Building Empire on Railroads, Buffalo, and Blood

The leitmotif of this complex story is the huge and unpredictable ecological impact of empires in modern times. Beginning in Madeira, then in Hispaniola and across the Americas, the Portuguese and Spanish and their successors not only destroyed indigenous societies but also transformed their ecologies by turning them into export-driven monocultures.

Such practices were not unique to Western imperialism: the Russian tsars and the Manchu regime in China also spread their power by promoting the agricultural colonization of what had been hunter-gatherer borderlands. Amrith sketches not just parallelisms but surprising connections in the predatory growth of empires. When Spanish galleons crossed the oceans from Potosi to Manila to trade silver for goods with Chinese merchants, they brought the plants of the New World with them. Sweet potatoes saved countless lives in early modern Asia when drought caused a sharp downturn in the cultivation of rice.

What was distinctive about the Western empires was the exponential increase in their ability to remake the lands they encountered. In early seventeenth century New England, English settlers initially struggled to clear forests or hunt fur-bearing animals — as John Smith grumbled, “We cannot much trouble them.” By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the building of railroads across North America enabled settlers to kill millions of buffalos on the prairies then to replace them with cattle. In their eyes, an additional benefit of this hurried was that it starved into submission the Native Americans who had relied on buffalo for food. In Argentina, General Roca similarly waged a genocidal war against indigenous peoples to clear lands for pasture.

Advances in the technology of killing led to a dramatic improvement in living standards. Chicago became one giant slaughterhouse, with new railroads and the advent of refrigeration turning the city into a hub for meat production that transformed diets across the country and allowed Americans to feast on animals now killed out of sight and mind. A visit to its stockyards, crammed with “nearly all the pigs ever bred in Wisconsin,” and awash with blood, repulsed the jingoistic journalist and poet Rudyard Kipling. For Amrith, killing was integral to the scientific progress often associated with European imperialism: Alfred Russel Wallace, who shared credit with Charles Darwin for the theory of evolution by natural selection, happily gunned down Indonesian orangutans so he could dissect them.

Although Amrith faults Kipling for failing to “equate” the mechanization of animal slaughter with the “imperial killing” his poems supposedly celebrated, he goes too far in playing down the distinction between the abattoir and the Maxim machine guns with which Europeans fought their colonial wars. As Lauren Benton has recently argued, law always constrained — or at least offered flimsy justifications for — the use of imperial violence. While Wallace may have been trigger-happy in his pursuit of science, he was also a gentle theosophist and a vocal critic of the British Empire’s cavalier attitude to the lives of its conquered subjects.

The British Empire may have run on violence, but its functionaries claimed to be intent on preserving life. One justification for the network of railways that eventually spanned the Raj was that they would eliminate the “partial and local” famines to which India was subject by speeding grain to places where the harvest had failed. When many millions of Indians nonetheless died from plague and famine in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Wallace denounced this “disgrace to our rule.”

Amrith repeatedly demonstrates that, more than sporadic violence, empires relied on their ability to use resources extracted from one region to exploit other distant areas. For instance, the Randlords of late nineteenth-century South Africa used pitch pine felled in Oregon to prop up their gold mines and “improved” deforested landscapes by replanting them with Australian blue gum trees. Long after the self-congratulatory abolition of the slave trade, the most important of these resources was people. It took one hundred thousand largely forgotten Chinese workers from Guangdong to build railways across North America. When the Randlords could not find enough Africans to endure the deadly conditions underground, they shipped in Chinese miners instead.

Horror, Horror, Everywhere

World War I united the planetary reach of capitalism with the Western prowess in killing. Its muddy battlefields were staked out with the barbed wire first used to corral cattle in the American Midwest. That was not the only way in which North America counted: Amrith shares Avner Offer’s agrarian interpretation of the conflict, arguing that Canadian wheat, American meat, and Australian wool enabled the Allies to prevail against the Kaiserreich. The British exploited the interconnectivity of Western economies against the Germans by enforcing a blockade against food imports, trying to starve their opponents into submission rather than relying solely on bombarding them.

World War II was driven by a no less insatiable appetite for land and food. Amrith reminds us that both Nazi and imperial Japanese thinkers were keen students of the United States, who saw its ethnic cleansing of the West as the prologue to its greatness. The war got underway not in 1939 but in 1937, when the Japanese invaded China to secure the raw materials that it needed to sustain a looming conflict with the United States. The Nazis likewise thought of their genocidal pursuit of Lebensraum in eastern Europe as an attempt to catch up with the Angloworld. Their minister of food and agriculture, Richard Darré, had grown up in Argentina, where he had seen how the British bankrolled the production of beef on the pampas. Heinrich Himmler hoped to turn Ukraine into a “paradise, a European California.”

