Summary
1. Capitalism is one of the principal drivers of climate change, but Ghosh believes we must take a deeper look at imperialism and empire. In this section, he supplies a sustained look at Asia’s centrality to the crisis.
2. This centrality is, of course, due somewhat to numbers, as most of the potential victims are in Asia. Bangladesh and Vietnam are two countries most threatened by sea-level rise, and the interior of the continent will be subject to extreme weather events. Asia is already facing a water crisis as the Himalayan glaciers melt. Unsurprisingly, the impact will be felt most by poorer people, especially women and children.
Asia is thus critical for the big questions of “mitigation, preparation, and resilience” (90). No global strategy can work unless embraced by Asians.
3. Ghosh posits that it was the expansion of industrialization in Asia in the 1980s that brought the crisis to a head. Signs of a changing climate were already visible in the 1930s and especially the 1950s, but they would have been much higher if Asia was already launched into their period of sustained economic expansion. Asia’s experience shows that the planet cannot handle these “patterns of living to be adopted by every human being” (92).
4. Ghosh asks why the most populous countries in Asia did not industrialize until the late 20th century. He begins by referencing the growth of modernity in the 16th-19th centuries and how patterns of that growth were similar throughout the world. The spread of ideas as well as technology and knowledge was wide and comprehensive. Modernity was thus not a “virus” that spread from the West to the rest of the world.
5. China experienced a medieval economic revolution about a thousand years ago, beginning to use coal and altering their landscape. But they did not make the transition to a large-scale coal economy, as those reserves were in remote areas and they used other fossil fuels.
6. Ghosh quotes from his novel The Glass Palace, using an excerpt about Yenangyaung, Burma where oil bubbles up to the surface and people’s lives revolve around the resource. British travelers were aware of these oil wells by the mid-19th century. It was a major source of revenue for the Burmese, and British envoys were interested. Oil became even more important after the second Anglo-Burmese War in 1852-53, in which the British took a swath of the country that had many of these wells. The king was distressed and asserted direct control over Yenangyaung. He also fostered links with the world market and further consolidated control to the best of his ability. But the British seized the rest of the region in 1885 and took over all the reserves, creating a megacorporation with Burmah-Shell.
What is important here is that Burma was using this technology and would have been able to keep pace with the petroleum economy, but was not able to do so due to imperialism.
7. Steam vessels came to India in the early 1800s, and India also provided most of the manpower for the boiler rooms of the world’s merchant fleets. Indian businessmen wanted a regular steamer service between India and England, and a group of British investors took up the challenge. This first voyage of what would be the Enterprise caused a sensation. Ghosh wrote of it in his novel Flood of Fire, and mentioned the personage of Dwarkanath Tagore.
Tagore was a key figure in the history of India’s carbon economy. He was a businessman who helped build a commercial infrastructure and was one of the most vocal proponents of the railroads. In Bombay, indigenous merchants were also very excited about the new technology. Overall, Indian entrepreneurs were “quick to grasp the possibilities of British and America steam technology” (107).
But what prevented places like India from competing in the carbon economy was that the British economy needed a huge influx of raw materials, so “the emerging fossil-fuel economies of the West required that people elsewhere be prevented from developing coal-based energy systems of their own, by compulsion if necessary” (107).
8. The major Europeans powers had a military and political presence throughout much of Asia and Africa right at the time when steam technology was nascent. Other forms of technology were suppressed and/or incorporated into the dominant model.
Fossil fuels helped Western powers maintain dominance in their various regions. Ghosh wonders what would have happened if decolonization and the dismantling of empires had happened earlier, perhaps after the First World War. This is a tantalizing question because it might mean that imperialism actually delayed the climate crisis because Asia and Africa could not expand their economies in a commensurate way.
The fact that the development of some of the key technologies of the carbon economy retarded the climate crisis should not shift the way we think about global justice and the crisis. But importantly, “our lives and our choices are enframed in a pattern of history that seems to leave us nowhere to turn but toward of self-annihilation” (111).
