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Human > Historical Geography of Globalisation > Flashcards

Historical Geography of Globalisation Flashcards

1
Q

How is the Anthropocene (Crutzen) conveyed to the lay public?

A

Using “statistical picturing”

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2
Q

What are 4 critiques of the Anthropocene?

A

1) Humanity is not homogenous in causing the Anthropocene
2) Start often viewed as the industrial revolution (by Crutzen himself - date?), not before then
3) Human impacts have been bloodless and only with environmental consequences
4) By focussing on humans, it gives them power and agency. A “Human supremacy complex” - not non-human changes

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3
Q

When is something assetized?

A

When an object/material is turned into commercial resource

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4
Q

What are some alternatives to the Anthropocene?

A
  • Pyrocene (Pyne 2015) - advent of fire marked the start
  • Manthropocene (Raworth 2014) - male dominated
  • Capitalocene (Patel and Moore 2018)
  • Plantationocene (Haraway)
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5
Q

When did Marx (1854) say capitalism started?

A

Upon the discovery of gold and silver in America, commercialising natural resources

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6
Q

How does David Harvey view the self-reinforcing nature of capitalism?

A

The Spatial fix (2001, 2003) of capital, always trying to find cheap things to exploit

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7
Q

How did Karl Polanyi (1944) view land?

A
  • Means different things to different people
  • Land a “fictitious commodity” under capitalism
  • “Land is another name for nature”
  • Bought, sold and used for profit
  • Land, labour and money cannot be physically made, yet they become commodities to fulfil the wider mechanism of the market economy

(Polanyi 1944)

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8
Q

Did forced commodification of land and labour only take place in the new world?

A

No, also happened in Europe, but at a much slower rate (hundreds of years, instead of years or decades)

Polanyi 1944)

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9
Q

What interesting points(/predictions) did Karl Polanyi make in ‘The great transformation’?

A
  • Complete marketisation incompatible with genuine democracy
  • Complete marketisation would be socially and environmentally detrimental
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10
Q

What are Polanyi’s 3 fictitious commodities?

A

1) Labour
2) Land
3) Money

Polanyi 2944

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11
Q

What was a major consequence of land being fictitiously commercialised?

A

The soil was commercialised too (Polanyi 1944). Link to Marx and the way this commercialisation drained the soil of its nutrients

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12
Q

When was society embedded and dis-embedded?

A

Embedded first, then dis-embedded under capitalism

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13
Q

Who coined the terms “inner” and “outer commons”? What is the difference?

A

Alan Greer (2018)

  • Inner commons found within the manor, containing arable land
  • Outer commons outside land belonging to nobility, on infertile, hostile landscapes. Foraging practices
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14
Q

Were the commons a place?

A

The commons had a spatial dimension, however, Peter Linebaugh (2018) saw them more as a practice involving the shared distribution of goods in a shared space

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15
Q

What were 3 principles of the commons system?

A

1) Mutual aid (link to Kropotkin) - Christianity driven
2) “Subsistence first”
3) “Affluence without abundance”

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16
Q

What was the main purpose of enclosures?

A

To make exchange value for markets and profits, not use value for mutual benefit

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17
Q

What, according John Locke, makes land productive?

A
  • Labour, allows more to be gained per input
  • Control over land (property) means control over workers too (extension)

Locke (Analysed extensively in Greer 2018)

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18
Q

What was “the pale” in Ireland?

A
  • The land owned by the King of England

- Area found outside of the pale called “beyond the pale” - uncivilised

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19
Q

How did property influence social relations?

A

People who owned property became proprietors, leaving an underclass of people without any land

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20
Q

How was land ownership proclaimed in the new world?

A
  • Ceremonies using flags and parades (Columbus)
  • Twig and soil for British in Newfoundland. Organic
  • Wooden stakes to mark boundaries (continues today), showing that the landscape was materially privatised. Without markers land was unowned and wasted
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21
Q

Was the colonisation of the new world an anthropocentric story?

A

No, animals also played a part in:

  • Columbian exchange (CITATION)
  • Animal expansion across the new word (Melville 1994 for USA; Greer 2017 for whole New World
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22
Q

Who has written about war capitalism?

A

Moore 2010 and Klein 2007

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23
Q

Why is labour geographically important?

A

Complements land to make it productive (Locke)

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24
Q

What is ‘war capitalism’?

A

Capitalism based on slavery and plundering

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25
Q

Was empire more important than manufacturing industries during 19th C?

A

Find info on this

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26
Q

In what ways were factories organised?

