Madeira, Sugar, & the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century, Part I : From ‘Island of Timber’ to Sugar Revolution, 1420-1506

• Madeira is a small island with a large place in the origins of the modern world. Lying 560 kilometers west of north Africa, Madeira was home to the modern world’s first cash crop boom, a sugar revolution. In the first of two successive essays in  REVIEW, I explain how the epoch-making acceleration of boom and bust on Madeira, during Braudel’s “first” sixteenth century (c. 1450-1557), marked a new crystallization of the nature-society relations pivotal to the rise of capitalism. This new crystallization represented an ensemble of new capacities to exploit and extract extra-human nature much faster, and on a much larger scale, than ever before. It was a mode of socio-ecological conquest and commodification that was possible because of early capitalism's “commodity frontier” strategy, one premised on global expansion as a constitutive moment in the formation of the modern world-system – as capitalist world-ecology no less than world-economy. From this standpoint, the very conditions of Madeira’s rapid ascent were also the conditions of its rapid decline after 1506. These stemmed from the rapid commodity-centered organization, and consequent exhaustion, of the relations governing human and extra-human nature: labor and land.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Ekonomisk historia (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Economic History (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Madeira

sugar

commodity frontier

European expansion

transition to capitalism

deforestation

capitalism

capitalism as world-ecology

world-systems analysis

historical geography

political ecology

political economy

historical sociology

environmental history

Agricultural economics

Jordbruksekonomi

Human ecology

Humanekologi

Human geography, economic geography

Kulturgeografi, ekonomisk geografi

Sociology

Sociologi

Agricultural history

Agrarhistoria

Economic history

Ekonomisk historia

Technology and social change

Teknik och social förändring

Economic History

ekonomisk historia

Social and Economic Geography

kulturgeografi

hållfasthetslära

Solid Mechanics

Systems Analysis

systemanalys

historia

History

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)