Technology and Culture

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The Earth is warming, due to humans burning fossil fuels. Humanity’s

accelerated burning of fossil fuels coincides with the beginnings of
the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the eighteenth century. A
question that has challenged historians is why people in Britain
converted to burning coal, inspiring other peoples to do the same,
forever altering human history and, now we know, altering the planet
in profound ways as well. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of
Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Brooklyn, NY: Verso
Books, 2016. Pp. 496. $29.95) is a detailed argument for the cause he
has identified: capital, as embodied in a small number of
industrialists who chose to burn coal and produce steam instead of
choosing to power their textile mills with other alternatives that were
available around the turn of the nineteenth century, including
workers’ muscles, the muscles of draft animals, and water power.

Malm’s is a Marxian argument. He begins the book by comparing the

two main meanings of the word “power” in English: (1) a force of
nature or measure of physical work, and (2) a word that characterizes
the hierarchical relationship between people. He notes that few
scholars embrace both meanings or show the movement in history
between the two. He sets out to use both. He begins by offering a
subtle critique of the prevailing explanations by E. A. Wrigley and
others for the shift to coal, which center on the idea that the English
were experiencing a serious shortage of firewood. Malm documents
that in the early nineteenth century, when the British conversion to
coal was accelerating, analysts calculated not how many acres of
forest coal replaced but how many laborers.

Moving to the heart of Fossil Capital, Malm marshals a detailed

examination of the adoption of coal-fired steam power by the British
textile industry. The shift to coal, he shows, occurred in the context of
two other important changes already under way in the industry: the
development of [End Page 866] the factory system, and the
increasing mechanization of the various tasks involved in converting
raw plant and animal fibers to yarns and then to finished textiles.
Managers of textile mills and their investors were already choosing,
in the early nineteenth century, to replace workers with machines
and to locate textile mills at sites that afforded water power to drive
the machines, when Watt’s steam engine became a viable alternative
for powering the mills. Malm cites numerous articles and letters by
leaders in the textile industry explaining their preference for steam
over labor or water power. Although more expensive, steam engines
never tired, and they were more easily controlled—suiting capital’s
needs—than were willful workers or fickle streams.

The chapters on the nineteenth-century adoption of steam power

would make Malm’s accomplishment important enough, but he has a
larger agenda, which is to take issue with the use of the term
“Anthropocene” to name the geological era we have now entered, in
which human actions are altering the planet in ways that will be
evident in future geological epochs. Anthropocene implies that we all,
collectively, are responsible for the greenhouse gases, especially CO2,
resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels, which are driving the
planet’s atmospheric changes. Malm argues, however, that at each
historical turn, “we,” collectively, did not choose to convert to fossil
fuels, just as British textile workers in the early nineteenth century
did not choose to adopt the textile machines and steam engines that
threw many workers out of their jobs and subjected remaining
workers to lives of drudgery in inhumane working conditions. Rather,
capital chose coal-fired steam because it offered greater profits,
generating more capital to be invested in more steam-powered
production—an endless cycle of growth that favored the capitalist
few.

Such has been the story of capital choosing fossil fuels ever since.
China is now the world’s greatest emitter of greenhouse gases. Malm
shows that most coal-fired industrial production in China has been
built by direct foreign investment (i.e., capital from the industrialized
West seeking new geographies for using fossil fuels to replace willful
Western labor and produce goods for Western consumers). He
contends, therefore, that those emissions, although emanating from
Chinese smokestacks, are the result of decisions made by capital, not
by Chinese workers or the rest of us. Malm proposes, then, that we
have entered the epoch of the “Capitalocene,” not the Anthropocene.

Although Fossil Capital is an excellent history of the Industrial

Revolution and the historical decisions that industrialists have made
to bring the Earth to its current threshold, the book is not without its
weaknesses. Most notably, Malm does not fully appreciate other
significant ecological roles that burning fossil fuels have played in
industrialization, a phenomenon which, along with capital, is at the
heart of our tremendous greenhouse-gas emissions. Malm focuses on
capital’s opting for coal-fired steam [End Page 867] to replace
labor because it fits his Marxian mode of analysis, but he downplays
the significance of conversions to coal for other energy needs, most
especially for smelting iron and making steel. For example, he
emphasizes that sometime between 1844 and 1855 coal use for
producing industrial steam surpassed coal use for domestic heating.
The industrial use of coal was accelerating at a greater rate than the
domestic, showing that capital’s use of coal-fired steam to replace
labor, increase production, increase profits, and reinvest in
productive capacity was transforming the economy in a more
profound way than was coal used for heating, which could only grow
about as fast as the population grew. Malm also mentions that in the
1844–1855 period, production of coke accounted for about as much
coal consumption as did domestic heating and the production of
industrial steam, but he passes over that third use to emphasize the
importance of the role coal played in allowing capitalists to
concentrate wealth and transform workplaces, consumption patterns,
and the economy.

Prior to the conversion to coke made from coal, iron and steel had
been relatively expensive materials, especially because of the
tremendous areas of timber land required to make charcoal. The rate
of forest reproduction thereby limited the scale at which iron works
could operate. Learning how to produce metallurgical coke from coal
freed the iron industry from those environmental limits in ways more
complex than replacing costly labor. The ability to smelt iron with
coke brought down the metal’s price, and relatively low-cost iron
provided another foundation for the Industrial Revolution. Lower
prices for iron made the metal inexpensive enough to be serviceable
as a principal building material, rather than being limited to a few
precious building components, like nails, tie rods, and hinges.
Relatively cheap iron brought down the cost of manufacturing steam
engines and made it feasible to lay steel rails across the countryside,
creating entirely new possibilities for overland transportation and
changing concepts of time. Despite this criticism, Malm has written a
valuable history for our time, showing the central role that capital
has played, and is still playing, in increasing Earth’s atmospheric
concentrations of greenhouse gases. His method can be a model for
historians exploring other episodes in the history of industry’s
adoption of fossil fuels. [End Page 868]