The relentless reshaping of the world’s countryside contributes significantly to overcoming the tendency of commodity prices to rise because of scarcity. Commodities crucial to our daily needs, including sugar, soy and palm oil, have stayed relatively cheap despite staggering demand, increasing environmental costs, and the expenditures associated with long-distance transport. Behind this paradox is a relentless logic with deep historical roots of incorporating ever more land and labour, a logic that just as often escapes the attention of historians as it eludes consumers and economic statistics. Only by looking at commodity frontiers broadly, globally and historically can we get a handle on this process of world historical importance. We can begin to understand not only how our consumption patterns relate to the current global ecological predicaments, but also how, over the past centuries, capitalism has dramatically changed through crises, social resistance and consumer movements. Thus, the past provides us with clues about how we can play a role as citizens, workers and consumers in bending the course of economic development in such a way that one planet is enough. History does not repeat, but it reveals some patterns that are helpful for coming to terms with our present.
To fully grasp a reality so profound and consequential, we need to think about history at a global scale, and about capitalism. While there is a tradition of looking at capitalism historically – for instance, by the economist Werner Sombart, the historian Fernand Braudel, and the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein – these scholars tend to focus on the ways that European agency has transformed the world, paying too little attention to agency in other parts of the world. At the same time, when analysts study our increasingly globalised economies, they usually focus on urban merchants, industry, state bureaucrats, soldiers and lawmakers, thus overlooking the crucial role of the world’s countryside and its inhabitants in sustaining and channelling the staggering growth of the world economy with its ever more extensive commodity frontiers.
One way to rethink global capitalism is to start in the countryside instead of the city, and to look at agriculture instead of industry. The fundamental transformations of the global countryside not only facilitated capitalist expansion; they shaped it, making it a pervasive force encapsulating the entire globe in its search for cheap commodities. Meanwhile, the countryside also exposed capitalism’s vulnerabilities, including ecological depletion and social resistance that led to fundamental crises culminating in rebellions and revolutions.