FOSSIL FUELS
THE INDUSTRY’S ORIGINS AND DNA
Large-scale fossil fuel combustion, the chief cause of the climate crisis, took root during the Industrial Revolution in England. In the mid 1700s, a new class of industrialists used coal to power the steam engines behind the first mass production of textiles, amassing enormous wealth. Today’s fossil fuel industry is the culmination of this use of coal to generate profits.
This use of coal, and the Industrial Revolution generally, are not just a national story about innovation and economic growth in England and the development of an urbanized, abused English working class. Rather, it is a global story, made possible by a massive transfer of wealth, through violence, within a new world system based on colonialism and transatlantic slavery.
Plunder of colonized peoples and places brought precious metals, spices, timber, and more to European nations at an unprecedented scale–with unprecedented profit resulting. This wealth transfer made the mass production of the Industrial Revolution possible. The unspeakable injustice and misery of enslaved labor in North America made cotton artificially inexpensive, driving a relentless search for new colonial subjects and consumers.
The brutality of the transatlantic slave trade and the displacement and genocide of Indigenous peoples around the globe were central to the development of the world economic system. This was clear to contemporaries. An 18th century English slave merchant described slavery as “the hinge on which all the trade of this globe moves.”
In its operational reliance on sacrifice zones and in other ways, the fossil fuel economy reflects its origins in an Industrial Revolution built on transatlantic slavery, colonial domination, and abuse of workers. To end fossil fuels once and for all, we must end the unjust hierarchies still embedded in the world economic system.
