Climate change and the Industrial revolution

• In Event: Extractive Economies from the Industrial Revolution to the Anthropocene

Abstract

It has been decades since, as historians of science and climatologists themselves have argued, the fundamentals of the physical basis of anthropogenic climate change have been understood and widely accepted in the research community. In contrast, the social sciences, excluding the significant work in some specialized fields such ecological economics or environmental history, have substantially lagged in their inquiries relative to the societal aspects pertaining global warming, and the ecological crisis more broadly, due to a number of factors including the focus and scope of dominant theoretical paradigms. As the climate crisis progressed and extreme weather events have become more frequent, with attribution studies being increasingly more robust, the social sciences have turned their attention to the societal processes and factors related to climate change, and the economic and environmental historical inquiry has accelerated. However, there is still significant disconnect between the recent scholarship in environmental history, ecology, economic theory and economic history particularly around the Industrial revolution, that is, the historical turning point to the modern fossil fuel energy regime.

This paper discusses the recent scholarship in environmental history and ecology (by John Robert McNeill, Edward Anthony Wrigley, Rolf Peter Sieferle, Andreas Malm, Jason W. Moore, Matthew T. Huber, amongst others) in the face of the classic works in economic history of the English and Global Industrial revolutions (by Paul Mantoux, T. S. Ashton, John Clapham, Fernand Braudel, Eric Hobsbawm, Eric Wolf, Kenneth Pomeranz, amongst others), considering economic theory and the synthesis of the knowledge of the physical basis of climate change presented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s last assessment. The paper explores the new insights brought by the new scholarship but most fundamentally some aspects that it obviates from the classic economic history work, economic theory and physical science of climate change.

Author

• Vladimir D. Díaz-Cuéllar, Carleton University