Economic History and the Environment: New Questions, Approaches and Methodologies

Abstract

Ecological economics is enabling economic and environmental historians to enhance their understanding of economic growth, by placing it in a broader perspective of biophysical interactions between nature and society. In this chapter, several ongoing researches and historical debates are examined from this standpoint such as the missing role of energy carriers in GDP growth, the socio-metabolic profiles of past and present societies, the pre-industrial ‘Smithian’ responses to ‘Malthusian’ traps, the role of efficient land-use in breeding livestock to increase agricultural yields, the reasons why the Industrial Revolution began in a high wage and cheap energy economy, the first globalization as a socio-metabolic watershed, and the question of whether there was a general crisis of biomass energies at the coming of fossil fuels era. Research discussing long-term socio-metabolic transitions may contribute to our understanding of how economic growth actually occurred, and which ecological impacts affected the Earth’s life-support systems. Equally, these projects leave room for the institutional settings or ruling actors needed to explain why growth has happened and by whom. Far from naturalising history, the use of ecology in the explanation of human history historialises ecology.