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Strengthening the Capitalist Beast?

Environmental Historians on the Expansion and Growth of Global Markets Scott Abel A hideous beast stretched its foul tentacles from the shores of Europe and the United States, reigning death and destruction on whatever it touches. According to some environmental historians that analogy is similar to how the global market treated disadvantaged people. But do most environmental historians see the global market as a purely a bad thing? Within the expansion of global market there are three subtopics identified as labor, commodities, and illness. These subthemes are observable in a manner that presents the expanding market as evil or both good and bad. Labor can be regarded as exploitation or opportunity from the expanding global market. The market turned nature into commodities, robbing the planet of its resources, but also allowed the restoration of the environment. Illness can be a byproduct of the expansion of the market because with trade also comes diseases. Some historians looked at disease as going in one direction, but others saw societies exchanging diseases. Historians looked at global the market as sometimes providing preventive measures and treatments for diseases. Some environmental historians viewed the expanding global market as bad, if not evil, but others took a more nuanced approach by stating both good and bad things happened because of the expanding global market. Global environmental historians looked at regions and territories that act as microcosms for the rest of the globe. Generally, environmental historians who wrote in the global perspective tended to examine the damaging side of the global market. Global environmental historians usually wrote their stories while maintaining some sort of political ideology, which required legislative reform to combat the damaged caused by

the global market. The authors wrote arguments that tried to push the reader toward their own political beliefs because most global histories have a political message or argument. If any global environmental historian showed a nuanced approach, it would detract from the authors argument because the work would present the other side of the argument, which usually weakens his own. Mike Davis regarded the labor system in India under the British as exploitive and oppressive as a result of the global market and capitalism. Davis argued that the global market caused a massive famine and focused on the suffering of the common laborer, because the British exported food grown in India despite the famine.i The British colonial system set up a work-for-food program that insufficiently fed the laborers and led to death.ii Davis was a Marxist or socialist, so he wanted to show the capitalist system as miserable as possible. He saw resistance to the capitalist-induced famines, not as nationalist uprising, but as class struggles. For example, the merchant caste in India stayed prosperous while the poor died of famine and Chinese merchants exploited the poor by gouging grain prices.iii These instances showed Davis as blaming the market system for the famine, thus depicting it as evil. If he showed balance and brought more benefits to the capitalist labor system, his argument would weaken because the global market system would not be as evil as his portrayal. Portraying the damage done by the global market supported his theory that the West created the third-world through exploitation. Joachim Radkau showed the constantly changing relationship between humanity, politics, and the environment, along with the balance between sustainable nature and the creation of commodities. Radkau blamed the expanding market as being part of the

reason for the overexploitation of nature and showed some of the backlash from protoenvironmentalists. Still, he depicted the expansion of the markets in the latter half of the twentieth century as problematic and in need of regulation, because of the environmental damage caused by cheap oil.iv Cheap oil permitted a further disconnect with the natural world and drove humanity away from sustainable living. The wave of new independent states in the postwar era became problematic because new nations repealed environmental laws and allowed a growth in population.v Nationalism, along with the need to obtain and exploit new materials, pulled humanity away from the old systems in place to prevent the overexploitation of nature. The expanded markets because of cheap oil and new nations allowed for increased levels of commodities at the expense of nature. Rakau illustrated this because he wanted to stress the importance of new regulation and the need for regulation to make humanity impact on the planet sustainable. John McNeill portrayed the rapid change humanity inflicted upon the environment in the twentieth century and what it meant. McNeill described how nations turned their environment into commodities more so than ever before. The Aswan Dam in Egypt altered the Nile to provide the Egyptians with the commodity of electricity and nickel mining in New Caledonia caused social and economic problems that will likely last for a long time. Afterwards, regulators addressed the problems caused by careless mining in New Caledonia that caused so much damage.vi McNeill showed that neglecting the environment and focusing on the selling of commodities caused great problems throughout the twentieth century and that the negative effects must be addressed before it is too late. The historian examined such disasters because he wanted to show how the expansion of the global market in the twentieth century cannot be repeated in the twenty-

