Biomass, Capitalism, and Hegemony: A Rich and Powerful History

How did Europeans achieve global dominance and continue to satisfy their ever-growing needs? How do we explain the effects this has on the rest of the world? In his magnum opus, published here in English for the first time as an open access book, world-renowned critical development scholar Benoit Daviron blends Braudelian history and a food systems approach to show how biomass--as the metabolism of societies and as a source of matter and energy--explains key historical phases of Western capitalist hegemony and the transitions between them. By examining various uses of biomass, technical production and extraction methods, forms of labour mobilization, and exchange systems, Daviron provides startling new insights into capitalist development from the 16th century to the present. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of critical approaches to global development, and for anyone interested in how capitalist domination came to be and how the bio-meatabolic imbalances it created might be redressed. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Table of Contents:
General Introduction Part I: Where we see the United Provinces build wealth and power by trading distant biomass, 1580-1705 Introduction 1. The United Provinces: Territories, resources and economic sectors 2. The Baltics and the North Sea: the first peripheries 3. Spices and companies: trade with another world-economy, Asia Conclusion Part II: Where we see England pull ahead of France by exploiting its territory and its colonies better, 1700-1846 Introduction 4. Mercantilism and the art of counting on your own forces 5. Mobilizing resources from the national territory 6. Distant biomass and social metabolism Conclusion Part III: Where Great Britain, now a hegemon, mobilizes the world for its supply of biomass and prompts Europe to imitate her, 1815-1913 Introduction 7. A portrait of an English hegemon as a biomass importer 8. Overcoming "the tyranny of distance": technical and institutional innovations 9. The Golden Age of Frontiers 10. An intensive animal farming pole in Northwestern Europe 11. On Free Labor 12. And capital? Key for transport, negligible for agricultural production Conclusion Part IV: Where the rivalry between Germany, the United States, and others gives a key role to the chemical industry, 1865-1945 Introduction 13. Germany: on a quest for an industrialization not dependent on long-distance biomass trade 14. Imperialist strategies, the weapon of the weak: France and Japan 15. The United States: from the legendary frontier to resolution of the long farm crisis Conclusion Part V: Where we see agriculture, under America's hegemony, become “modern”, “conventional” and food-focused, 1945-1972 Introduction 16. The American model 17. Uneven spread of the American model and the institutionalization of the Global North-South division 18. International agricultural trade: limited, food-focused, and administered Conclusion Part VI: American Hegemony, Season 2: The Return of Globalization Introduction 19. The second age of American hegemony 20. Reorienting the world 21. The "oil-based model" of biomass production and consumption pursues its global conquest 22. The incomplete globalization of agricultural markets Conclusion General Conclusion

About the Author :
Benoit Daviron is a French agronomist and agricultural economist at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD). He is also currently a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

Review :
Biomass, Capitalism, and Hegemony brings political economy down to earth. Daviron penetrates the glittering surface of money to reveal a long history of successive ruptures in social metabolism, in which societies like living organisms, consume resources and produce waste. For millennia, biomass from plants supplied all human needs. Empires 500 years ago began to stretch solar metabolisms in space by reaching into distant landscapes to extract biomass, using enslaved labour, but still relying on energy from sun, wind, and water. Centuries later metabolism stretched in time by reaching deep into the earth for stored fossil energy and minerals. The “industrial revolution” not only separated labour from land, but also shifted the metabolic regime to mining. Viewed as metabolic regimes, wars are not only about hegemonic transitions from losers to victors. They create successive separations of “industry” from “agriculture,” and finally the rise of chemical industries that dominate agriculture and food along with everything else. More than cyclical transfers of wealth and power, extraction of biomass and energy have cumulatively led humans to a precipice, in which small course reversals face towering power and wealth locked into a disastrous trajectory of extraction and war.