Slaveship Earth: Capitalism’s Secret 500-Year Climate History
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The climate crisis didn’t begin with factories, smokestacks, or fossil fuels. It began with slave ships.
In this sharp and provocative lecture, Jason W. Moore delivers a devastating answer: the problem isn’t “anthropogenic” — made by humans. The problem is capitalogenic — made by capital.
Moore critiques the most dangerous idea of the modern world — the “Man” versus “Nature” binary — and shows how it was born in the Columbian invasions after 1492. He replaces the comforting myth of Spaceship Earth with the far more accurate metaphor: Slaveship Earth. Signifying a world-ecology of power, profit and life built on the capitalist expulsion of most humans from “humanity,” Cheap Nature, and five centuries of violence, appropriation, and frontier-making, Moore traces the long history of climate change before and during the capitalist era.
This is not another story of hopelessness or population panic. It is an ecology of hope. Moore reveals how every major climate shift in the Holocene has been a moment of civilizational crisis and political possibility — from the fall of Rome and the peasant revolts that ended feudalism, to today’s climate crisis. He shows why the Capitalocene today is propelling a crisis of life-making and profit-making at once, and why only collective democratic action can seize the opportunities hidden inside the capitalogenic threat.
In this wide-ranging talk, Moore explains:
• Why “anthropogenic global warming” is neither innocent nor accurate — Britain and the US alone are responsible for more than a third of historical greenhouse gas emissions.
• How sugar plantations, silver mines, and the slaveship — not the steam engine or the Industrial Revolution — created the organizational template for capitalism as a world-ecology and its Cheap Nature projects.
• Why the Anthropocene is an elitist anti-politics machine that hides five centuries of capitalogenic crisis behind the fiction of “humans did it.”
• How climate shifts have repeatedly destabilized ruling classes and opened paths to greater equality for the vast majority.
• Why today’s state shift demands we move beyond Green Arithmetic to an ethic of care, connection, and democracy in the web of life.
This is not a call for green tech or climate austerity. It is a call to end the cheapening of life and labor once and for all — and to build a different world inside the one that is dying.
From a public lecture by Jason W. Moore, “Climate, Capitalism, and Geohistorical Crises, School of Architecture, ETH-Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich), 25 February, 2019.
Jason W. Moore teaches world history at Binghamton University and coordinates the World-Ecology Research Collective. He is the author of Capitalism in the Web of Life and, with Raj Patel, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. Key ideas for this lecture are drawn from Moore’s books and essays, most freely available on his website jasonwmoore.com, including “The Capitalocene” essays, “Opiates of the Environmentalists,” and “Our Capitalogenic World.”
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