The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

everywhere perhaps except within the modern academy.

Could that be the reason why television, film, and the visual arts have found it much easier to address climate change than has literary fiction?

the one point where all those lines of descent converge is the invention of print technology, which moved the logocentricism of the Abrahamic religions in general, and the Protestant Reformation in particular, onto a new plane. So much so that Ernest Gellner was able to announce in 1964, “The humanist intellectual is, essentially, an expert on the written word.”

the slow but inexorable excision of all the pictorial elements that had previously existed within texts:

It was as if every doorway and window that might allow us to escape the confines of language had to be slammed shut, to make sure that humans had no company in their dwindling world but their own abstractions and concepts.

But then came a sea change: with the Internet we were suddenly back in a time when text and image could be twinned with as much facility as in an illuminated manuscript.

In accounts of the Anthropocene, and of the present climate crisis, capitalism is very often the pivot on which the narrative turns.

However, I believe that this narrative often overlooks an aspect of the Anthropocene that is of equal importance: empire and imperialism.

capitalism and empire are certainly dual aspects of a single reality, the relationship between them is not, and has never been, a simple one: in relation to global warming, I think it is demonstrably the case that the imperatives of capital and empire have often pushed in different directions, sometimes producing counterintuitive results.

To look at the climate crisis through the prism of empire is to recognize, first, that the continent of Asia is conceptually critical to every aspect of global warming: its causes, its philosophical and historical...

are rarely reckoned with—and this may be because the discourse around the Anthropocene, and climate matters genera...

Asia’s centrality to global warming rests, in the first instance, upon numbers.

In China, which feeds more than 20 percent of the world’s population off 7 percent of the world’s arable land, desertification is already causing direct annual losses of $65 billion.

The brute fact is that no strategy can work globally unless it works in Asia and is adopted by large numbers of Asians. Yet, in this matter too, the conditions that are peculiar to mainland Asia are often absent from the discussion.

The reality is that the continent has also played a pivotal role in setting in motion the chain of consequences that is driving the present cycle of climatic change.

it was the rapid and expanding industrialization of Asia’s most populous nations, beginning in the 1980s, that brought the climate crisis to a head.

Asia’s contribution, on the other hand, came about through a sudden but very small expansion in the footprint of a much larger number of people, perhaps as much as half of a greatly expanded global population, late in the twentieth century.

it is that of the simpleton who, in his blundering progress across the stage, unwittingly stumbles upon the secret that is the key to the plot. This is because certain crucial aspects of modernity would not have become apparent if they had not been put to an empirical test, in the only continent where the magnitudes of population are such that they can literally move the planet.

What we have learned from this experiment is that the patterns of life that modernity engenders can only be practiced by a small minority of the world’s population.

It is Asia, then, that has torn the mask from the phantom that lured it onto the stage of the Great

Derangement, but only to recoil in horror at its own handiwork; its shock is such that it dare not even name what it has beheld—for having entered this stage, it is trapped, like everyone else.

It is now known that the Kerala School of Mathematics anticipated the work of “Gregory, Newton and Leibniz by at least 250 years”; it is by no means unlikely that these developments were transmitted to Europe by Jesuits.

In short, as the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam has long argued, modernity was not a “virus” that spread from the West to the rest of the world. It was rather a “global and conjunctural phenomenon,” with many iterations arising almost simultaneously in different parts of the world.

oil became especially important after the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852–53, when the British seized a large part of the kingdom, depriving the then ruler, King Mindon, of his southern revenues. This greatly increased the king’s dependence on oil, and in 1854 he did what the rulers of many modern petro-states were to do in the century to come: he asserted direct control over the oil fields of Yenangyaung, effectively nationalizing the industry.

In light of this, it could be said that the first steps toward the creation of a modern oil industry were actually taken in Burma.

After that, the oil fields of Yenangyaung passed into British control, and, in time, they became the nucleus of the megacorporation that was known until the 1960s as Burmah-Shell.

It will be clear from this that, as with much else that bears the label of “modern,” the development of the oil industry in Burma was a profoundly hybrid process, involving local rulers, officialdom, and businessmen, not to speak of technologies that dated back many centuries. Yet, as the historian Marilyn Longmuir notes, “Most oil historians give the date 28 August 1859 as the commencement of the modern oil industry when ‘Colonel’ Edwin L. Drake organized the first successful drilling of an oil well at Oil Creek near Titusville, Pennsylvania.”

Sivasundaram!

it was the very success of Bombay’s shipyards that led to their undoing. The English shipping industry complained that “the families of all the shipwrights in England are certain to be reduced to starvation” unless India-built ships were barred from accessing British ports. In 1815, the British Parliament passed a law, the Registry Act, that placed tight restrictions on Indian ships and sailors (“lascars”). It has been said of this law that it was “more devastating to the economy of Indian shipping than all the competitive technological innovations of the last 300 years put together.”

It was the very fact that India’s ruling power was also the global pioneer of the carbon economy that ensured that it could not take hold in India, at that point in time.

appetites of the British economy needed to be fed by large quantities of raw materials, produced by solar-based methods of agriculture. Had a carbon economy developed synchronously in India and elsewhere, these materials would have been used locally instead of being exported.

the emerging fossil-fuel economies of the West required that people e...

the coal economy thus essentially “depended on not being imitated.” Imperial rule assured that it was not.

From that point on, carbon-intensive technologies were to have the effect of continually reinforcing Western power with the result that other variants of modernity came to be suppressed, incorporated, and appropriated into what is now a single, dominant model.

The boost that fossil fuels provided to Western power is nowhere more clearly evident than in the First Opium War, where armored steamships, led by the aptly named Nemesis, played a decisive role. In other words, carbon emissions were, from very early on, closely co-related to power in all its aspects:

the first important conflict to be fought in the name of free trade and unfettered markets;