Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming

Malm, Andreas

ISBN 10: 1784781290 / ISBN 13: 9781784781293

Published by Verso, 2016

About this Item

488 pages, soft cover. Covers are clean and bright, as are interior pages. Binding is solid. This book is a Marxist critique of climate change. It argues that the reliance on fossil fuels originated in the 19th-century British textile industry. Industrialists adopted coal-fired steam engines not for better efficiency, but because they offered superior control over a captive workforce compared to river-based water mills. Clean copy.

Seller Inventory # 34578

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming
• Publisher: Verso
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1784781290
• ISBN 13: 9781784781293
• Binding: Softcover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

A sweeping study of how capitalism first promoted fossil fuels with the rise of steam power—and contributed to the worsening climate crisis

The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy—but rather superior control of subordinate labor. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today.
 
Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order.


“The definitive deep history on how our economic system created the climate crisis. Superb, essential reading from one of the most original thinkers on the subject.”
—Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine

About the Author

Andreas Malm teaches human ecology at Lund University, Sweden. His work has appeared in journals such as Environmental History, Historical Materialism, Antipode and Organization & Environment. He is the author, with Shora Esmailian, of Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War, and of half a dozen books in Swedish on political economy, the Middle East and climate change.