The Men in the High Castle of the Anthropocene: American Geostrategists Speculating on Planetary Futures and Extractivist Roots of Global War During the 1940s

• In Event: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Speculation about planetary futures of politics and transimperial patterns of resource use consumed American geostrategists over the early 1940s as conflicts in Europe, Asia, and Africa converged into the second global war in a generation. Their speculations shaped the course of American empire on the eve of the Great Acceleration. Yet, despite profound implications for trajectories of the Anthropocene, these speculations have rarely been the focus of environmental history.

Combining socio-ecological data with archives of the American outward state, the proposed paper explores how questions of resource extraction, industrialization, and environmental impacts of war became central to speculations about the postwar planet informing American military and political planning during World War II. These speculations emerged from analysis of industrial infrastructure in the empires of Japan and Germany as well as flows of alienated nature and labor linking Asia and Europe with the rest of Earth. Overwhelmingly elite white men and hardly revolutionaries, some American geostrategists were nevertheless borne by their own speculations to confront the possibility that the roots of world war might lie in the nature of industrialization itself. This provocation set the stage for radical proposals soon after Axis defeat to reform transimperial patterns of resource extraction and industrialization to prevent future global wars.

Revisiting largely-forgotten debates at the heights of American imperial power and their long-term environmental consequences, I argue that launch trajectories of the Great Acceleration inflected by American choices in the 1940s were far less overdetermined than generally believed. By restoring greater contingency to the making of the Great Acceleration, I also suggest how speculative imagination might be a force for transforming the geopolitical terrain of the unfolding climate crisis today – a terrain shaped, in large part, by the turbulent 1940s. The paper bridges global environmental history, transimperial history, and critical Anthropocene studies.

Author

• Paul Nauert, Eastern Oregon University