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NEW COMPARISONS IN WORLD LITERATURE

World Literature
and Ecology
The Aesthetics of Commodity
Frontiers, 1890-1950

Michael Niblett
 New Comparisons in World Literature

Series Editors
Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee
Department of English Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK

Neil Lazarus
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one
of the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world
literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particu-
lar kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing
that registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the his-
torical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that
take up the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the
global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar
new modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result.
Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this
decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect.

Editorial Board
Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA
Dr. Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden
Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland
Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK
Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK
Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada
Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA
Dr. Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Dr. Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada
Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India
Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15067
 Michael Niblett

World Literature
and Ecology
The Aesthetics of Commodity Frontiers, 1890-1950
Michael Niblett
Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK

New Comparisons in World Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-38580-4 ISBN 978-3-030-38581-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38581-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of English and

Comparative Literary Studies and the Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean
Studies at the University of Warwick. It is a privilege to work in such
an intellectually challenging and sympathetic environment. In particular,
I would like to thank my fellow members in the Warwick Research Col-
lective: Sharae Deckard, Nick Lawrence, Neil Lazarus, Graeme Macdon-
ald, Paulo de Medeiros, Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, Stephen Shapiro,
Myka Tucker-Abramson, and Rashmi Varma. Their work is a constant
source of inspiration to me, and certainly, this book would not have been
possible without the ideas and arguments they have set in motion. I am
also indebted to a wider network of colleagues and comrades whose work,
correspondence, and conversations have contributed hugely to my think-
ing. Many thanks to Stephen Barrell, Sharae Deckard, Sorcha Gunne,
Jason W. Moore, Kerstin Oloff, Victoria Smith-Majdoud, Mark Tum-
bridge, and Claire Westall. Particular thanks are due to my long-time col-
laborator and conspirator Chris Campbell, with whom many of the ideas
for this book were first discussed and debated. During my time teaching
at Warwick, it has been a pleasure to explore many of the arguments con-
tained in this study with undergraduate and postgraduate students: their
insights and input have been invaluable. I am extremely grateful to the
editors and production team at Palgrave for all their work in bringing this
book to publication.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust, which

funded the research on which large portions of this book are based.
Thanks, too, to the research team involved in the “World Literature and
Commodity Frontiers” project: Chris Campbell (again), Christine Okoth,
and Esthie Hugo.
Thanks, as ever, are due to my family and friends for all their support.
This book is dedicated to Kerstin, Leon, Wilbur, and Lewis (chronological
order!).
Thanks are due to the following publications, in which earlier drafts
of limited parts of Chapters 5 and 6 have appeared. In both cases,
the material has been reworked here: “‘Time’s Carcase’: Waste, Labour,
and Finance Capital in the Atlantic World-Ecology.” Atlantic Studies
16.1 (2019): 72–89; “‘It’s the Mass That Counts’: Striking Energies
in Working-Class Fiction.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 53.3 (2017):
303–315.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Or, Fictions and Frontiers—The Making of

the Modern World-Ecology 1

2 The Commodity Frontier and Its Secret 43

3 Fictions of Appropriation and the Nature of Frontier

Romance 79

4 Romance, Realism, Modernism: Frontier Forms in the

Work of Rhys Davies and José Lins Do Rego 115

5 The “Mangled” Body: Proletarian Writing and the

Dialectic of Labour 153

6 “Stop the Oil!”: Narrative Energetics and the Political

Ecology of Strikes 205

7 “We State the Facts”: Romance and Revolt in the Work

of Jorge Amado and Gwyn Thomas 227

Index 253

vii
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Or, Fictions and Frontiers—The

Making of the Modern World-Ecology

Consider four passages from four very different novels. First, José
Américo de Almeida’s Trash (A Bagaceira, 1928), set on a sugar plan-
tation in Paraíba in Brazil’s Northeast:

The grinding [of sugar-cane] continued, one might say, from midnight to
midnight. The loose grinders vomited out pulp greater in volume than the
cane it swallowed, while a steady jet of liquid spurted into the trough.
[…] [In the mill-yard], the workmen were stretched out in the sun like so
many heaps of cane trash. (1978: 68–69)

Next, Ellen Wilkinson’s Clash (1929), which tells the story of the 1926
General Strike in Britain and its impact on the country’s coal mining com-
munities:

