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

Moore, Jason W.,1971-Umeå universitet,Institutionen för idé- och samhällsstudier,Umeå Studies in Science, Technology, and Environments (author)

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

Binghamton, N.Y.Fernand Braudel Center for the study of economies, historical systems, and civilizations,2009
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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.

In:Review: a journal of the Fernand Braudel Center for the study of economies, historical systems, and civilizationsBinghamton, N.Y. : Fernand Braudel Center for the study of economies, historical systems, and civilizations32:4, s. 345-3900147-9032

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SOCIAL SCIENCES: SOCIAL SCIENCES; and Economics and Bu ...; and Economic History

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