Conquest, Domination and Control: Europe’s Mastery of Nature in Historic Perspective

Abstract

Globalisation is increasingly analysed as an historic phenomenon;it has a history, and it is a phenomenon that is capable of makingand shaping history. This article attempts to contribute to a broadeningof the globalisation research agenda by analysing the ideology ofdomination and control over the natural environment, one of the fundamentalideological underpinnings of our current global transformation, ina historical perspective. The paper serves two purposes. First, byanalysing the history of fundamental ideologies such as the dominationof nature, this article places current social practices within thelarger framework of historic dynamics of globalisation. Second, byanalysing the ideological underpinnings of global transformations,it sheds light on the co-construction of social order through thedevelopment of material and ideational realms. Alternative approachestowards globalisation research should include analysis of the ideologyof "mastery" over nature. The perspective chosen in this articlecan be characterised as historical political ecology, because itcentres on a critical assessment of the interaction of political,social and environmental variables in a historic perspective (cf.Greenberg and Park 1994), in this case offering comparison betweenEurope and China."Breathless and fragmented, the world rushes into the new millennium".This is the message that the German Advisory Council for Global EnvironmentalChange (Wissenschaftlicher Beirat der Bundesregierung Globale Umweltveränderungen,WBGU) places at the beginning of its annual assessment for the year2000 (2001: 13). And indeed, the state of the world’s environmentis represented as one of constant crisis and turmoil, despite theplethora of environmental regimes and organizations working towardsthe amelioration of this crisis. Total global fossil fuel consumption(coal, oil and natural gas) rose to a new peak of 7,956 million metrictons of oil equivalent in 2001. Carbon dioxide emissions reached6,553 million tons in 2001, amounting to a record concentration of384 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (measured at the Mauna LoaObservatory, Hawaii, 2007). The capacity of the 436 nuclear reactorsoperating in over 35 countries has reached 351 gigawatts and theeconomic mega-machine on which all these achievements rest, produceda record annual gross world product of US 40.5 trillion in 1999(1998 prices). The flipside of this steady economic growth is a globalenvironment deteriorating at an accelerating rate, and human societiessuffering continuing violent upheavals. There were over 150 majorand minor armed conflicts between 1990 and 2000. 1 Over the courseof human history, humankind’s impact on its natural environment hasmagnified, including its ability to alter, shape and reshape nature,its abilities to dominate the global environment in all its formsand to construct it according to its own needs. The ideology thatprovides for this unprecedented enterprise – the mastery of nature– is of European origin, although today it is shared by almost everysociety on earth, through the subtle effects of globalisation.This article tries to answer the question why Europe developed anideology of conquest and domination towards nature and how it achievedthe necessary technologies, tools, mentalities, beliefs, institutionsand mental frameworks to put this ideology into practice. Why wasEurope, a backward region of civilisation up to the late Middle Agesand the Renaissance, able and willing to follow this destructivepath with such stubbornness and ingenuity? My ambition in this respectis rather modest. Instead of offering a detailed historical accountof the relation between nature and society, I provide a summary ofthe main trends and issues. This short paper offers a broad and schematicaccount of European relations to nature, and an interpretation oflarge-scale historic developments.The article is organised as follows: section two discusses the difficultrelation between humans and their environment, and some featuresof the historic impacts of human actions. The third section aimsat analysing, in a comparative approach, the different parametersthat shaped European and Chinese relations towards their naturalenvironment: pre-1500 climate, geography, population, agriculture,society and culture. 2 The fourth section focuses on Europe’s "stepahead" from China and other civilizations between 1450-1750, andtries to identify the forces that shaped the ideology of "mastery":institutions including the state, the Church, science, capitalism,and events that included scientific discoveries and the Reformation.I conclude with a brief summary of the argument.