A
  • Division of labour
  • Workers developed key skills
  • Corporeal connections, allowing machines to work
  • Discipline and distributions in Foucault 1975
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27
Q

What is an important “take-away message” from E.P. Thompson’s work on time?

A
  • Time no longer passed, but spent. It became currency during the industrial revolution and rise of factory work
  • Natures timepiece no longer used, now determined by employers and the marketplace
  • Similar points in Foucault 1975
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28
Q

How was nature used by philanthropic factory owners?

A
  • Nature used to socially reproduce labour. One of the few leisure activities allowed, but still time-controlled (E.P. Thompson 1967?)
  • Exertion of biopower (Foucault 1971)
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29
Q

Was time the only way of disciplining workers?

A

No, also space

  • Factories became the “Territories of capitalism” (Sack 1986)
  • Space was organised in accordance to the division of labour (Foucault, 1975)
  • Spatial organisation normalised. Workers made to ignore it
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30
Q

How can factories be described?

A

The “territories of capitalism”

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31
Q

Is forced labour only present in capitalist systems? Does all of capitalism force labour?

A

Not really, other systems (authoritarian communism) do the same. Some more socially democratic forms of capitalism have moral benefits

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32
Q

What are affordances?

A
  • The actions made possible by a person and an object
  • Objects have an affordance
  • A bundle of wood screwed together becomes a chair when a person sits on it
  • Human use converts an object into use value
  • Objects can have multiple affordances
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33
Q

What is an example of a crop with multiple affordances?

A

The potato (Nally and Kearns 2020)

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34
Q

How were potatoes viewed differently by natives and Spanish colonisers in Latin America?

A
  • Potatoes part of culture in agrarian lifestyle of Native inhabitants in Latin America. Mutually used
  • Spanish viewed land, objects and inhabitants to be put to work to make profit, including potatoes
  • Potato cheap food for war capitalism (Patel and Moore, 2018)

(Nally and Kearns 2020)

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35
Q

What two reasons were potatoes brought to Europe during the 16th century?

A

1) Warfare (specifically 30 years war)
2) Changing politics of land and property (enclosures)

(Nally and Kearns 2020)

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36
Q

Why were potatoes used in the 30 years war as food?

A

Small plants, occupying a small space, and with the edible root found underground, allowing them to evade detection (also in Ireland during “scorched earth tactics”)

(Nally and Kearns 2020)

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37
Q

Why were potatoes grown by poor people on enclosures?

A

Crop provided energy from a small amount of land, escaping ‘scorched earth tactics’ in, C16th Ireland protecting itself from plunder

(Nally and Kearns 2020)

38
Q

What did Marx refer to Ireland as?

A
  • The “agricultural district of England”
  • Potato especially important for providing basis of capitalist British imperialism because it provided cheap food (Nally and Kearns 2020)
39
Q

Despite all the affordances potatoes offer, what were some major issues?

A
  • Only provided energy, not vitamins or protein
  • Lumper potatoes became a monoculture in Ireland, and were blighted, leading to the Irish Potato famine

(Nally and Kearns 2020)

40
Q

Why is capital referred to as “value in motion” by Marx?

A
  • Money is invested in assets, literally moving from one thing to another
  • Profit from exchange value, itself derived from labour used to make an object into a commodity

Capital is using money to make more money (Harvey 2010)

(Marx Kapital)

41
Q

What are ‘real abstractions’?

A
  • Social relationship to commodity exchanges
  • Thus are something both described and practiced

(Patel and Moore 2017)

42
Q

Did Columbus just discover the New World?

A

No, he even focussed on how the land, especially the plants, could be exploited as cheaps in a form of frontier capitalism

(Patel and Moore, 2017)

43
Q

What two scientific revolutions provoked/reinforced the cheapening of nature as part of frontier capitalism?

A
  • Cartesian revolution (i.e. thinking things should be protected, other things are not worth protecting, and should be used)
  • Linnaean taxonomy system, epistemologically categorising nature into a hierarchical structure of importance and value
  • Both led to an ontological dominance over nature

(Patel and Moore, 2017)

44
Q

How did money transform societies?

A
  • Money transformed into a force used in wars and appropriation of land
  • Investments in the above made more money
  • Continues today with credit

(Patel and Moore, 2017)

Alternative argument: Money allowed investment, so more incentive for peace (100 years of peace pre-1914)

45
Q

What is interesting about the difference between frontier capitalism (Patel and Moore) and the heartland thesis (Mackinder)?

A

Mackinder saw the heartland as an important source of wealth, whereas frontier capitalism would argue that the geographical (not necessarily the spatial edges) frontiers are the source of wealth

46
Q

Why is cheap care important for capitalism?