Coal dust and the mud of the mines saturated the whole place. The coal-
pit was the only thing in each village that mattered, the only part of life
on which capital and care and brains were expended. Human beings were
usually fed into its mouth at eight-hourly intervals, and just as regularly
coughed up again. (2004: 146)

Third, Jorge Amado’s The Violent Land (Terras do sem-fin, 1943), an

epic account of the cacao boom in the Brazilian state of Bahia in the early
twentieth century:

© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. Niblett, World Literature and Ecology,
New Comparisons in World Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38581-1_1
2 M. NIBLETT

The workers in the groves had the cacao slime on their feet, and it became
a thick rind that no water could wash away. And they all of them – workers,
jagunços, colonels, lawyers, doctors, merchants, and exporters – they all
had that slime clinging to their souls. […] For cacao was money, cacao
was power, cacao was the whole of life. […] Growing within them, it cast
over every heart a malignant shade. (2013: 272)

Finally, Ralph de Boissière’s Crown Jewel (published in 1952, but first

written in the 1930s), which narrates the industrial unrest by oilfield
workers that precipitated a General Strike on the Caribbean island of
Trinidad in 1937:

[Fyzabad] was a village of shacks set in an area from which oil was sucked
day and night. A vampire desists when sated, but these pumps were never
sated, they seemed to work without cease. Yet this and the workers’ shacks,
some crumbling, […] others old and weathered, Popito took for granted,
it was such an ordinary sight. (1981: 112)

Each of these passages describes a locality or region in which daily life

is dominated by the production or extraction of a particular commodity.
Despite differences in the historical and geopolitical contexts to which the
four novels respond, there are clear similarities in their representation of
the impact of the sugar, cacao, coal, and oil industries. Almeida’s image
of the sugar mill remorselessly consuming cane, sucking out the energies
of its workers until they resemble heaps of trash, is echoed in the ravenous
maw of Wilkinson’s pit; in Amado’s invasive, debilitating cacao slime; and
in the ceaseless, vampiric derricks and dilapidated shacks of de Boissière’s
Fyzabad. There is a hint of the phantasmagoric about how all four writ-
ers figure this experience of exploitation. The commodities they refer to
not only govern the organization of infrastructure and environment, but
also saturate social relations and invade subjectivities, re-shaping thoughts,
habits, and perceptions. Thus, the character of Popito in Crown Jewel
has become so habituated to the sight of oil derricks and impoverished
dwellings that he takes this landscape for granted. By exposing Popito’s
acculturation to a world shaped by the production of oil, de Boissière’s
novel draws attention to the specific configuration of human and extra-
human natures on which such production depends. The same is true for
the other texts cited here: in making visible the disruptive transformation
of lives and landscapes characteristic of these sites of commodity produc-
tion, each opens up a potential space for critique.
 1 INTRODUCTION: OR, FICTIONS AND FRONTIERS … 3

The above passages exemplify the central concerns of this book, which
will explore the relationship between world-literature and commodity
frontiers. How one defines a commodity frontier is (as we will see in
Chapter 2) a complex issue. Provisionally, however, they can be described
as zones of extraction or production that reorganize human and bio-
physical natures in such a way as to send vast reservoirs of relatively
“cheap” food, energy, raw materials, and labour-power into the capitalist
world-economy (Moore 2015: 53).1 By so doing, they help to reduce
(or check) the tendentially rising value composition of capital, easing the
pressure on systemic profit rates and advancing expanded accumulation.
Propelled by capitalism’s endless quest for profit, however, they also tend
to rapidly exhaust the socioecological conditions upon which their pro-
ductivity depends. Indeed, frontier zones are peculiarly uneven and unsta-
ble phenomena, often combining advanced technologies with relatively
archaic social modalities (forced labour, for example). Typically, too, they
are sites in which processes of subject formation (such as the racialization
or gendering of labour) occur in markedly overt or violent fashion—not
least because they are frequently to be found in regions subject to impe-
rialist domination.
My specific interest is in analysing fiction and poetry from 1890 to
1950 in terms of the ecological transformations through which the sugar,
cacao, coal, and oil frontiers have developed. I will focus on work from
three representative sites from across the world-system: Trinidad, the
Northeast of Brazil, and Britain.2 My concern is with the way life- and
environment-making processes have been registered not only at the level
of content, but also at the levels of form, imagery, and style. To speak
of “registration” is not to suggest that literary texts merely reflect or
passively record the dynamics of commodity frontiers. Cultural practice
is itself an ecological force, an integral pivot in humanity’s capacity to
rework life, land, and the body. It is worth recalling here Raymond
Williams’ exposition of Marx’s concept of “productive forces”: a “produc-
tive force,” writes Williams, is “all and any of the means of the production
and reproduction of real life. It may be seen as a particular kind of agricul-
tural or industrial production, but any such kind is already a certain mode
of social co-operation and the application and development of a certain
body of social knowledge” (1977: 91). Cultural forms, including literary
works, can be grasped as productive forces in this sense, then: as a species
of social knowledge fundamentally interwoven with the reproduction of
material life. A novel or poem, that is, might not only depict a particular
4 M. NIBLETT