first. Problems caused to the global environment resulted in the need for political change through more regulation. William McNeill revealed the dark side of the expanding global markets through the transmissions of diseases by trade with distant lands. The expansion of the market through new trade routes, increased trade, and faster transit allowed for the spread of diseases. For example, steamships brought diseases to new places because the shorter transit period disallowed enough time for the bacteria to perish.vii McNeill declared the flow of diseases went from the large populations, particularly in Europe, India, and China, to lands of few populations because parasites could only thrive with a certain population level.viii McNeill related politics to disease by calling the large powers macroparastic, in large part because of the development of the cannon as a weapon that for centuries was bought by a select few.ix He depicted disease as just another weapon in the arsenal of the wealthy powers dominating the global market to dominate the weak. Disease was a consequence of the global market and William McNeill wanted the more prominent application of disease in global history by enhancing the effect of disease on political history. Therefore, showing disease as restricting or holding back the larger powers would deter other historian from examining the subject. Comparative historians such as Stuart Banner, Ian Tyrell, and Harold Platt wrote about the global market in a manner that brought out its advantages and disadvantages. The comparative historians needed to show the similarities and differences between separate societies. To portray the market as always bad negates the principles of comparing and contrasting because, different entities within a larger system, such as the global market, do not always have opposing interests. Therefore, the global market,

essentially a system of exchange, must benefit someone at one time or another within each case. Each comparative historian showed benefits, along with the detractions because this was the essence of their comparative histories. To declare that two historic situations as the same event in different places would be overly simplistic, even if the ultimate result was virtually the same. Stuart Banner in Possessing the Pacific discussed some elements of labor and the global market. Australias aboriginal population suffered greatly at the hands of the English because according to English law, they did not have the rights to their land.x The aboriginals saw foreigners take their land, even though their families had previous claims to it.xi Therefore, Banner implied that aboriginal labor suffered, because they lost their hunting and gathering lands to the British settlers. He also illustrated aspects of Hawaiian contact with the labor markets of the Europeans and Americans. In Hawaii, illness caused by trade wiped out a significant proportion of the population, leaving much of the farmland unattended. To fill the gap left by the deceased, white settlers immigrated to Hawaii and worked the land.xii Banner showed that the new labor source, white settlers, requested the right to purchase land, which King Kamehameha eventually granted.xiii Banner used these events to display how the introduction of the global property market by white settlers benefitted a group of natives in Hawaii. The group happened to compose mostly of Hawaiian nobles and chiefs, but the system eventually allowed foreign settlers to purchase even more land.xiv Banner displayed the varieties of ways in which foreign powers took over the Pacific through comparing and contrasting Hawaii to Australia, which were examples where the global market possessed both positive and negative effects.

Ian Tyrrell depicted a comparison of environmental reform between California and Australia from 1860 to 1930 to show mainly the similarities between the two places through commodities in the global market. Tyrell argued that the environmental reform movement started because of the distance of these places from the Atlantic system. The environmental reform system failed as California moved away from the core-peripheral relations within the capitalist world in the early twentieth century and Australia developed closer ties to Great Britain a few decades later.xv The market was also good because it allowed the exchange of commodities such as the eucalyptus plant, which arrived in California from Australia in the nineteenth century and gardeners planted for its aesthetic beauty.xvi Tyrrell portrayed a global market in the Pacific that saw trade of commodities between East Asia, Australia, Pacific Islands, and western America as a Pacific exchange.xvii He also showed the beneficial side of the comparison because his goal was to show a vibrant Pacific exchange, which was a part of the global market. Granted it was less connected at times to the Atlantic system, but the Pacific system allowed an exchange of commodities over vast distances, too. Harold Platt wrote a comparative history between Manchester, England and Chicago, Illinois with a great deal of focus on illness essentially because of the global market system. He revealed that Chicago as Porkopolis, which meant the city distributed pork throughout the market and caused illness from the pork byproducts. The byproducts polluted the water supply, causing illness and forcing public action.xviii Showing the negative aspects of the market was important to his argument because he needed to lay the groundwork for environmental reform. He also used germ theory and new ideas about sanitation brought through the global market to energize the reform

movement.xix Solutions came from overseas and Platt showed the environmental reform movement was not just a local phenomenon, but a movement that rose up throughout the industrialized world to combat urban pollution. Platt depicted the Chicago and Manchester environmental reform movements and, perhaps inevitably, the movements needed to examine ideas and systems from other places, thus incorporating the global market into his theory. Transnational environmental historians tended to present arguments that presented a nuanced view of the global market. The historians focused on exchange and the causes of it in all the entities involved because exchange means giving something in return for something else. If a historian merely focused an entity taking away and exploiting another group people, there would be little, if any, exchange. Furthermore, transnational historians acknowledged the global market because the market drove their arguments and there would be no trade without it. Transnational historians wrote about the benefits and harm brought by an exchange to emphasize its importance. Without rendering the benefits of transnational exchange, the importance of the exchange would be undermined. John Soluri, a transnational environmental historian, used the global market to portray a nuanced view about labor in Honduras. The negative aspects for Honduran laborers were the horrible conditions where they lived and worked. Laborers lived in overcrowded and diseased barracks.xx Furthermore, Soluri pointed out how pesticidesprayers often lost their lives to horrible illnesses, likely because of their jobs.xxi Soluri revealed some positive aspects of banana production that helped the laborers survive the jungle. In the 1920s, company-owned hospitals attempted to save the lives of 1,000s from the grasp of malaria. In 1926, the admission rate for malaria-infected patients to

