Entire Volume 17 issue 1 - Journal of World-Systems Research ...

111 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
THE WORLD-HISTORICAL IMAGINATION: BEYOND HUMAN EXEMPTIONALISM
The Long Twentieth Century coincided with an explosion of world-system interest in the
environment. Given this synchroneity, it is something of a puzzle that the world-historical
perspective has yet to locate the spatio-temporal coordinates and relations of the system within
the nature-society relation. 5
The world-historical perspective has broken two sorts of new ground in environmental
studies. First, world-systems analysts have shed light on the ways that biophysical
transformations have enabled accumulation, and capitalist development as a whole (Foster 1994;
Moore 2000a). Perhaps most famous is Bunker’s elaboration of staple theory, showing how
“modes of extraction” (largely in the South) were intertwined with “modes of production”
(largely in the North) (1984, 1985; Bunker and Ciccantell 2005; Ciccantell, Smith, and Seidman
2005). Dutch world hegemony was impossible without timber to build commercial fleets; British
hegemony, impossible without coal to fire steam engines. A second group of studies takes up the
consequences of capitalism upon biophysical nature. This is the “ecological footprint” approach
in spirit as well as letter (e.g. York, et al. 2003; Jorgenson 2003; Chew 2001; Amin 2009),
overlapping with studies of ecologically unequal exchange (Jorgenson and Clark 2009a, 2009b).
These studies represent a signal contribution to recent world scholarship. They have
deepened our understanding of capitalism and environmental change, historically and in the
neoliberal conjuncture. They have not, however, moved to rethink the major categories of
analysis through the nature-society relation. So far, the “greening” of world-systems analysis has
left untouched the core conceptual and methodological premises guiding the investigation and
explanation of historical capitalism. The “endless accumulation of capital” has, by and large,
remained an irreducibly social process rather than a socio-ecological project. It is a fine example
of what Dunlap and Catton once called “human exemptionalism” in their early formulation of
environmental sociology (1979). Capitalism, for much of the world-historical perspective,
remains a social process that is either enabled by, or imposes terrible degradations upon, external
nature. In either case, “nature” is rendered passive, the object of “social” forces, externalized
symbolically in many of the same ways that capital seeks to externalize its costs of production.
What would an alternative that transcends such Cartesian binaries look like? I propose
that we move from the “environmental history of” modernity, to capitalism “as environmental
history.” In the first approach, scholars investigate the environmental consequences of social
relations. Many of environmental history’s classic texts take this approach. 6
The alternative turns
on unthinking social reductionism. This questions the very category of social relations by asking
how modernity itself constitutes a socio-ecological project and process. This is capitalism,
imperialism, hegemony as environmental history. It is the search for a single dynamic inquiry in
which nature, social and economic organization, thought and desire are treated as one whole. And
this whole changes as nature changes, as people change, forming a dialectic that runs through all
of the past down to the present (Worster 1988:293).
5 Promising explorations include Quark 2008; O’Hearn 2005; Gellert 2005; Araghi 2009; and Biel 2006.
6 For example, Cronon (1991), Merchant (1989), McNeill (2000). An extraordinary exception is Donald
Worster (1990, 1992), whose conception of regional modes of production as the crystallization of local
environmental conditions and political-economic relations at larger scales prefigures the present argument.