historical reality, but also help to produce it: narrative-making, we might

say, is a mode of life- and environment-making.
Discussing the social impact of modernization in the early twentieth
century, David Harvey contends that modernism in the arts provided
“ways to absorb, reflect upon, and codify these rapid changes” (Harvey
1989: 23). Literary texts may well perform this kind of cultural work
when it comes to the transformations engendered by commodity fron-
tiers, supplying narratives that enable particular social groups to adjust to
such transformations, or generating tropes and figures that help to imagi-
natively resolve specific socioecological antagonisms. But literature might
intervene in more creative or critical ways too. As Williams writes: “sociol-
ogy can describe social conditions more accurately, at the level of ordinary
measurement. A political programme can offer more precise remedies, at
the level of ordinary action. Literature can attempt to follow these modes,
but at its most important its process is different and yet still inescapably
social: a whole way of seeing that is communicable to others, and a drama-
tization of values that becomes an action” (1970: 58–59). The specific
kinds of knowledge enabled by literary works can sensitize readers to the
possibility of new types of social practice (including new ways of organiz-
ing nature) and new analytical optics. “A good novel,” claims Roberto
Schwarz, “is a genuine event for theory” (2012: 22).
Schwarz’s understanding of the relationship between social reality and
literary form is of central importance to the present study. Schwarz posits
society in its relation to the literary object as “an internal force, encapsu-
lated within a formal device that reconfigures itself autonomously” (2001:
31). “The material constraints of social reproduction,” he writes,

are themselves fundamental forms that, for good or ill, are impressed
on the different areas of spiritual life, where they circulate and are re-
elaborated in more or less sublimated or falsified versions: forms, therefore,
working on forms. Or better – the forms discovered in literary works are
seen to be the repetition or the transformation, with variable results, of
pre-existing forms, whether artistic or extra-artistic. (2001: 25)

Literary form, in working on social (or socioecological) forms, will trans-

form the latter in line with the logic of aesthetic practice. Thus, to take
a relevant example, if we were to sift a novel or poem for signs of the
ecological antagonisms of a particular commodity frontier, we might not
 1 INTRODUCTION: OR, FICTIONS AND FRONTIERS … 5

find them at the level of thematic content, but they may well be present
in transmuted form as, say, generic or stylistic discontinuities.
This book will probe the myriad ways in which the ecological reali-
ties of the sugar, cacao, coal, and oil frontiers have been reconstituted
as a force internal to literary form. The particular historical and cultural
contexts in which individual works originate, as well as the distinct polit-
ical ecologies of these commodities, will impart an irreducible specificity
to their fictional or poetic mediation. Nonetheless, it is my contention
that the life- and environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers
provide fruitful grounds for a new form of world-literary comparativism.