A
  • Not “real work” (i.e. wage-work)
  • Allows wage work to take place
  • Socially reproduces labour
  • Part of “great domestication” into households
  • Part of the necessary (and contradictory) hierarchical structure of capitalism

(Patel and Moore 2017)

47
Q

What is an extra cheap not mentioned in Patel and Moore 2017?

A

Cheap cities, created for efficiency, with the cost of land reduced using 3-dimensional structure of high-rise buildings

48
Q

What is the difference between proletariat and precariat?

A 
Proletariat = Marxist term for exploited working classes (opposite of bourgeoises)
Precariat = Neologism for working class suffering from socioeconomic precarity - important in neoliberalism
49
Q

What is a Marxian perspective of cheap food (link to urban metabolism)?

A
  • Rural communities provide cheap food for the urban “cash nexus”
  • Cheap food to fuel cheap care and thus cheap work
  • High (labour) productivity per input

(Patel and Moore 2017)

50
Q

Why is cheap food important (2 big reasons)?

A

1) Cheap relative to the cost of labour
2) Cheap food prices allow for wages to stay static

(Patel and Moore 2017)

51
Q

In what ways is the atmosphere a different frontier for capitalism?

A

A dumping ground (not a place that is economically exploited) for pollutants. Those responsible cannot be accounted for their actions

(Patel and Moore 2017)

52
Q

What is a benefit of capitalism regarding the environmental crisis?

A

Provides ingenuity

Doesn’t outweigh the issues capitalism itself causes

53
Q

How do things become fictitious commodities (Polanyi 1944)?

A

By social relations around them

Patel and Moore 2017

54
Q

What are some major contributors to cheap lives?

A
  • Linnean taxonomy
  • State organisation, specifically the nation state

(Patel and Moore 2017)

55
Q

What are the dangers of referencing overpopulation as the root of environmental destruction?

A
  • Blamed on poor and working class (when actually the bourgeoises and superstructure) (Patel and Moore 2017)
  • A neo-Malthusian conceptualisation
  • Also inequalities of consumption
56
Q

Why is reparation for colonialism not a great idea?

A
  • Paying out could mean forgetting, not forgiving
  • Money is the root of all evil - a cheap itself

(Patel and Moore 2017)

  • Education better? Solving postcolonialism too
57
Q

What is an externality?

A

An outside factor (of system) that can increase or decrease the value of a commodity

(Patel and Moore 2017) - perhaps a major driver of frontier capitalism

58
Q

Why is profit important for capitalisms survival?

A
  • Allows for wages to be paid and for trade

- Once capitalism becomes the dominant economic force, it is difficult to avoid this

59
Q

How did capitalism entice others to become part of it?

A

Workers paid, thus entering the economic system as consumers themselves, fuelling further demand, productivity and profit

60
Q

What is it called when commodities have a use and exchange value?

A

A “double life” of a commodity (Marx Kapital)

61
Q

What is a good example of a food with many affordances? Why is this significant?

A
  • The potato, used for many different purposes
  • Potatoes have multiple ecologies, depending on the socio-ecological relations determining their usage
  • Provided biosecurity for agricultural proletariats in Ireland - “the staff of life”

(Nally and Kearns 2020)

62
Q

Why are plants (and nature in general) important to capitalism?

A
  • Interspecies dependency important because labour is dependent on nutrients and cheap food
  • Plants as a biological proletariat, working for humans as cheap food (Mabey 2016)
63
Q

What 3 social mechanisms have allowed capitalism to succeed?

A

1) Nature/culture dualism
2) “Consequential bias” - a linear perspective of the world
3) Cartesian principle - Substances are more important than relations; “Thinking things” vs “extended things”

(Moore, 2017)

64
Q

Why does Moore (2017) argue that the current environmental crisis started in the (long) 16th century?

A
  • Advent of wage-labour capitalism

- Socioeconomic markers to show this

65
Q

What was unoccupied land in the New World called?

A

“Terra Nullius” - or nobodies land (Moore 2017)

66
Q

In what ways could the frontiers of capitalism be spatial AND temporal?

A
  • Spatial as new areas exploited
  • Temporal because of previously exploited spaces being exploited again. Bodies are the smallest spatial scale of temporal frontiers, primarily through the social reproduction of labour; also wastelands
67
Q

What is the rise of cheap care in households referred to as?

A

“The great domestication” (Patel and Moore 2017)

68
Q

What is a good text for commons and enclosures?

A

Linebaugh, 2014

69
Q

What does Greer (2018) focus on?

