Empire, Capital, and the Rise of Cheap Nature, 1450–1750

This contribution asks how new forms empire, commodity production, and capitalist organization crystallized in the early modern era around a “cheap nature” strategy. In this strategy, I suggest, we find a way to comprehend a restless geography of conquest, commercialization, and commodity production unprecedented in human history. Capitalism as frontier-making civilization comes to the fore. While environmental and world historians have often characterized this era as one of “commercial” or “pre-industrial” capitalism, this intervention suggests a different perspective. In this, the industrialization and agrarian transformation of Europe in the “long” sixteenth century was practically linked to trans-Atlantic imperial mobilizations of the “unpaid work” of human and extra-human natures: slaves, indigenous peoples, forests, soils, mineral veins, and much beyond.