∗ ∗ ∗

Analysing capitalism’s globalizing propensities in The Germany Ideology,

Marx and Engels insist that its transformation of history into world his-
tory is no “mere abstract act” but rather “an act the proof of which every
individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks and clothes him-
self” (1998: 58–59). The capitalist world market ensures that production
and consumption everywhere acquire a cosmopolitan character. Pointing
to the examples of sugar and coffee, Marx and Engels argue that these
commodities “have proved their world-historical importance in the nine-
teenth century by the fact that the lack of these products, occasioned by
the Napoleonic Continental System, caused the Germans to rise against
Napoleon, and thus became the real basis of the glorious Wars of Libera-
tion of 1813” (1998: 59). However, it is not only primary commodities
that assume world-historical significance; intellectual creations, too, are
delocalized. As the Communist Manifesto famously asserted: “National
one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossi-
ble, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a
world literature” (1967: 84).
Since 2000, the concept of world-literature has been the subject of
renewed debate in the academy. This has arisen in part from a feeling that
the disciplinary protocols and critical presuppositions of literary studies
have entered into crisis. The reasons adduced for this crisis are numer-
ous, ranging from “the ongoing subordination of culture generally to the
laws of the market” and “the apparently declining significance, relatively
speaking, of literature itself as a cultural form” to “the steady assault on
the autonomy of the humanities” within the university system (WReC
2015: 1). More broadly, “globalization” is often identified as a kind of
6 M. NIBLETT

master-process determining a whole host of destabilizing factors. In this

context, “world literature” has emerged as a key node in arguments over
the reinvention of the discipline. One of the earliest and most signif-
icant interventions into this debate was Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures
on World Literature” (2000). Borrowing his “initial hypothesis from the
world-system school of economic history,” Moretti posits the existence of
a “world literary system (of inter-related literatures)” that is both “one”
and “profoundly unequal” (55–56). More recently, the Warwick Research
Collective (WReC) has sought to build on Moretti’s formulation, flesh-
ing out his insight into the structured inequality of the world literary
system through reference to the Marxist theory of uneven and combined
development. WReC argues for a conception of “world-literature” as the
literature of the capitalist world-system (hence the hyphenation of “world
literature”): capitalist modernity is “both what ‘world-literature’ indexes
or is ‘about’ and what gives ‘world-literature’ its distinguishing character-
istics” (2015: 15).
Underpinning this conception of world-literature is an insistence that
modernity must be grasped, like capitalism itself, as a singular and simul-
taneous phenomenon, yet one that is everywhere heterogeneous and
unique. In this view, modernity represents something like the space-
time consciousness corresponding to capitalist modernization; it might
be defined as “the way capitalist social relations are ‘lived’ – different in
every given instance for the simple reason that no two social instances are
the same” (WReC 2015: 12). Thus, for any territory integrated into the
world-system, the shared experience of capitalist modernization provides
“a certain baseline of universality” (Brown 2005: 2), even as this expe-
rience is lived differently in different locations—hence the possibility of
reconstructing world-literature in terms of its relationship to the uneven
singularity of capitalist modernity. As WReC puts it, the “effectivity of the
world-system will necessarily be discernible in any modern literary work,
since the world-system exists unforgoably as the matrix within which all
modern literature takes shape and comes into being” (WReC 2015: 20).
I follow WReC in identifying the “world” in “world-literature” as the
capitalist world-system, the universalizing propensities of which inaugu-
rate what Fredric Jameson calls a “new kind of global history, whose very
logic is ‘totalizing’ in the strict sense: with the result that, even if before
there were histories – many of them, and unrelated – now there is ten-
dentially only one” (1991: 380). This, it bears emphasizing, is “a mod-
ern, but not a Western history” (Lazarus 1999: 25). The insistence of
 1 INTRODUCTION: OR, FICTIONS AND FRONTIERS … 7

