The Unending Frontier

Some highlights and musings:

The book makes a good case that the dynamics of colonial resource extraction aren't particularly specific to capitalism, or Europeans. It seems to happen whenever a well organized administrative state or commercial market encounters less organized people with something it wants, with examples I hadn't seen before from Ming China, Tokugawa Japan, the Delhi Sultanate, Russian imperial expansion into Ukraine and Siberia.

I had no idea that the Dutch colonized Taiwan, only to be ousted by the Ming dynasty, or that the Ming dynasty escaped to exile in Taiwan for a long time, before finally being crushed by the Qing. A historical parallel I'm sure everyone in China sees with the mid-20th century Nationalists fleeing there and founding modern Taiwan.

The introduction of maize and sweet potatoes to China from the Americas enabled indigenous hill peoples of the south to settle down and become farmers (wet rice agriculture wasn't a think in the mountains). This made them easier for the Ming dynasty to subjugate and incorporate into their administrative state & economy, and led to massive deforestation and topsoil erosion.

Also, sweet potatoes had been adopted by the pacific islander civilization as much as 500 years before Europeans made it to South America, where the plant was domesticated, so the islanders were visiting the continent at least occasionally (based on the genetics of sweet potatoes).

The main actor in the conquest and depopulation of the Americas was disease. Things might have turned out very differently if the tables had been turned! What if instead 90% of the population of Afro-Eurasia had died off in the 1500s because of new pathogens brought home by would-be conquistadors? We still don't really get how bad novel pathogens can be, even after 3 years of coronavirus chaos.

Tokugawa Japan accepted its resource limits and adapted to them culturally -- in spectacular contrast to Great Britain -- adopting a spartan, minimalist material aesthetic, widespread population controls, strict centralized sustainable forestry practices, and extensive utilization of previously unused marine resources. But it also isolated itself from ongoing technological progress and stagnated.

Not exactly a shining example to emulate, but I feel like there are lessons for the "island nation" of Earth here. Are there good examples of societies that have accepted material resource limits, and simultaneously embraced technological development?

The concentration of effort and incentives that global markets can bring to bear on localized resource extraction is terrifying, especially when the desires of those markets are capricious. This isn't such a big problem when what's changing is the arrangement of a relatively stable collection of raw inputs. Clothes fashion can change rapidly, but if the clothes are still being made out of the same materials, in approximately the same quantities year after year, it's not a disruptive discontinuity. Ditto electronics. What's changing is the information content, not the physical stuff.

But when a new and different raw material or natural product becomes the focus of a globe spanning market, things get crazy. Hipsters in the US decided the like Mezcal, and suddenly the acreage dedicated to growing maquey in Mexico has exploded, resulting in much more monocropping, displacing almost subsistence agriculture. Undomesticated varietals are being hunted down mercilessly in the woodlands of the mountains. It just can't scale to global attention. And what happens if in 5 years mixology moves on, but the newly planted maguey haven't yet matured?

We're on the verge of something similar in our energy systems. If we pull off the energy transition, billions of tons of annual fossil fuel production will vanish in a generation, and hundreds of millions of tons of new materials will be extracted every year to support an electrified energy system -- lithium for batteries, rare earth elements for magnets, copper for motors and dynamos and wires... It'll also be a shift from energy materials as a once-through flow to energy materials as capital stock that is resident in the system for decades and can potentially be recycled. These are very fundamental shifts and I think they'll be more disruptive than many people imagine.