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Political Economy of World-Systems 2002 Conference Riverside, California |
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Abstract Is There a Political Ecology of the
Hegemonic Cycle? Jason W. Moore At best, environmental history appears as an afterthought in the literatures on world hegemonies and phases of capitalist development. I hope to show that hegemonic transitions and stages of capitalist development look much different when environmental history is viewed as endogenous to the processes of large-scale socio-political change in the modern world-system. To that end, this paper explores two questions from the perspective of political ecology. First, In what sense does the hegemonic cycle - the rise and fall of not just "great" but "leading" powers in the modern era - relate to environmental history? Second, In what sense are theorizations of "phases of capitalist development" (e.g. Albritton, et al., 2001) reducible to the theory of the hegemonic cycle and hegemonic transitions? The answers to these questions, I suggest, find a common thread in environmental history. While the hegemonic cycle, and hegemonic transitions especially, constitutes an important moment in the environmental history of the modern world-system, the totality of capitalism's environmental history is not reducible to the hegemonic cycle. There appear to be "long centuries" of agro-ecological transformation that are related, but not reducible to, hegemonic succession. The existence of an agro-ecological cycle alongside the hegemonic cycle - and of world ecological transitions that appear strongly related to, but still partially independent of, hegemonic transitions - suggests the need for a new approach to the periodization of world capitalist development. At the very least, the existence of overlapping but still distinct historical geographies of crisis and transition - in the form of hegemonic succession and recurrent waves of agro-ecological restructuring on a world-scale - indicates the need for rethinking the relation between conceptions of world hegemony and phases of capitalist development, as well as those conceptions by themselves. This argument is developed in three sections. First, I review the literature on world hegemonies, and evaluate its relation to environmental history. I suggest ways in which we might conceptualize the environmental history of the hegemonic cycle and hegemonic transitions with references to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, and the political ecology of the "three hegemonies" of historical capitalism. Second, I argue against recent efforts to collapse the periodization of capitalist development into the conception of world hegemony. Without discounting the importance of hegemonic actors in reshaping world ecology, I contend that the world environmental history of capitalism cannot be reduced to the actions of leading hegemons, or to the crises that accompany hegemonic transition. Especially significant, I think, is that a far-reaching reorganization of world ecology during the transition to capitalism in the long 16th century predates the emergence of the first hegemonic power (the United Provinces) (see esp. Moore, 2002a). Finally, eras of fundamental agro-ecological change - which elsewhere I have characterized as "systemic cycles of agro-ecological transformation" (Moore, 2000a) - seem to be rather more strongly related to capitalism's contradictions of class, capital, and (especially) metabolism than to its geopolitical moment, however closely intertwined the latter may be with the former. |
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27th Annual Conference of the Political Economy of World-Systems Spring Hosted by the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California, Riverside |