Steam and Power: Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital

The Earth is warming, due to humans burning fossil fuels. Humanity’s accelerated burning of fossil fuels coincides with the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the eighteenth century. A question that has challenged historians is why people in Britain converted to burning coal, inspiring other peoples to do the same, forever altering human history and, now we know, altering the planet in profound ways as well. Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam-Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books, 2016. Pp. 496. $29.95) is a detailed argument for the cause he has identified: capital, as embodied in a small number of industrialists who chose to burn coal and produce steam instead of choosing to power their textile mills with other alternatives that were available around the turn of the nineteenth century, including workers’ muscles, the muscles of draft animals, and water power.

Malm’s is a Marxian argument. He begins the book by comparing the two main meanings of the word “power” in English: (1) a force of nature or measure of physical work, and (2) a word that characterizes the hierarchical relationship between people. He notes that few scholars embrace both meanings or show the movement in history between the two. He sets out to use both. He begins by offering a subtle critique of the prevailing explanations by E. A. Wrigley and others for the shift to coal, which center on the idea that the English were experiencing a serious shortage of firewood. Malm documents that in the early nineteenth century, when the British conversion to coal was accelerating, analysts calculated not how many acres of forest coal replaced but how many laborers.

Moving to the heart of Fossil Capital, Malm marshals a detailed examination of the adoption of coal-fired steam power by the British textile industry. The shift to coal, he shows, occurred in the context of two other important changes already under way in the industry: the development of the factory system, and the increasing mechanization of the various tasks involved in converting raw plant and animal fibers to yarns and then to finished textiles. Managers of textile mills and their investors were already choosing, in the early nineteenth century, to replace workers with machines and to locate textile mills at sites that afforded water power to drive the machines, when Watt’s steam engine became a viable alternative for powering the mills. Malm cites numerous articles and letters by leaders in the textile industry explaining their preference for steam over labor or water power. Although more expensive, steam engines never tired, and they were more easily controlled—suiting capital’s needs—than were willful workers or fickle streams.

The chapters on the nineteenth-century adoption of steam power would make Malm’s accomplishment important enough, but he has a larger agenda, which is to take issue with the use of the term “Anthropocene” to name the geological era we have now entered, in which human actions are altering the planet in ways that will be evident in future geological epochs. Anthropocene implies that we all, collectively, are responsible for the greenhouse gases, especially CO₂, resulting from the combustion of fossil fuels, which are driving the planet’s atmospheric changes. Malm argues, however, that at each historical turn, “we,” collectively, did not choose to convert to fossil fuels, just as British textile workers in the early nineteenth century did not choose to adopt the textile machines and steam engines that threw many workers out of their jobs and subjected remaining workers to lives of drudgery in inhumane working conditions. Rather, capital chose coal-fired steam because it offered greater profits, generating more capital to be invested in more steam-powered production—an endless cycle of growth that favored the capitalist few.

Such has been the story of capital choosing fossil fuels ever since. China is now the world’s greatest emitter of greenhouse gases. Malm shows that most coal-fired industrial production in China has been built by direct foreign investment (i.e., capital from the industrialized West seeking new...