The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift
Forthcoming in February 2020 In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx, inspired by the German chemist Justus von Liebig, argued that capitalism’s relation to its natural environment was that of a robbery…
As Guy Routh explained forty years ago in his magisterial book, The Origin of Economic Ideas, economics has preposterous origins. Since the time of Adam Smith, the new academic discipline was linked through the emerging class of merchants and manufacturers to the rich and powerful in general, and fulfilled the ideological role of presenting the emerging capitalist system as the best of all possible worlds.
Historical capitalism cannot be understood aside from its existence as a colonial/imperialist world system in which the violent exercise of power is an ever-present reality. In order to uncover the…