critics such as Jameson and WReC on situating modernity in the context

of capitalism as a world-system is directed precisely at delinking it from
the idea of “the West.” Modernity “is not something that happens – or
even that happens first – in ‘the west’ and to which others can subse-
quently gain access” (WReC 2015: 13). Rather, it is a globally dispersed
social logic, one “characterized by unevenness: that is, by the dynamics
of development and underdevelopment, autocentricity and dependency,
the production and entrenchment of localisms (to a point approaching
irreducibility) within larger processes of globalization, incorporation, and
homogenization” (Lazarus 1999: 25).
If Marx and Engels’ discussion of the world-historical importance of
sugar and coffee exemplifies this materialist understanding of capitalis-
m’s totalizing logic, it also implicates the specifically ecological perspec-
tive that informs the present study. For the “new kind of global histo-
ry” inaugurated by capitalism must be understood as inseparable from an
epochal reorganization of global natures such that “varied and heretofore
largely isolated local and regional socioecological relations were incorpo-
rated into – and at the same moment became constituting agents of – a
capitalist world-ecology” (Moore 2003: 447). This is the view of environ-
mental historian Jason W. Moore, whose work over the past two decades
has elaborated a post-Cartesian critique of capitalism as ecological his-
tory. For Moore, the term “ecology” should not be viewed as a synonym
for “the environment”. Rather, it signifies the matrix of dialectical rela-
tionships and processes through which species (including humans) make
environments and environments make species (2011: 5; 2015: 7).3 In
Moore’s world-ecology perspective, history is to be understood as always
co-produced by humans alongside the rest of nature. Historical systems
(such as capitalism, feudalism, or the slave-based societies of antiquity)
are bundles of human and extra-human relations and activities, woven
together in such a way as to instantiate definite law-like patterns of wealth,
nature, and power over long time and large space. The differently specific
ways in which these natures are woven together within successive epochs
are determined ultimately by the prevailing mode of production, itself
constituted through a particular set of dialectical relations between human
and extra-human natures. On this view, capitalism is a “world-historical
matrix” that “knits together humans with the rest of nature […] within a
gravitational field of endless accumulation” (2012: 227). Accordingly, the
processes through which this mode of production develops (including,
say, colonization, industrialization, and financialization) are to be grasped
8 M. NIBLETT

as not merely having consequences for the environment, but as ecological

projects—as both producers and products of specific forms of life- and
environment-making (Moore 2015: 82, 291–292).
Moore’s post-Cartesian critique is to be distinguished from that of
critics like Bruno Latour, for whom recognition of the intermixing of
the human and the non-human warrants the abandonment of the ana-
lytical distinction between these categories (Latour 1991).4 For Moore,
such distinctions remain important: humans are a specifically endowed
environment-making species with the historic capacity to put nature—
including other humans—to work in the service of accumulating wealth
and power (Moore 2015: 9). To speak, as Moore does, of nature as
a “matrix” within which human activity unfolds is to evoke not an
undifferentiated holism, but a dialectical unity-in-difference: humanity-in-
nature/nature-in-humanity. That said, Moore’s position has come under
fierce attack from, among others, John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark,
who charge that it involves “an all-out denial of Marx’s conception of the
‘alienated mediation’ of the social metabolism of humanity and nature
under capitalism” (2016: 10). This, I think, misrepresents Moore’s plainly
Marxist-inspired critique, downplaying the distinction he draws between
nature (human and extra-human) as a differentiated unity of relations
and Nature and Society as the result of how those relations are struc-
tured under capitalism. Nature and Society are radically separated, sin-
gular abstractions; but they are real abstractions nonetheless; that is, they
are “operative forces, both in our knowledge structures and in capitalism’s
actually existing relations of power and production” (Moore 2015: 27).
The alienation of humanity from non-human nature is the lived reality of
the capitalist social world, even as it is the product of a historically specific
interrelating of human and extra-human natures. As Williams puts it, “the
point that has really to be made about the separation between man and
nature which is characteristic of so many modern ideas is that – however
hard this may be to express – the separation is a function of an increasing
interaction” (1980: 83).5
Moore’s work has aroused interest among scholars from across the dis-
ciplines. It joins a recent groundswell of studies committed to rethinking
global environmental history. “How do you tell the history of the world?”
asked Bruce Robbins in an article in 2014, noting that “not long ago this
question would have seemed naive.” Now, however, in the context of
“the decline of American power and the rise of China,” as well as “global
 1 INTRODUCTION: OR, FICTIONS AND FRONTIERS … 9

