Biomass, Capitalism, and Hegemony

Benoit Daviron is a French agronomist and agricultural economist at the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development (CIRAD). He is also currently a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, USA.

Biomass, Capitalism, and Hegemony brings political economy down to earth. Daviron penetrates the glittering surface of money to reveal a long history of successive ruptures in social metabolism, in which societies like living organisms, consume resources and produce waste. For millennia, biomass from plants supplied all human needs. Empires 500 years ago began to stretch solar metabolisms in space by reaching into distant landscapes to extract biomass, using enslaved labour, but still relying on energy from sun, wind, and water. Centuries later metabolism stretched in time by reaching deep into the earth for stored fossil energy and minerals. The “industrial revolution” not only separated labour from land, but also shifted the metabolic regime to mining. Viewed as metabolic regimes, wars are not only about hegemonic transitions from losers to victors. They create successive separations of “industry” from “agriculture,” and finally the rise of chemical industries that dominate agriculture and food along with everything else. More than cyclical transfers of wealth and power, extraction of biomass and energy have cumulatively led humans to a precipice, in which small course reversals face towering power and wealth locked into a disastrous trajectory of extraction and war.

• General IntroductionPart I: Where we see the United Provinces build wealth and power by trading distant biomass, 1580-1705Introduction1. The United Provinces: Territories, resources and economic sectors2. The Baltics and the North Sea: the first peripheries3. Spices and companies: trade with another world-economy, AsiaConclusionPart II: Where we see England pull ahead of France by exploiting its territory and its coloniesbetter, 1700-1846Introduction4. Mercantilism and the art of counting on your own forces5. Mobilizing resources from the national territory6. Distant biomass and social metabolismConclusionPart III: Where Great Britain, now a hegemon, mobilizes the world for its supply of biomass and prompts Europe to imitate her, 1815-1913Introduction7. A portrait of an English hegemon as a biomass importer8. Overcoming "the tyranny of distance": technical and institutional innovations9. The Golden Age of Frontiers10. An intensive animal farming pole in Northwestern Europe11. On Free Labor12. And capital? Key for transport, negligible for agricultural productionConclusionPart IV: Where the rivalry between Germany, the United States, and others gives a key roleto the chemical industry, 1865-1945Introduction13. Germany: on a quest for an industrialization not dependent on long-distance biomass trade14. Imperialist strategies, the weapon of the weak: France and Japan15. The United States: from the legendary frontier to resolution of the long farm crisisConclusionPart V: Where we see agriculture, under America's hegemony, become “modern”, “conventional” and food-focused, 1945-1972Introduction16. The American model17. Uneven spread of the American model and the institutionalization of the Global North-South division18. International agricultural trade: limited, food-focused, and administeredConclusionPart VI: American Hegemony, Season 2: The Return of GlobalizationIntroduction19. The second age of American hegemony20. Reorienting the world21. The "oil-based model" of biomass production and consumption pursues its global conquest22. The incomplete globalization of agricultural marketsConclusionGeneral Conclusion