Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

When Europeans began to colonise the Americas in the decades after 1492, they were not driven by the romance of ‘exploration’ and ‘discovery’, as our schoolbooks would have it. Colonisation was a response to the crisis of elite disaccumulation that had been caused by the peasant revolutions in Europe. It was a ‘fix’. Just as elites turned to enclosure at home, they sought new frontiers for appropriation abroad, beginning with Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas. These two processes unfolded simultaneously. In 1525, the very year that German nobles massacred those 100,000 peasants, the Spanish king Carlos I awarded the kingdom’s highest honour to Hernán Cortés, the conquistador who slayed 100,000 Indigenous people as his army marched through Mexico and destroyed the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán. The congruence of these two events is no accident. In the decades that inaugurated the rise of capitalism, enclosure and colonisation were deployed as part of the same strategy.