Earth Capital

This book is a major new history of capitalism which takes account of the material and ecological underpinnings of productive activity as well as the social, political and institutional dimensions of economic life. It retraces the history of capitalism over a long time period, giving particular attention to role of food, agriculture, energy and natural resources and with an eye to the future, mindful of the need to find solutions to an ecological crisis that threatens to overwhelm us. Alessandro Stanziani shows that the development of capitalism since the 12th century has been based on two primary forms of exploitation: the exploitation of labour, often coerced, and the exploitation of what he calls ¿Earth capital¿, by which he means both the planet as a whole and its land and natural resources as factors of production. While these two forms of exploitation have gone hand-in-hand, the emphasis has shifted over time: forced labour gradually declined in importance from 1870 on and the ex