Asset Details
Do you wish to reserve the book?
Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the \First\ Sixteenth Century: Part I: From \Island of Timber\ to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506
Hey, we have placed the reservation for you!
By the way, why not check out events that you can attend while you pick your title.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place the reservation. Kindly try again later.
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the \First\ Sixteenth Century: Part I: From \Island of Timber\ to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506
Do you wish to request the book?
Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the \First\ Sixteenth Century: Part I: From \Island of Timber\ to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506
Please be aware that the book you have requested cannot be checked out. If you would like to checkout this book, you can reserve another copy
We have requested the book for you!
Your request is successful and it will be processed during the Library working hours. Please check the status of your request in My Requests.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place your request. Kindly try again later.
Journal Article
Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the \First\ Sixteenth Century: Part I: From \Island of Timber\ to Sugar Revolution, 1420–1506
2009
Overview
Madeira is a small island with a large place in the origins of the modern world. Lying 560-some kilometers west of north Africa, Madeira was home to the modern world's first cash crop boom, a sugar revolution. In the first of two successive essays in this journal, I explain how the epoch-making acceleration of boom and bust on Madeira, during Braudel's \"first\" sixteenth century (c. 1450-1557), marked a new crystallization of the nature-society relations pivotal to the rise of capitalism. This new crystallization represented an ensemble of new capacities to exploit and extract extra-human nature much faster, and on a much larger scale, than ever before. It was a mode of socio-ecological conquest and commodification that was possible because of early capitalism's \"commodity frontier\" strategy, one premised on global expansion as a constitutive moment in the formation of the modern world-system—as capitalist world-ecology no less than world-economy. From this standpoint, the very conditions of Madeira's rapid ascent were also the conditions of its rapid decline after 1506. These stemmed from the rapid commodity-centered organization, and consequent exhaustion, of the relations governing human and extra-human nature: labor and land.