warming and other looming resource-related catastrophes,” “urgent rea-

sons have made themselves felt […] for trying to make sense of history
on a planetary scale.” Much of this work has been articulated around the
thought-figure of the Anthropocene, which has come to prominence in
the past decade or so following discussions among scientists over whether
the earth has entered a new human-dominated geological epoch (Clark
2015: 1). “Geological terms rarely become articles of fashion,” notes
Benjamin Kunkel. “But the vogue for the Anthropocene makes sense.
It expresses […] an awareness that environmental change of the most
durable significance is taking place as we speak, with unaccustomed speed,
[…] [and] it names an effort to consider the contemporary world histori-
cally” (2017: 22–23). Moore, it should be noted, in common with several
other scholars, is rightly critical of the term Anthropocene, arguing that it
tends to produce narratives of historical change in which a “homogenous
acting unit”—the Anthropos: humanity as an undifferentiated whole—is
identified as the motive force behind environmental crises, while ques-
tions of capitalism, class, and power are bracketed or obscured (2015:
170).6 Alongside Donna Haraway, Andreas Malm, and David F. Ruccio,
among others, Moore has proposed that we might better grasp our mod-
ern epoch under the sign of the Capitalocene: an “ugly word for an ugly
system,” as he puts it, but one at least capable of identifying the complex
interrelations of capital, nature, and power through which the history of
the modern world has unfolded (Moore 2016: 5; see also Haraway 2016;
Malm 2016; Ruccio 2011).7
The extent and intensity of such debates over how history gets told
is testament both to the severity of the current ecological crisis and to
the headway made by environmental studies since the 1970s in putting
“green” issues on the agenda. “By the dawn of the twenty-first century,”
writes Moore, “it had become increasingly difficult to address core issues
in social theory and social change without some reference to environ-
mental change” (2013: 1). This “green” turn has been paralleled in the
field of literary studies, with the consolidation of environmentalist and
ecocritical paradigms over broadly the same period (Mukherjee 2010:
42). Of particular relevance here is the recent emergence of the energy
humanities, a field of study premised “on an appreciation of culture’s role
in establishing, maintaining and transforming resource and work/energy
regimes” (Westall 2017: 269). The challenge the energy humanities sets
itself, according to Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer, is to “first, grasp
the full intricacies of our imbrication with energy systems (and with fossil
10 M. NIBLETT

fuels in particular), and second, map out other ways of being, behaving,
and belonging in relation to both old and new forms of energy” (2017:
3). In this connection, as Graeme Macdonald notes:

Fiction, in its various modes, genres, and histories, offers a significant (and
relatively untapped) repository for the energy aware scholar to demonstrate
how, through successive epochs, particularly embedded kinds of energy cre-
ate a predominant (and oftentimes alternative) culture of being and imag-
ining in the world; organizing and enabling a prevalent mode of living,
thinking, moving, dwelling and working. (2013: 4)

Or, as Patricia Yaeger put it in an important editorial for PMLA in 2011,

in which she called on scholars to create “an energy-driven literary theo-
ry” (307): what would happen if, instead of “divvying up literary works
into hundred-year intervals (or elastic variants like the long eighteenth or
twentieth century) or categories harnessing the history of ideas (Roman-
ticism, Enlightenment),” we “sort texts according to the energy sources
that made them possible?” (305).
The present book builds on the literary-critical possibilities suggested
by the energy humanities. It responds to Yaeger’s injunction by join-
ing her emphasis on energy sources to the conceptual rubrics provided
by the world-ecology perspective. In so doing, it posits the necessity of
understanding those energy sources (and commodity frontiers more gen-
erally), as well as the cultural forms and values with which they are imbri-
cated, in terms of the systemic logic and structural relations of capitalism
as a world-system. Much of my own work over the past few years has
been concerned precisely with the potential for combining the world-
ecology perspective with the materialist reconstruction of world-literature
pioneered by WReC. If, I have argued (Niblett 2012: 20), the capital-
ist world-system is a world-ecology, and if world-literature is the litera-
ture of the capitalist world-system, then world-literature must simultane-
ously be the literature of the capitalist world-ecology. In other words, the
effectivity of the world-ecology will also necessarily be discernible in any
modern literary work, since it too—in the form of the changing relation-
ship between human and extra-human natures through which the modern
world-system has developed—exists as the matrix within which all modern
literature takes shape.8
Grasping the globalizing propensities of the world-system in terms
of the development of capitalism as ecological history necessarily leads
 1 INTRODUCTION: OR, FICTIONS AND FRONTIERS … 11