Hunger explains not just the origins of the war but its horrors. The Nazis tried to protect their own people from the rigors of total war and to defeat the Soviet Union by taking Ukraine’s grain for themselves. They did not blanch at the thirty million deaths from hunger that they calculated would result from such a policy. While they allotted a calorific minimum of food to the millions of forced workers on which their war machine depended, they felt free to work the Jews of eastern Europe to death.

In their minds, the use of Zyklon B — a poison gas initially formulated as an agricultural insecticide — became a “humane” alternative to the slow starvation of concentration camp inmates. In time, the Nazis used starvation even against those they did not consider to be their racial enemies. They punished the Dutch for acts of resistance by diverting much of their agricultural produce to the Reich — twenty-five thousand people duly died in the Dutch Famine, the Hongerwinter, of 1944.

Amrith arguably underplays the gap between the vicious chauvinism often displayed by supposedly liberal powers and the exterminatory ideology of the Nazis, who treated Jews as “lice.” His rationale for doing so is that he attends to what regimes do, not what they say. Although Winston Churchill — who felt the “common British racial hatred of India and Indians” — did not explicitly mandate the starvation of Bengalis in the way the Nazis planned the death of Ukrainians or Russians, Amrith argues that “the effect was the same.”

Between two or three million died of hunger and disease when he insisted on shipping grain from the Punjab to support the war against Germany. The Allies certainly stopped at nothing to win the war, engineering firestorms over Dresden and Tokyo and dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yet by Amrith’s own account, abundance was no less important a weapon in the West’s armory than hunger. Tins of American Spam kept Soviet armies on the march — Nikita Khrushchev enjoyed the taste — and fed millions of Asians with the coming of peace.

The Faustian Struggles of Production

The aggressive manipulation of the environment remained central to Western hegemony in the age of decolonization. Just as America’s farmers soaked their land in petroleum fertilizers and chemical insecticides, its generals showered Vietnamese civilians with napalm. Agent Orange and the other exfoliants dropped on the Vietnamese jungle, which poisoned nearly five million people, were herbicides originally designed for American farms. The revealing codename for their use was Operation Ranch Hand.

While no other country could match America’s military-agrarian complex, assaults on the environment were not limited to the West. The independent governments of Egypt and India displaced millions of peasants to build gigantic dams for irrigation and hydroelectric power. Speedy development became a global obsession. Mao Zedong’s officials forced peasants to harass millions of sparrows to death in the belief that they were harming crops. The insects on which the sparrows had actually fed soon swarmed their fields and homes. Amrith muses that this Great Leap Forward never had the “bloodlust and gratuitous cruelty” of European big game hunting, but its good intentions cannot have been much consolation to peasants plagued by bugs.

Ideologies did not so much determine whether a society embarked on the reckless consumption of fossil fuels, but merely shaped why they did so. In the United States, the expansion of the petroleum industry was identified with individual autonomy, because it mainly powered personal vehicles. The proceeds from the federal gas tax were earmarked for the construction of new highways, which by the late 1950s carried consumers to a new institution: the indoor and air-conditioned shopping mall.

In postwar Italy, Enrico “Enzo” Mattei — tasked with dismantling Fascist state enterprise — sought bilaterial agreements with oil producers in the Middle East, talking up decolonization in an effort to power Fiats. He died in a mysterious plane crash after making an enemy of the CIA. Iran and Brazil offer further variations on the theme: its regimes associated oil not with individual freedom, but with national greatness and their wells fueled industrial development rather than private cars.

These paths to development combined with a “green revolution” in agriculture and plunging mortality rates to produce a “great acceleration” in industrial production and carbon pollution. It was easy to quiet the chorus of people who warned of the risks.

Carson’s critics said she was hysterical and a communist. The generals who had seized control of 1960s Brazil murdered the indigenous activists who protested their lucrative clearing of the Amazon rainforest. It is tempting to cast the United States, whose way of life has, in George W. Bush’s words, never been “up for negotiation” as the spoiler of environmental action. Yet most consumers of palm oil, now a major driver of deforestation, are Asians. It is no easier to point the finger at commodities than at countries. Before we scan the list of ingredients and guiltily return the cookies to the shelf, we should reflect with Amrith that palm oil produces as much fat and energy as other oils but in just one-fifth of the agricultural space. Need rather than greed explains its ubiquity.

