Benjamin Morgan
The British nineteenth century has recently become a period of considerable importance within scholarship about anthropogenic climate change. In 2002, the chemist Paul Crutzen published a short and much-discussed essay in Nature, “Geology of Mankind,” which proposed that a new geological era, the Anthropocene, began with James Watt’s 1784 patenting of the steam engine. The essay thus made British industrial modernity central to scientific and popular accounts of the origins of planetary ecological crisis in the following years. Many in the sciences and social sciences have since challenged the idea that the Anthropocene begins with British industrialization, proposing competing start dates for the human transformation of the planet that include the development of agriculture, the drop in CO2 following the sixteenth-century depopulation of the Americas, and the global dispersal of atomic fallout in the years following 1945.2 But the nineteenth-century nexus of new ideas about deep time and global weather systems, of expanding fossil fuel–based energy systems, and of the emergence of global capitalism remains widely regarded as the most significant intersection of historical processes in relation to the climate crisis.