Step Right Up

This chapter explores the historical and material reasons behind the Industrial Revolution’s unprecedented era of continual, sustained economic growth. It explores the shift to an inorganic, high-growth economy, characterized not just by the discovery of new sources of energy, but by the deepening of capitalist social relations. Prior to this era, preindustrial “organic economies” were ecologically constrained by the regular cycles of photosynthesis and animate labor. The decisive breakthrough lay in the ability to commodify and systematically exploit vast, concentrated stores of fossil fuels. Initially coal, but followed by oil, fossil fuels became the condition for the imposition of waged work and sustained economic growth. This chapter traces the first major energy transition in the British textile industry, where steam power (fueled by coal) displaced waterpower, before proceeding to the rapid expansion of the oil industry, driven first by early investment, then by wartime demand, and finally by the automobile. Finally, the chapter considers the complex relationship between the modern fossil economy and information and communication technologies (ICTs), and how they are implicated in patterns of market expansion and rising resource throughput that endangers global ecologies.