Nature's Evil

In 1802, the Prussian explorer and mining official Alexander von Humboldt found guano on islands off the coast of Peru. Attracted by abundant shoals of fish, huge colonies of seabirds deposited layers of excrement on the rocks. Used by the Incas for centuries, guano was a very productive soil fertiliser. It did not need processing, so the production price consisted of the transportation costs plus mandatory payment to the Peruvian government. Inadvertently, Humboldt’s discovery gave rise to the first case of what would later be called the ‘Dutch disease’. Peruvian currency strengthened. Cheap imports flowed into the country, depriving local peasants and artisans of work. When the supplies of guano ran out, just as silver had previously done, the Peruvian state was left with debts which it could not pay off; in 1876 it filed for bankruptcy. European farmers switched to nitrate fertilisers that were extracted from mines. In another surprising contingency, these mines were also located in Peru. Thanks to these gifts of nature, Peru went to war with its neighbours. Having lost this battle, it ceded its nitrate sites to Chile. Just a little later, the German chemist Fritz Haber found a way of synthesising nitrate fertilisers. They are now made literally from the air, albeit with a huge investment of energy (see chapter 13 ).

Guano is just one example of the tragic fate that a unique, topical mono-resource brings to the nation that happens to own it. It promises wealth and simplicity, and these temptations are irresistible for any political body. Getting a magic tool for distinguishing between good and evil, the state uses a mono-resource, invests in it, protects it, identifies with it, and distributes its profits for the benefit of the subjects. All other sources of prosperity are left to private interests or historical chance. The closer this state is to the exclusive ownership of a mono-resource, the more evident it becomes that this particular kind of raw material is money – the proper currency of this state. Gold, silver, silk, fur, tobacco, opium – all of them were used as money, as the means of payment for labour and goods. Only in labour-dependent countries is capital a converted form of labour; more frequently, capital turns out to be the transfiguration of a chosen resource.

Working on the history of Canada, the sociologist Harold Innis formulated a ‘staples thesis’. He presented this resource-bound development as a succession of changing ‘staples’ – different sorts of raw material: in the beginning there was fur, then timber, then grain, then oil. Following Innis, the historian Robert Allen based his version of global economic history on a similar idea. 18 Similar concepts of a dominant staple

, mono-resource platform

or commodity fetishism

assert that the economy of political communities – nation-states or, in earlier epochs, empires with their colonies – tends to concentrate on a particular form of raw material

to the exclusion of others . In my view, this concentration has been historically typical for most resource-bound states; labour-bound states escape it. The higher the concentration, the more disconcerting the shift. This ‘fetishist’ moment ends either because the raw material runs out or, more frequently, because its consumption falls. When this happens, the economic mechanisms of supply and demand go into a tailspin. With the change of economic platform, the whole pyramid of production and trade, state and society, shakes or even collapses. 19 Such moments are times of trouble – no wonder that the struggling elites try to prevent them by any means.