Green Capitalism: Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century ed. by Hartmut Berghoff and Adam Rome (review)

The term "green capitalism" is riddled with ambiguity. To some, it is an oxymoron: Capitalism, predicated as it is on the commodification of nature and everything else, can never really be green. Others believe the term to be rather redundant, for capitalism has always been about being green, if by green we mean money. To both, the term, as used today, is little more than a marketing ploy, cynical or brilliant as the case may be.

The editors and authors involved in the volume under review have something else in mind, however. To them, the ambiguity associated with the term is more complicated and complex, expressing itself in connections of varying types between business and the environment—some surprisingly venerable—motivated by diverse purposes and personnel, intermediated by disparate governmental actors and actions, whose actions in turn have had variegated (and often unintended) effects. As a result, the ambiguity highlighted in Green Capitalism: Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century is the type that enables readers to develop more sophisticated interpretations of—or at least approaches to—green capitalism, interpretations and approaches that defy caricature and can't be adequately conveyed on a bumper sticker.

Green Capitalism had its roots in a 2014 conference co-sponsored by the Hagley Museum and Library and the German Historical Institute. At that conference, participants were tasked with providing historical perspectives on a rather existential question: "Can capitalism be green—or at least greener?" (p. ix). Evidently, the conferees rose to the occasion and revised versions of roughly half of the conference essays appear in Green Capitalism, which also includes essays by each of the editors and several commissioned pieces.

The volume comprises thirteen essays, divided into three discrete parts, along with an excellent contextualizing preface by Roger Horowitz. The three essays included in Part I, entitled "The Big Picture," are, as the title suggests, broad pieces designed to "frame" the other essays in Green Capitalism by laying out a number of major issues involved in the relationship between business and the environment, as well as by discussing historiography and some relevant theoretical concerns. In the first, Adam Rome traces the difficult, even tortuous history of concepts such as "green capitalism" and "sustainability" over the past half century. These concepts, if not accepted by all, are now, as this volume demonstrates, subjects of serious analysis. Hartmut Berghoff follows with a provocative essay wherein he argues that, contrary to conventional notions, business (or at least some businesses) have long been cognizant of environmental issues and acted in green or greenish ways. In so doing, he also makes a pitch for an "eco-cultural" approach to the study of business history. In the third essay, Hugh S. Gorman offers a very sophisticated analysis of both the role of "systems of environmental governance" in shaping and conditioning the environmental character of capitalism at various points in time, and of business's role in establishing, maintaining, and operating the same.

The three essays included in Part II ("Conservation Before Environmentalism") operate at very different registers than those in Part I. All three are close empirical case studies wherein the authors detail how a variety of companies/industries in North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to deal with environmental issues. Not all of the responses outlined were completely or even largely successful by our standards, but it is undeniable that business was engaging environmental issues long before the concept of green capitalism was in vogue.

The two essays in Part III ("Failures and Dilemmas") and the five in Part IV ("Going Green") continue along the empirical, case-study path blazed in Part II. Here too the authors focus on the varying ways in which individual companies/industries dealt with complicated environmental issues over the course of the twentieth century, not only in North America, but also (in several of the chapters) in...