hospitals numbered over a quarter of total admission rate. Companies applied insecticide to protect employees and treated patients with quinine.xxii Soluri needed to show the benefits and costs of the global market intervention in Honduras to fully understand the affect of the banana trade on the laborers. If Soluri painted a picture of the banana plantations as merely just terrible places to live, then he would have to address other questions, such as why people stayed in the workplaces. The book focused on the trade as a whole and therefore the transnational theme obligated Soluri to examine what Honduras received from the companies and purchasers for their products. Thomas Andrews wrote a transnational labor and environmental history, but acted differently from other transnational historians because he lionized the laborers, rather than focusing on the exchange of commodities. Therefore, his work did not follow the same message or trend as other transnational historians. Andrews exposed the suffering of the miners and the terrible conditions that could injure or kill them. The awful conditions made a fifteen year old cry and beg his mother not to make him go back into the mines. The youth had good reasons because poisonous gases harmed miners greatly. Carbon Monoxide was a particularly effective killer that showed no mercy or remorse.xxiii Andrews wanted the reader to empathize with the miners because the laborer was the centerpiece of his argument. As for transnational history, Andrews focused on the laborers moving to the United States to find work and did not show any real exchange between nations, because the movement only went one way. Any balance or nuances would weaken his argument because workers must have justification for striking and fighting. Without any need to show an actual exchange of goods and people, Andrews provided no evidence of why the workers left their homes in the first place. The

exchange was only a means of oppression by the corporations, therefore not in need of a balanced approach. Marcus Hall wrote a transnational history about environmental restoration that showed an exchange with the United States and Europe in regard to ideas about the environment. Although Hall wrote mainly about ideas about crossing the Atlantic and people carried when they crossed the ocean to observe the foreign environment. For all intents and purposes, these travelers were laborers. Although they did not likely alter the environments themselves, they set the groundwork for environmental restoration. Hall regarded the restoration of the environment through natural processes and the acceptance of man as an active player in environmental disasters as productive steps toward restoration. Therefore, the global market helped restore nature through the exchange of people and ideas from one continent to another. The historian depicted a balanced work which helped move the argument and chronology forward. Hall showed some of the exchange contradicted the restoration movement, particularly with Egisto Rossis comments on America because balance was important in to telling the story of environmental reform. If there was no balance, Hall could not explain why environmental law took so long to come into effect. Rossi, an Italian, wrote that the Americans would turn desert into productive land and contradicted John Wesley Powells belief that agriculture in the desert was unsustainable. The Italian predicted the arid West would be the home of many farming settlers, which contradicted any idea of environmental preservation.xxiv The exchange had positive effects, too, such as the George Perkins Marshs work and influences in Italy. Hall pointed out that Marsh turned environmental protection into a political movement in Italy through inspiration

and advice. Marsh helped form the Italian Forest Law of 1877 and helped Italy become more environmentally conscious.xxv Hall showed the exchange of ideas and how people from Europe and America affected each others environmental policies and opinions, eventually ushering reasonably effective environmental movements. Of course, not all ideas matched Halls ideal position, but he placed them in his argument to show the resistance to the ideals of George Perkins Marsh. Sterling Evans used commodities in the global market as materials that brought both wealth and slavery to the people of the Yucatan in Mexico. The commodity Evans discussed was henequen, which was important to the United States and Mexico. Among the goals of Evans included stressing the importance of henequen to North America. The United States needed henequen for the production of twine in factories, along with the collection of wheat.xxvi Therefore, henequen not only supported American agriculture interests, including farmers, but also industrial interests such as the Plymouth Cordage of Massachusetts and International Harvester.xxvii These combined interests could potentially influence US policy greatly to protect the supply of henequen to the United States. The Yucatan produced ninety percent of the US henequen imports, giving the Mexican government and the elite of the Yucatan significant power, along with immense amounts of wealth.xxviii Evans showed that Mexico greatly benefitted from the henequen trade, which supported his argument that underlined the importance of henequen. Henequen and the global market also brought great misery to people, particularly Indians, because of the condition they worked in. Evans needed to show that not only were American farmers and some of the Mexican elite bound in twine, but also the enslaved people who worked the land. Mayans and other Indians lost their freedom and

