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

245 JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH
environmental history and typically a lack of addressing it in the regional chapters. Part three,
entitled “Landscapes, Conquests, Communities, and the Politics of Knowledge,” deals with
contention in social construction of the same regional environment for different uses by different
interests, showing how selected definitions, ideologies, and certain interests can dominate the
rules of definition of what the environment is to be used for—against other subaltern groups that
lose their abilities to define their local environment for their own use.
As Pomeranz writes, the theme of the volume is “commitments to state-building,
sedentarization, and intensifying the exploitation of resources [that] we have designated the
developmentalist project.” (p. 7). “What then were the concrete manifestations of the
developmentalist project? Perhaps the most basic is a continuing increase in incentives and
pressures to expand economic production” as a common theme, whether the distant past or the
present. Thus state projects of developmentalism or state formation from scratch are what most
authors analyze regionally, both for their ideological claims and their material policy power
interactively across widely different temporal eras as similar. “We make state making processes
drive the global intensification of land use…the latter cannot simply be ascribed to capitalism,
much less to an Enlightenment [European epistemology later exported worldwide] that emerged
when these processes were already in full swing.” (p. 5) Ergo, shockingly, they edit entirely out
any mention of inter-regional domination or mere inter-regional relation from the story of the
world history of the environment!
This means they mischaracterize state formation in the modern world since much of state
formation proceeded in the past several hundred years because of such world systemic dynamics
instead of developing in autarkical isolation. Thus state formation is incapable of being
understood without combing the local and international links. Further puzzling is that many other
historians for generations have been aware of this interaction of regional and global politics in
state formation. For instances of critiques of the editors’ main thesis, Canada’s ‘national’
sovereignty seemed required in the 1860s to justify bond issues being more sellable
internationally for investment in a cross provincial network of railroads connected to international
extraction regimes (reading any book by the pioneer historian of international raw material flows,
Harold Innis). Second, state formation cannot be only a mere regional phenomenon since in oil
rich areas of the world state formation and elaboration is keyed into the world system of oil
commodity chains—particularly clear in Venezuela (reading Terry Lynn Karl’s The Paradox of
Plenty) or in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait (both sponsored into existence by British or American oil
company aids; reading Brown’s Oil, God, and Gold: The Story of Aramco and the Saudi Kings
(1999)). Third, international coffee commodity prices and the material specialization of robusta
coffee in mass market Brazil in the 1800s led to market specialization being possible for smaller
territories globally in finer coffees. This encouraged state elaboration in Central America to arise
in a particular time around coffee elites, simultaneously globally dependent upon conditions in
the world system of coffee combined with the very different regional specifics: the local
environment, previous land tenure relationships, and labor supply. It is impossible to understand
Central American state formation without reference to the world, commodity, and price regimes
in the world coffee markets (reading Robert G. Williams States and Social Evolution: Coffee and
the Rise of National Governments in Central America (1994) [Editor’s note: see John M. Talbot’
review essay on coffee, Journal of World-Systems Research 16:2:291-301). Since oil and coffee
are the first and third most profitable commodities in world trade (second is illegal drugs,