us to the commodity frontier. Propelled by the law of value, capitalism

has unfolded through the cyclical emergence of ecological crises, favour-
ing “developments that reward the rapid exhaustion of nature (includ-
ing human nature), so long as external supplies can be secured” (Moore
2011: 19). Exactly how we are to define the term “external” here is
a question to which I will return in Chapter 2. Suffice to say for now
that the movement of commodity frontiers into un- or under-capitalized
zones, where they reorganize lives and landscapes in service to commod-
ity production, has been integral to securing the cheap food, energy, raw
materials, and labour-power essential to accumulation. However, the ten-
dency for commodity frontiers to rapidly exhaust the socioecological con-
ditions upon which their productivity depends means that they are period-
ically compelled to jump to new sites of exploitation. Moving relentlessly
across the globe, they draw more of nature into the gravitational field
of endless accumulation, deepening the world-historical character of local
ecologies such that landscape transformations in one region, say, become
inextricable from the reorganization of flora and fauna elsewhere.
Consider the following example, which speaks directly to the present
study. In 1897, Cadbury Brothers of Bournville, Birmingham, purchased
the cacao estates of La Mercedes and Maracas Valley in Trinidad. Cad-
bury had long been buying cacao beans from the colony for use in the
manufacture of its chocolate products, but this was an effort at vertical
integration aimed at more closely regulating the supply of raw materials
(Momsen and Richardson 2009: 487). Nearly twenty years later, Cad-
bury purchased land in the English village of Frampton-on-Severn in rural
Gloucestershire, where it established a milk-condensing plant (Morgan
and Smith 1972: 165). The plant was a response to the growing demand
for milk chocolate in the early twentieth century, as well as to “the need
to minimise the distance which liquid milk had to be transported in the
days before refrigerated bulk tankers” (Hill 2017: 76). Cacao beans were
shipped to ports in Bristol and then transported by barge up the River
Severn and the Gloucester and Sharpness Canal to the factory at Framp-
ton. Here, they were mixed with locally produced milk—the Severn Vale
“was, in the early twentieth century, prime dairy country with rich pas-
ture and numerous farms” (Hill 2017: 76)—to create what was known as
chocolate crumb. This was then shipped to the main Cadbury factory at
Bournville, where it was ground down, blended with cocoa butter, and
turned into chocolate bars.
12 M. NIBLETT

The various links in this commodity chain implicate a series of frontier

movements that tied together the ecologies of several geographically—
and geopolitically—distinct areas. The specific nexus of relations between
human and extra-human natures through which the cacao frontier oper-
ated in colonial Trinidad became entangled with the reorganization of
landscapes and work regimes in England’s semiperipheral West Country.
Here, the imposition of the Cadbury’s factory in Frampton, and its thirst
for some 40,000 gallons of milk a month, placed new demands on the
local dairy frontier (Morgan and Smith 1972: 165). This, in turn, became
inextricable from the forms of life- and environment-making involved in
the transformation of the chocolate crumb into bars in the industrial
core of Birmingham, a process heavily reliant on both the coal frontier
in Britain and various sugar frontiers across the globe.
This is but one instance of how the fundamentally globalizing move-
ment of commodity frontiers has propelled the development of the capi-
talist world-ecology as a single, if highly uneven, system. As with capitalist
modernization more generally, the experience of frontier-led ecological
change is simultaneously locally specific and world-historical. Thus, it too
can provide a baseline of universality for comparative analyses of cultural
forms. Indeed, not only does it allow us to compare literary responses
to commodity frontiers located in very different geopolitical contexts; it
also permits a form of comparison predicated on the recurring logistics of
frontier zones—in particular, their tendency towards cycles of boom and
bust, of resource windfalls followed by exhaustion. Are there similarities
in the generic conventions or aesthetic forms mobilized to express the
lived experience of a commodity boom? Of a period of bust? What hap-
pens to the relationship between, say, realism and modernism at different
points in the frontier cycle? These questions will be taken up later in this
book. For now, I want only to mark in general terms how variations in
the geopolitical location of commodity frontiers might differently inflect
literary production.

∗ ∗ ∗

The broad distinction I have in mind is that between commodity fron-

tiers operating in core regions of the world-system (albeit such frontiers
will likely constitute peripheral zones within the core) and frontiers oper-
ating in peripheral or semiperipheral regions subject to colonial or impe-
rialist interference. Such distinctions are necessarily fluid and provisional
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