Economic History in the Anthropocene: Four Models

Abstract

Under the global threat of the Anthropocene, environmental history and economic history are coming together to understand our predicament. This new field of “eco-economic history†traces the ecological impact of the startling rise in global economic productivity over the last two centuries. No longer is nature treated as an externality and damage to non-renewable resources discounted. I identify four basic eco-economic models emerging in this literature.

The one I call retro-modernist returns us to a Euro-centered world for both the problem’s origins and its remedies. Three more convincing models, double-layered modernity, parallel modernities, and multi-scalar approaches, expand our understanding of how we arrived at this catastrophic juncture and what we might do about it.