The recent COP27 conference was dominated by discussions about the creation of a ‘loss and damage’ fund financed by the world’s richer nations to help poorer countries cope with the devastating effects of the climate emergency. The global South has been suffering disproportionally from rising sea levels, extreme weather events, crop failure and potentially deadly rises in temperature, despite having contributed far less to carbon emissions over time than the prosperous industrialised North. In Pakistan – a country with a relatively small carbon footprint – this summer brought the most devastating monsoon floods in historical memory, inundating as much as one third of the country’s populated area. Much of this year’s harvest has been destroyed, and millions of Pakistanis remain stuck in temporary camps. In the words of Sherry Rehman, the country’s new climate change minister and veteran ‘liberal’ voice, Pakistan has become the ‘ground zero’ of the climate catastrophe. While the international fossil fuel industry was raking in record profits and deceiving the public with ‘greenwashing’ spin, her country had the right to ask for ‘reparations’ to make up for the loss to infrastructure and economic productivity caused by others. This fiery rhetoric was subsequently dialled down by Rehman’s own government, but a tentative step towards a ‘loss and damage’ fund turned out to be the only tangible outcome of COP27. While the question of how to quantify and apportion responsibility to individual countries remained hotly contested, the assembled world leaders seemed to find it easier to negotiate ways to pay for the effects of greenhouse gas emissions than to make any meaningful commitments to limiting emissions themselves.
It is clear that the global North has to accept responsibility for global warming and is in a moral bind to the people of the global South. But whether government-to-government transfers akin to ‘reparations’ – if indeed they ever materialise in substantial amounts – should stand at the heart of a solution is a more complicated question. While the COP format by necessity regards negotiations between nation states as the most meaningful way to address global problems, historians should be much more sceptical about approaching global heating in this manner. The nation state may still be the most readily accepted building block of global politics, but it is worth remembering that it started its career as a legal construct designed to bring an end to the devastating religious wars of early modern Europe. When it comes to understanding large-scale processes of economic and social change such as the development of fossil fuel capitalism, a ‘methodological nationalism’ – thinking in terms of national units – can actually be less than helpful. And this is not even asking difficult questions about when and where the nation state concept ever adequately reflected real structures of power. It certainly only applied to a small proportion of humanity during the age of the modern European Empires from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and its conceptual validity remains at best limited in our own age of multinational corporations, international tax havens, transnational elites and global production chains.
Histories of global capitalism such as the world systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein have alerted us to the need to understand global capitalism as a single integrated whole, where development in one place always has immediate and causal connections with ‘underdevelopment’ in another. While the debate about the local roots of Britain’s original industrial revolution rambles on, a more globalist vantage point suggests that industrialisation has rarely exclusively or even predominantly been a ‘national’ story. The flourishing of the Lancashire cotton industry, for example, was dependent on a supply of cheap cotton produced on the slave plantations of the American South. The workers toiling in Britain’s factories could not be fed, moreover, without cheap imported food from the sugar plantations of the Caribbean, or a little later, the beef herds of Argentina and Uruguay. And British textiles would not have been so profitable if British colonialism had not first ruined highly accomplished artisan weavers in India, and then ensured tariff free access to the Indian mass market for British goods. Industrial capitalism is not an ‘advanced’ form of production, while plantation slavery, cattle-ranching or small-holding agriculture are ‘backward’. They are all equally ‘up to date’ in their time, and integral to the same stage of global development.
What is more, the winners and losers of the global capitalist system were never neatly divided between North and South, even if on the final balance sheet the system was decisively rigged in favour of Northern interests. It is easy to identify the biggest beneficiaries: European and North American capitalists, and the most exploited: racialised slaved labour. But there were a large number of social groups that fell somewhere in between, and whose balance of benefit and loss is not always straightforward to calculate or compare. Who profited more from industrial capitalism – the increasingly comfortable but still exploited working classes of Great Britain or the newly prosperous import-export trader conducting his business under British overlordship in colonial Bombay? In the area of British India that later became Pakistan, farmer-landowners producing rice or wheat for export could only become as politically and economically powerful as they did because British colonial policies restricted the ability of local bankers and financiers to become successful industrialists and create a new capitalist ruling class.
In recent decades, the growing interconnectedness of the global economy and the large-scale outsourcing of industrial production to countries with cheaper labour have made calculations of who benefits and who is responsible for harmful externalities like carbon emissions even more complicated. What about a chip manufacturer in Taiwan or an iPhone factory in China? Or, to return to flood-stricken Pakistan, a garment factory in the country’s own ‘Manchester’ – Faisalabad – or a sports good manufacturer in Sialkot, where most of the world’s footballs are stitched? In a remarkable irony of history, many international fashion brands are now producing their wares in unsafe and overcrowded factories in Bangladesh, only a few hundred miles to the East of where British colonialism had driven the world’s most accomplished makers of luxury cotton fabrics into ruin about 200 years earlier. Most of these outsourced products end up under global brand names in the shops, where the greatest share of profit accrues. But the governments of Pakistan, Bangladesh and many other countries, whose efforts to achieve their own ‘national’ versions of industrialisation had often spectacularly failed by the 1970s, have nevertheless courted these multinationals with soft-touch labour and environmental laws to maintain economic growth and support growing middle class aspirations.
The outsourcing of labour to South Asia and other parts of the world went hand in hand with the outsourcing of greenhouse gas emissions, environmental degradation and urban overcrowding. Sherry Rehman could increase the moral pressure for climate ‘reparations’ by pointing out that some proportion of Pakistan’s modest global greenhouse emissions are not in fact Pakistan’s own, but emissions produced ‘on behalf’ of Europeans or North Americans. But such an argument shifts the overall thrust of policy making in the wrong direction. The interconnectedness of global capitalism as a single system, which easily goes as far back as the time of the first coal-fired steam engines, means that emissions must be cut everywhere rather than being outsourced with a conscience-calming ‘loss and damage’ payment thrown in as compensation. A fund to help the poorest nations still has an important role to play, but the most meaningful way the beneficiaries of centuries of capitalist development could address their historical debt to the losers is to genuinely eliminate carbon-burning from global supply chains.
Markus Daechsel is Reader in the History of Modern Islamic Societies at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published widely on the history, politics and social dynamics of South Asia.