A

Commons and enclosures in the New World

70
Q

Why was land more easily acquired in the New World by settlers and turned into enclosures?

A

Land not explicitly owned by anyone, so could be expropriated by colonisers. In the Old World, common land was protected by common law, thus requiring purchase etc (Lockean theory)

(Greer, 2018)

71
Q

How important were animals in the appropriation of land in the New World by colonisers?

A

Animals belonging to colonisers not contained (only posts), so were inadvertently released, radiating out across the new world, creating a ‘colonised myth’ (own term)
(Greer 2018)

  • “Ecological imperialism” of Old World species introduced into the New World (Crosby 1986)
72
Q

How important was technology for the advancement of capitalism? (two opposing arguments)

A

Moore (2018) - very important. “Technics” (mechanical and organic technology) important throughout

Greer (2018) - technology only important post-enlightenment (except for classification). Foucault (1975) “specialisation of knowledge” to fulfil a spatial fix (Harvey 2001)

73
Q

How does frontier capitalism operate in modern (post-) industrial societies?

A
  • Deindustrialisation to find cheaper places to manufacture goods (Harvey 2001)
  • Helps keep the rate of productivity and profit up
  • “Spatial fix” of capitalism helps resolve its crises
  • Fix drains land through productivity

Harvey 2001

  • Frontier a “structural tendency” of capitalism (Moore 2000)
74
Q

What is productivity?

A

Amount of capital made in a commodity per input (of labour)

75
Q

Why was the “metabolic rift” (Moore 2000) created by sugar frontiers important for capitalism?

A
  • Put in place economic relations which secured the flow of capital to the old world
  • Providing a cheap food to increase labour productivity
  • Commodity (like all commodities) could be purchased by other workers, creating wages
  • Made a market for cheaps and the law of values (value not use-value etc)

Moore 2000

76
Q

In what order did the ‘sugar frontier’ pass?

A

1) Madera
2) Brazil
3) Caribbean

Moore 2000

77
Q

Do frontiers only exist spatially?

A

No, or at least not necessarily

Also labour, slaves in particular (Ogborn et al 2000)

78
Q

Was the ascent of capitalism exclusively driven by economic forces?

A

No, also political forces (power) - e.g. Royal Charter given to the East India Company (Ogborn 2000)

79
Q

Why was the Pelosi silver mine significant?

A

Enabled trade with china + far east (Moore, 2010)

80
Q

What were Marx’s “free gifts”?

A

Items or land that could be expropriated for no (/little) cost

81
Q

Does failure/plunder precede or proceed acquiring a new frontier?

A

Yes and no…
- For Pelosi mine, European silver mines failed through complete extraction, thus requiring a new source (Moore, 2000). In this instance it failure preceded the acquisition of a new frontier

  • For a transition to overseas (Chinese) manufacturing in the 1980s, domestic UK manufacturing declined mainly afterwards (Harvey 2001). Failure proceeded the acquisition of a new frontier
82
Q

What the relationship between profit, productivity and exchange value?

A

Profit is made when productivity gets cheaper at a faster rate than the price (value) of a commodity being made/extracted

(outlined in Moore 2000)

83
Q

What is a good text for state power?

A

Scott 1998

  • States (eg Britain, France, US, China) have exerted power in law etc
  • Increased productivity through efficiency (alternatively by cutting corners)
84
Q

What are “inscription devices”?

A

Mechanisms used designate land to certain forms/divisions of labour

85
Q

Who has written about the changing legal rights to land and resources?

A

Foucault (1975) - force used to make property a legal right

86
Q

What, basically, is imperialism?

A
  • Exploiting land, labour and resources in a different place/country
  • Frontier capitalism is inherently imperial
  • Apple making phones in China is Imperial!

(Ideas from Marx Kapital)

87
Q

Why are commodities said to have a double life?

A

They have both a use value and a (fictitious) exchange value

88
Q

Is work unique to capitalism?

A

No, work is performed in other economic systems. Just work for exchange value and capital accumulation in capitalist system

89
Q

What is abstract labour?

A

Labour that is presented as equal, but actually performed at different exchange values to enable exchange of commodities and competition (Kapital)

90
Q

What makes something cheap?

A

Something that is below the system average (Moore 2017)

91
Q

Are then any alternative reasons for the advancement of capitalism, especially advanced capitalism, besides cheaps?

A
  • Hidden infrastructures (citation?)
  • Hidden labour in landscapes (Mitchell 1996)
  • Consumerism (Debord 1967)
  • Wage labour to ensure proletariat does their ‘job’ (Kapital)

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