Jan 4, 2023 Eric Herschthal, Fall 2022 DM Faculty Grant Recipient

Did racial slavery play a meaningful role in the rise of today’s climate crisis?

That’s the question driving my current research project, and one that a recent Digital Matters Faculty Fellowship has helped fund. The broader project, tentatively titled “Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change,” is inspired by an intriguing proposition recently put forward by interdisciplinary scholars working across the humanities.  These scholars argue that the proposed name for our current ecological crisis—the “Anthropocene,” which describes the global ecological changes now being felt by centuries of human-induced climate change—does not adequately capture the particular history that brought us to this moment.  The term Anthropocene, they argue, with its root in the Greek anthropos, or “human,” universalizes and thus conceals the ways Western capitalism, colonialism, and slavery shaped the origins of anthropogenic climate change.

None of these scholars deny that, today, the Global South—mostly notably China—have become, or might soon become, the world’s major contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions. But advocates for an alternative name to the Anthropocene—the Capitalocene? the Plantationocene? (the Chtulucene, anyone?)—insist that the world-economy that these rising nations are participating in, the one we’re all participating in, has unique roots in the early modern West, and particularly the intertwined histories of slavery, settler colonialism, capitalism and industrialization.  On a surface level, it’s an easy argument to make: these days many humanities scholars agree, whatever their discipline and whatever their quibbles, that racial slavery and settler colonialism were important parts of Europe and the United States’ rise to global dominance.

The challenge is how to get past generalities and down to particulars. If racial slavery did play a role in today’s climate crisis, how would we know, and how could we test, measure, document, and ultimately explain it? That’s the challenge “Carbon Conscripts” has set for itself.  As an historian of slavery and science in the early United States, I am interested in how we as historians—and historians of slavery especially—might not simply offer important critiques of scientific knowledge, but also how we might collaborate with scientists to actually answer questions we’re both clearly invested in. To that end, over the past two years I have worked with a handful of climate scientists to help build a very simple carbon emissions model that can help us discern whether slave plantations and the broader economies they were directly tied to had, on average, more (or less) carbon emissions than other forms of agricultural labor—family farms, say, or indentured-servant based plantations—and even other industries, most notably English factories burning coal.

The Digital Matters Fellowship has helped fund the research behind some of this initial research. And one recent result—still very tentative and unpublished, mind you—suggests that, between 1600 and 1800, carbon emissions from the three major slave-grown crops in the British Atlantic—sugar, rice, and tobacco—had greater emissions than from all the coal being burned by English factories over the same period.  Climate scientists have long known that emissions from agricultural related deforestation, not the burning of fossil fuels (like coal), were the dominant source of global greenhouse gases prior to the twentieth century. Yet my data is the first to focus on colony-specific and labor-regime specific agricultural commodities, unlike other historical global emissions models that ignore differences in labor regimes (slave versus free) and that ignore differences in economic systems (capitalist production geared toward global markets versus local subsistence economies).

Another question I have been researching with the support of the Digital Matters Fellowship relates to the emissions coming from economies that did not rely on slave labor but were directly attributable to supplying slave plantations.  An important focus of the recent historical scholarship on slavery and capitalism has been the economic ties between northern, non-slave based American colonies (and eventually states), and their slave-based trading partners. And one of the better-known links is between colonial New England and the British Caribbean. From around the 1650s onward, colonial New England became an important supplier of corn, animals, and timber to sugar plantations of the British Caribbean.  My question is how much carbon was emitted to clear the forests for the New England corn, livestock pastures, and timber that Caribbean sugar slaveholders imported each year? And how do these emissions compare to those of other British American colonies, slave-based and free?

At this point, I have only been able to convert raw data of colonial New England exports found in colonial customs manuscripts into the amount of cleared land it would have required. Nonetheless, this pre-processed data suggests that while the amount of New England forests likely cleared to supply the British Caribbean with food and animals paled in comparison to the amount of forest cleared for tobacco, rice, and sugar plantations themselves, it made up the vast majority of the export-related emissions from colonial New England.  In other words, beyond emissions from clearing forests to feed their own families, most of colonial New England’s emissions—the part tied to trade, and thus early modern capitalism—came from feeding enslaved Africans.  These are, I suggest, the “ghost emissions” of Caribbean slave plantations—emissions that would otherwise be unaccounted for, or invisible, if one only focused narrowly on the plantation site.

So what does this all add up to? Well, it might be obvious that it’s too early to tell. This project will require several more years of research before anything can be stated with greater confidence.  But it’s clear that, based on this early data alone, slave labor played an important role in accelerated the rate of carbon emissions of the early modern West. Indeed, prior to the nineteenth century, emissions to produce slave-based commodities likely exceeded the emissions from the burning of coal—and England was already several decades into the Industrial Revolution. Later research will focus on what is often called the “second slavery” of the nineteenth century—that is, in the United States context, cotton slavery and its ties to industrial capitalism.  Here, the story I’ll be investigating is the extent to which cotton slavery accelerated the transition to fossil fuels.  As is well known, the United States was the main supplier of cotton to the coal-burning British factories prior to the Civil War. The question, then, is how many of England’s coal-producing factories were reliant on slave-grown cotton in the mid-nineteenth century, and how much carbon did they emit compared to factories that burned coal but did not rely on slave-grown raw commodities?

Perhaps another Digital Matters Fellowship will help me answer that.