Amrith stresses some reasons to be cheerful. Governments have tried to clean up the air and the rivers and are replanting mangrove swamps. The world united to close the hole in the ozone layer. K-Pop fans have implored its stars to use less packaging in their promotion materials. Amrith’s young children tell him they are indignant at the destruction of the earth. But these bright sparks hardly coalesce into a new dawn. Amrith’s aim, however, is less to find magic bullets than to highlight the “stubborn residues of history” that frustrate the search for solutions.

As Carson’s contemporary Indira Gandhi saw, debates on environmental action are political as much as they are scientific: they ask whose interests count in a “divided world.” Amrith’s admiring account of her record as prime minister of India notes that she mixed a conservationist agenda with a defense of her country’s right to reach Western standards of living. When the scientist Paul Ehrlich sounded the alarm about global overpopulation, Gandhi replied that he had confused the number of people with the thornier question of how resources were distributed. Westerners consumed and polluted very much more per capita.

Despite her eloquence, Gandhi allowed her “loutish” son, Sanjay, to preside over the coerced sterilization of up to eight million Indian men, mostly drawn from lower caste groups. And as Indian and Chinese carbon emissions have rocketed since Gandhi’s time, the fault lines of environmental privilege now run through as well as between countries. China’s Belt and Road Initiative and its interest in the geophysical control of the weather reveal its determination not to be left behind in a less habitable future.

Yet while the urban elites of non-Western countries may be able to insulate themselves from climate change in a concrete, air conditioned, and securely provisioned “technosphere,” the billion or so people who may lose their homes to climate change will be less fortunate. Unable to afford the move to Western countries — who will strain to exclude them — they will become refugees in their own countries.

The Sorrowful Pageantry of Progress

The Burning Earth is more successful in charting the “colossal human suffering” baked into the modern world than it is in inspiring us to do something about it. Though beautifully written, it suffers from a problem of literary form. In each of its chapters, folly, callousness, and the law of unintended consequences cause millions of horrible deaths from starvation and epidemic disease. Most of the victim’s names are not recorded — history being largely composed from the logbooks of the powerful and happy few.

Amrith tempers his “numbing” statistics with vignettes from primary sources that help us to envision what it was like to inhabit their shattered worlds. But it becomes hard to care. This is even truer when we contemplate the butcher’s bill of animal life in his pages. How should readers react to the eight million horses killed in World War I or the million Malaysian pigs hastily slaughtered in 1987 to stop the spread of the Nipah virus? Such ghostly numbers just produce an embarrassed shrug.

Western thinkers once had philosophies of history to make sense of what Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called the “slaughter bench” of the past. The spiritual, intellectual, or even material advances achieved by human beings made the terrible suffering of past ages worthwhile. Amrith is rightly skeptical of such approaches, which relied on universalizing the priorities of Western peoples while occluding their costs.

With Dipesh Chakrabarty, he knows that the “mansion of modern freedoms” rests on the “ever expanding consumption” of fossil fuels. Even though countless millions now enjoy meaty diets, comfortable homes, and freedom from epidemic disease, we cannot say history has been moving in the right direction. There is no progress to report: merely spiraling extraction and emissions, initially at the expense of the anonymous poor. Our instinct to take their part may be healthy but it is unhistorical. Beginning with Kublai Khan’s fateful decision to back the rice farmers of China over the demands of his mounted followers for pasture, Amrith’s book demonstrates that elites have often had to ruin one group’s environment to produce the environment another needed to flourish. There are no heroes or victims in this game, but only players.

Global history writing of this kind risks becoming a dismal art, bringing only the consolation of lucidity. The more we learn about the depth and ubiquity of “existential inequality,” the less it seems likely to change. Amrith — whose chair at Yale was endowed by an Indian private equity investor — sees that the ability to form a connected picture of human existence is a by-product of our accelerating consumption of the resources on which it depends.

He writes movingly about the French banker Albert Kahn, who in 1909 commissioned a photographic archive of the civilizations of the planet. He funded it with the fortune he had made investing in South Africa’s deadly gold mines and in promoting railways in Japan. Kahn was anxious to dispatch photographers to capture the older ways of life that he believed (and hoped) capitalist globalization would eliminate.

Amrith’s politics are not Kahn’s. Rather than merely recording the inevitable victims of development, he writes to memorialize and mourn with them. Yet The Burning Earth and books like it strangely echo the commitment of Kahn’s archive to producing an objective, planetary panorama of who we are and where we are going. The question remains: to what profit?