University of Chicago

Faculty Member, History

About

My work focuses on links between science, environment and politics in the period 1700-1900. I am finishing a book on the environmental history of the Scottish Enlightenment and beginning a new project on the history of the stationary state and the politics of environmental limits 1776-1850. Below follows an early outline of the latter:

The concept of the stationary state seems destined for a second coming in the twenty-first century. Warnings about climate change and peak oil now challenge the core assumption of modern politics that contemporary rates of economic growth can be sustained indefinitely. Indeed, radical critics of the status quo imagine that the only solution to our present dilemma must be a steady state economy. At the other end of the spectrum, cornucopian libertarians insist that markets can overcome environmental pressures through engineering fixes or the decoupling of economic development from its material basis. Both sides invoke technical expertise to overcome political controversy. Each claims to predict long-term trends in complex natural and social systems.

The politics of future limits has deep historical roots. The classical economists Adam Smith, T.R. Malthus and J.S. Mill shared a fundamental concern about the physical limits to long-term growth. Smith and his successors held that material progress was destined to plateau in a stationary state when natural resources were fully exploited. Malthus carried the notion to its farthest extent in a thought experiment that imagined our planet completely cultivated, “every acre… a garden.” Curiously, the rise and fall of the concept of the stationary state has never been told in full. What made the idea so persuasive to many of the most acute minds in eighteenth and nineteenth century British political economy? And why did the concept remain attractive deep into the middle of the nineteenth century, long after the emergence of the factory system?
         
The emergence and persistence of the idea of the stationary state must be understood as the outcome of multiple pressures in British politics and society between 1776 and 1850 including 1) the rise of prediction based on national statistics as a tool of governance 2) the use of natural history and geology to define the temporal horizon and ecological assumptions of political economy 3) the frequency and visibility of environmental strains in the metropole 4) the use of environmental degradation as a justification for imperial expansion 5) the defense of autarky in the food supply mounted by the political elite and 6) rival views of the British energy regime put forward by the landed and manufacturing interests. A history of the stationary state will thus link together the high intellectual history of naturalism in classical political economy by Margaret Schabas with the environmental-economic histories of ecological strain at the limits of the preindustrial economy in E.A. Wrigley and Kenneth Pomeranz as well as the cultural-economic histories of the Industrial Revolution as an information economy in Joel Mokyr, Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart.

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