9. Another obstacle in Asia’s path to industrialization was indigenous resistance of many kinds. Gandhi, for example, spoke of how essentially “the universalist premise of industrial civilization was a hoax” (112) because a consumerist model would become unstainable. Similarly, in China Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian voices joined together to resist consumerism and industrialization. Resistance was eventually overcome, but places like Japan and Korea showed how it could happen by wasting far less resources.
Many leading Asian figures were also voicing concerns about environmental devastation before those beyond the counterculture were doing so in the West. People in both China and India, two countries often blamed for precipitating the climate crisis, were calling attention to what the carbon economy was doing and what is was capable of. No, they did not stop the wholesale embrace of carbon, but they did “succeed in retarding the wholesale adoption of a consumerist, industrialized model of the economy in their countries” (114).
Thus, the climate crisis cannot be said to be a problem created by an “Other,” and global warming must be seen as ultimately “the product of the totality of human actions over time” (115).
Analysis
In this section, “History,” Ghosh explores how imperialism and the rise of fossil fuels contributed to the crisis, as well as how resistance mounted but did not forestall any of the disruptions. What makes this section so illuminating is how Ghosh centers imperialism, not necessarily capitalism, the common target of blame, and the role Asia plays in this story.
Essentially, his argument is that we all know that “the rapid and expanding industrialization of Asia’s most populous nations, beginning in the 1980s…brought the climate crisis to a head” (91), but that is not where we should stop our history. Rather, evidence of a changing climate dates to the 1930s, and China was interested in fossil fuels as early as the 11th century. So what happened? How is it that it took so long for Asia to develop a fossil fuel economy, leading to a situation that has “torn the mask from the phantom that lured it onto the stage of the Great Derangement” (92). In short, Asia did not industrialize until the late 20th century because of colonialism. To make his point, Ghosh accounts for the British interest in the oil wells in Yenangyaung, and the various ways they consolidated their power in the region to attain that oil. He explains that the “emerging fossil-fuel economies of the West required that people elsewhere be prevented from developing coal-based energy systems of their own” (107). As steam technology languished and carbon technology grew, the Western powers became more and more of a military and political presence in Asia. Prasannan Parthasarathi lauds Ghosh’s explication of this history, writing “This vast global inequality is, in the final analysis, backed up by military power, which is heavily dependent upon fossil fuel technologies. A fascinating body of sociological research, again conducted by Andrew Jorgensen with collaborators, has found a powerful link between levels of military spending, measured as a proportion of gross domestic product or military personnel as a fraction of the labor force, and carbon emissions. We have a double whammy: inequality is a major contributor to our climate crisis, as is the apparatus of violence that enforces our vast global inequalities. Ghosh is right on target in invoking empire as critical to our dilemma of planetary heating.” Similarly, Julia Adeney Thomas explains “Centering Asia allows us to see that modernity's patterns of life can only be practiced by a small minority of the world's people. Asian history shows that ‘capitalism’ needs to be thought with ‘imperialism’ to recognize the agency of Asians, their long history of noncapitalist exploitation of resources, and how colonialism may even have delayed carbon emissions by delaying Asian industrialization. It is also true that ‘no strategy can work globally unless its works in Asia and is adopted by large numbers of Asians.’”
Ghosh posits that almost certainly if the decolonization movements had taken place earlier, the onset of the climate crisis would have been delayed. Sadly, they did not, and, as he notes in a quote by geologist David Archer, “Money flows toward the short-term gain and reward the over-exploitation of unregulated common resources. These tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy toward his inevitable doom” (111).
His last point in the section regards indigenous resistance, and an acknowledgement that what he is arguing does not “diminish the force of the argument for global justice regarding greenhouse gas emissions” (110). Ursula Heise writes, “This insight, Ghosh highlights, strengthens arguments in favor of global distributive justice (formerly colonial nations indeed have a right to claim that they have to make up for time lost), but attaining such justice entails putting all human societies at even greater risk. In a gesture reminiscent of Chakrabarty’s call for a ‘negative universal history’ in the face of climate change…Ghosh emphasizes that this paradox undermines the utility of an ‘us-versus-them’ approach to the climate crisis – including, presumably, the approach of critics who see the abolition of capitalism as a prerequisite for solving the climate crisis.”
