While volcanic eruptions infrequently release tons of arsenic into the atmosphere, capitalist interests within the United States disrupted the arsenic cycle like a volcano erupting on repeat. Instead of rising magma causing these eruptions, the imperial and racial relations of agrochemical expansion set these new arsenic cycles into motion.
From 1870 to 1914, arsenic was one of the essential substances that connected the Age of Empire and the Second Industrial Revolution. It is unlikely life on Earth has been subjected to this degree of chronic and widespread arsenic exposure since the Great Oxidation Event. But not all life on Earth; the selective pressure of arsenic exposure disproportionately impacted Latin America, where arsenic exposure reached new heights while following newly established pathways during the region’s so-called “export boom” from 1870 to 1930. This era witnessed the expansion of foreign-owned plantation economies to produce sugar, coffee, rubber, and other goods for export to the United States and Europe.
Agrochemical arsenic has traveled with settler colonialism and the U.S. empire since the 1870s. During Western expansion in the United States, settlers turned to Paris green (copper [II] acetoarsenite) to combat the Colorado potato beetle (Leptinotarsa decemlineata) in the 1860s and Rocky Mountain locust (Melanoplus spretus) in the 1870s. Settlers from Kansas to Nebraska used so much Paris green to combat the great locust swarms of 1874–1875 that they eventually drove the entire species into extinction.
Arsenic served as an extension of U.S. empire into many regions. In addition to maintaining the political economy of unjust cotton production in the South, arsenic helped U.S. leaders spread the politics of agrochemical use throughout the Americas. Concurrent with U.S. cotton planters’ actions in the post-emancipation South, planters across the Americas started introducing arsenic into their export-oriented plantations and orchards.
The association between arsenic and empire exploded in the early 1920s. The British maintained a global arsenic network that tied colonies and cotton together. They sequestered raw arsenic in Canada, South Africa, Australia, and Rhodesia, refined it in the United Kingdom, and exported it to Hong Kong, New Zealand, and India.