved on to another plot and again burnt the forest. Fire helped to produce excellent harvests. Mature trees survived forest fires, and cereals or vegetables were sown around them. Field and forest existed side by side, and animals