Scarcity in the Modern World: History, Politics, Society and Sustainability, 1800-2075

Scarcity in the Modern World brings together world-renowned scholars in an open access book to examine how concerns about the scarcity of environmental resources such as water, food, energy and materials have developed, and subsequently been managed, from the 18th to the 21st century. These multi-disciplinary contributions situate contemporary concerns about scarcity within their longer history, and address recent forecasts and debates surrounding the future scarcity of fossil fuels, renewable energy and water up to 2075. This book offers a fresh way of tackling the current challenge of meeting global needs in an increasingly resource-stressed environment. By bringing together scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, this volume provides an innovative multi-disciplinary perspective that corrects previous scholarship which has discussed scientific and cultural issues separately. In doing so, it recognizes that this challenge is complex and cannot be addressed by a single discipline, but requires a concerted effort to think about its political and social, as well as technical and economic dimensions. This volume is essential for all students and scholars of environmental and economic history. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors 1. Introduction, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, John Brewer, Neil Fromer and Frank Trentmann Part 1 Making Scarcity 2. Scarcity: Language and Politics, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal 3. Untangling Scarcity, Amber Huff and Lyla Mehta 4. Rethinking the Relationships between Scarcity, Poverty and Hunger: An Anthropological Perspective, Richard Wilk 5. Renewable Energy: A Story of Abundance and Scarcity, Neil Fromer Part 2 The Power of Projection 6. Growth in the Anthropocene, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson 7. The Great Resources Myth, David Rutledge 8. Escapology, or How to Escape Malthusian Traps, Jörg Friedrichs Part 3 Coping, Managing, Innovating at Different Scales 9. U.S. Mobilization during the Second World War as a Model for Coping with Climate Change, Hugh Rockoff 10. Scarcity and Innovation: Lessons from the British Economy during the U.S. Civil War, W. Walker Hanlon 11. China’s Great Leap Famine: Malthus, Marx, Mao and Material Scarcity, Sigrid Schmalzer 12. Encounters with Scarcity at a Micro-Scale: Householders’ Responses to Drought as a Continuum of Normal Practice, Heather Chappells Part 4 Dynamics of Distribution 13. A Climate of Scarcity: Electricity in India, 1899–2016, Elizabeth Chatterjee 14. Lagos ‘Scarce-City’: Investigating the Roots of Urban Modernity in a Colonial Capital, 1900–1928, David Lamoureux 15. Energy Shortages and the Politics of Time: Resilience, Redistribution and ‘Normality’ in Japan and East Germany, 1940s–1970s, Hiroki Shin and Frank Trentmann 16. Food Shortages: The Role and Limitations of Markets in Resolving Food Crises during the 2012 Famine in the Sahel, Emma C. Stephens Acknowledgements Index

About the Author :
John Brewer is Eli and Edye Broad Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, USA. Neil Fromer is the Executive Director of the Resnick Institute at the California Institute of Technology, USA. Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is Associate Professor of British History, Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago, USA. Frank Trentmann is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.

Review :
Scarcity is no longer just an axiom that governs the narrow world of modern economics; Scarcity in the Modern World reveals a socially, politically, and economically constructed condition in constant tension with the biophysical world. As the mantra of infinite growth in a finite world governs modern capitalism, scarcity threatens to have profound, if not devastating, effects on human life. Spanning cultures, continents, and academic disciplines, this timely anthology richly historicizes climate change and resource exhaustion, as well as proposes creative ways to conceptualize future solutions. This book serves as model for how interdisciplinary scholarship can productively address critical challenges facing humanity.