Centuries of capitalism saw the global countryside ruthlessly converted into cheap commodities. But at what cost?
Each systemic crisis accelerated the expansion of commodity frontiers. As we have seen, capitalism became global when Europe’s budding capitalist economies hit their natural limits. Always short on space to grow commodities and lacking minerals, wood for fuel and the right climate to grow cotton, sugar and coffee, Europe expanded its sites of production to secure its economic expansion. Sugar production provides a classic example of a series of relocations in response to ecological crises and limitations. After droughts eliminated Egypt’s abundant sugar exports in the early 15th century, Cyprus, Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula tried to fill the gap. But the Mediterranean cane fields could not satisfy a growing demand for sugar, and Italian merchants and Iberian monarchs moved sugar frontiers to the Atlantic realm, first to Madeira and the Canary Islands, then into Brazil and the Caribbean. The geographer David Harvey has coined the term ‘spatial fix’ to describe this spatial expansion of commodity production.
This spatial expansion under the first commodity frontier regime was enabled by a massive enslavement of workers. Eventually, however, the ‘fix’ of slavery created additional crises with yet more global repercussions. Most spectacularly, the hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans transported to the sugar, coffee and indigo fields of Saint-Domingue rebelled in 1791 and put an end to the world’s largest plantation complex. This was an immensely consequential revolt, a revolution actually, that reverberated throughout the Caribbean region and the Americas. Yet it was only one of the many slave rebellions since the 16th century, rebellions that eventually involved tens of thousands of enslaved workers. Meanwhile, an increasing awareness of the cruelties attending the slave trade and of the horrendous death rates on the plantations fed a rising abolitionist movement, particularly in the United Kingdom. This awareness resulted in an increasing number of European countries banning the slave trade. Continuing massive rebellions by enslaved people in the British West Indies led to a comprehensive ban on slavery within the British Empire beginning in 1834, followed by the French Empire in 1848, the US in 1865, Cuba in 1886, and Brazil in 1888.
The crisis of Europe’s slave-based commodity frontiers in the Americas in the early 19th century was ‘fixed’ by an expansion of mass commodity production in other parts of the Americas as well as in colonial Asia and Africa, which was built upon the enhanced infrastructural, military and bureaucratic capabilities of states allowing them to control ever larger territories and populations.