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overseers forced them to plant and harvest henequen. They lived in impoverished and miserable conditions, presumably with little hope of improvement.xxix They were bound in twine, but their twine was more like steel shackles. Evans used information on how the twine industry harmed people to illustrate further the importance of the henequen trade. Evans depicted a balance approach to commodities in the global market because he needed both the benefits and costs to truly understand the exchange and could not fully explain the importance of henequen if he simply focused on the negative aspects. Alfred Crosby wrote an argument based on the importance of the Columbian exchange and depicted the merger of two global markets. A consequence of trade between distant lands included the exchange of diseases between the Americas and Europe. Crosby gave a balanced view of the exchange by focusing on both diseases brought to the Americas and a disease that Amerindians probably gave to the rest of the world. Demonstrating the impact of the exchange proved that neither place remained the same after the Columbian contact. The Europeans infected the Americas with many diseases, including small pox, measles, and typhus from the modern-day Brazil to Roanoke in the English Virginia colony. Accounts generally accredited small pox with wiping out the most Indians, but chroniclers often used small pox to describe any disease afflicting a helpless Indian.xxx Crosby used the diseases to reveal the stunning devastation that the Amerindians endured and how important it was to the history of the Americas. Crosby wrote about a disease that potentially spread from the Americas to the rest of the world to show that exchange harmed Europeans, too. According to one account the Europeans first received the disease of syphilis on Hispaniola from the Arawak

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Indians and brought it back to Europe. Crosby backed up the transmission with accounts written by de las Casas and Ruy Diaz de Isla, which described symptoms sounding remarkably similar to that of syphilis.xxxi Syphilis spread across the Atlantic Ocean and found new hosts, illustrating the importance of the Columbian exchange. Crosby used a balanced exchange because it, as with most environmental transnational history, emphasized the importance of the transnational exchange. Environmental historians possess varying views on the global market, but their views often depended on what type of environmental history they wrote. Global historians tended to write an unbalanced view of the global market because doing so helped the political argument that they made. Global environmental historians depicted the global market as a bringer of injustice, waste, and pollution, along with denouncing the recent global market to trumpet the cause of environmental regulation and reform. If they were more balanced, their arguments would be less-effective. Comparative environmental historians wrote about the global market in a more balanced manner, although not because they wanted to show the global market as a good thing. Comparative historians had to write positive remarks about the global market system at the risk of becoming too simplistic. Few comparative historians found only similarities between case studies and with the global markets so large and complex, portraying it as simply an evil device would neglect truly understanding the case. Transnational environmental historians addressed the global market in great detail because it was the means of the exchange. The illustration of the market as evil, illustrated an entire transnational exchange as evil and few historians wanted to make the subject of their book as purely bad. To focus only on the negative results of the exchange casts doubt on

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the importance of the exchange and the thesis of a transnational work. Perhaps, the global market was not some inhuman beast to environmental historians, but it is certainly not a saint either. Endnotes:

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Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino and the Making of the Third World, (New York: Verso, 2002), 123. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 38-39. iii Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts, 84, 155. iv Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment, (Washington: Cambridge, 2008), 200 v Joachim Radkau, Nature and Power, 175. vi John McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the World, (New York: Norton, 2001), 33, 34, 173. vii William McNeill, Plagues and People, (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 139. viii William McNeill, Plagues and People, 54-5. ix William McNeill, Plagues and People, 205-206. x Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007), 27. xi Banner, Possessing the Pacific, 28-30. xii Banner, Possessing the Pacific, 131-133. xiii Banner, Possessing the Pacific, 136. xiv Banner, Possessing the Pacific, 140-141. xv Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930, (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 6, 220. xvi Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 58-59. xvii Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods, 15. xviii Harold Platt, Shock Cities: The Environmental Transformation and Reform of Manchester and Chicago, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 140-141. xix Platt, Shock Cities, 480-481. xx John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States, (Austin: University of Texas, 2005), 153. xxi Soluri, Banana Cultures, 119-120. xxii Soluri, Banana Cultures, 140. xxiii Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: Americas Deadliest Labor War, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2008), 142-144. xxiv Marcus Hall, Earth Repair: A Transatlantic History of Environmental Restoration, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 92-93. xxv Hall, Earth Repair, 44-47. xxvi Sterling Evans, Bound in Twine: The History and Ecology of the Henequen-Wheat Complex for Mexico and the American and Canadian Plains, 1880-1950, (College Station: Texas A&M, 2007), xvii, 20. xxvii Evans, Bound in Twine, 20. xxviii Evans, Bound in Twine, 92. xxix Evans, Bound in Twine, 66. xxx Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1972), 40-43. xxxi Crosby, The Columbian Exchange, 138-139.
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