How capitalism first promoted fossil fuels with the rise of steam power
Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His work has appeared in journals such as Environmental History, Historical Materialism, Antipode and Organization & Environment. He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War, and of half a dozen books in Swedish on political economy, the Middle East and climate change.
Malm forcefully unmasks the assumption that economic growth has
inevitably brought us to the brink of a hothouse Earth. Rather, as
he shows in a subtle and surprising reinterpretation of the
Industrial Revolution, it has been the logic of capital (especially
the need to valorize immense sunk investments in fossil fuels), not
technology or even industrialism per se, that has driven global
warming.
*Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums and Ecology of
Fear*
Fossil Capital is a theoretical masterpiece and a
political-economic-ecological manifesto. It looks unblinkingly at
the catastrophe that could await human society if we fail to act on
the words System Change or Climate Change. It is a book that I will
return to again and again-and take notes.
*John Bellamy Foster, University of Oregon, author of Marx’s
Ecology*
The definitive deep history on how our economic system created the
climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most
original thinkers on the subject.
*Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The
Shock Doctrine*
A unique reconceptualization of the relationship between nature,
capitalism, and Marxism.
*Jacobin*
Will climate change make us evaluate differently the achievements
of George Stevenson and James Watt, Industrial Age pioneers? For it
was in Britain, which accounted for 80 per cent of fossil fuel
combustion in 1825, that "the fossil economy" began. Malm's history
is expansive and detailed, and often quite terrifying in its
analysis. Essential reading.
*Herald Scotland*
The birth of the fossil economy, avers human ecologist Andreas
Malm, arrived when steam eclipsed water power in
mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Around that, Malm builds a deep,
insight-packed history of how society came to be in thrall to the
twin engines of combustion and capital.
*Nature*
A major and important revision of Marxist theory . a singularly
important work, pointing the way for future work in economics,
politics, theories of time, space and energy.
*Radical Philosophy*
His thorough account of the switch to steam shows quite
convincingly that coal did not make Britain great for everyone, and
the transition was rooted not in technological superiority or
environmental scarcity but in good old fashioned class
conflict.
*In These Times*
Anyone with an interest in ecology, and anyone opposed to
capitalism, must read Malm's crucial contribution to understand how
and why capitalism makes war on planet Earth.
*International Socialist Review*
This impressive book speaks to several emergent areas in
ecocriticism: material ecocriticism, the ubiquitous Anthropocene,
environmental history, 'Victorian Ecology' . Such a formidable body
of historical evidence has the potential to ignite both 'Victorian
ecology' and a more socially engaged ecocriticism.
*Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism*
Has Andreas Malm written the crime story of the year with his book
Fossil Capital? Or submitted the fossil world order to
psychoanalysis? Both. The depth of his inquiry into how our
economic system created the climate crisis is impressive . Very
concrete, very beautiful, and perfectly reasonable.
*Aftonbladet*
Fossil Capital presents, with impressive detail and theoretical
clarity, how the fossil fuel economy has come into being. Malm does
not reiterate commonplaces about climate change, but looks closely
at its origins. This extremely well-written book is radical without
being dogmatic. Malm does not take his audience for granted at any
point; there are no short cuts.
*Marx and Philosophy Review of Books*
Remarkable book
*London Review of Books*
This is a denser, wonkier, and more historical survey of the long,
ugly marriage between fossil fuels and capitalism - in fact,
between fossil fuels and the entire history of economic growth.
*New York Magazine*
The best book written about the origins of global warming ... Like
Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything, Fossil Capital trenchantly
demonstrated that capitalism and capitalists are responsible for
climate change.
*Bookforum*
If we are to rescue ourselves from the looming catastrophe that is
climate change, one of our tasks must be to understand how we
became enmeshed in an economy powered by fossil fuels. It would be
hard to find a more illuminating book for this purpose than Fossil
Capital , a history of the rise of coal-fired steam power in
Britain. In the tradition of historians such as Robert Brenner and
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Andreas Malm gives central importance to the
capitalist social relations in which steam power is deployed as a
form of power over people, challenging technological determinist
accounts of the rise of the fossil economy (that steam power was
inherently more efficient), as well as the " Anthropocene
narrative" that sees the fossil economy as the inevitable outcome
of human use of fire, and the Ricardian-Malthusian narrative that
coal power was adopted because it was more abundant and cheaper
than water.
*Socialism and Democracy*
Brilliant
*Irish Times*
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