The Castillian and Portuguese aristocracy, in
debt with Italian financiers for help in their conquest of the Iberian
peninsula, doubled down on their successful style of conquest, plunder and tribute and initiated the first colonial conquests of
the Atlantic in the Canary Islands and Madeira. Madeira, the Island of
Wood, was first known to the Portuguese in 1419. Initial deforestation
followed as the Portuguese cut the great forests for shipbuilding
lumber. The land was then turned to wheat growing for Portugal from the
1430s. Then the land was turned to sugar, and near
total deforestation followed for fuel in the production process.
Sugar is difficult to process. Initial European production in Iberia (Valencia) funded by German banks used Muslim techniques developed in the near East, using slave and free workers. Commercial sugar production started in 1420s, and was taken to Madeira. by 1460s there was almost exclusively sugar production in Madeira. This developed all the tendencies of monoculture and led to the development of specialised labour and technology. In São Tomé, the Portuguese colony off the coast of West Africa, large scale slave plantations were developed, and the techniques invented here were later taken to the new world. "Centuries before Adam Smith could marvel at the division of labor across a supply chain that made a pin, the relationship between humans, plants, and capital had forged the core ideas of modern manufacturing - in cane fields. The plantation was the original factory."pp16 Demand from Europe was essentially infinite, and new expeditions to develop cane industry was financed by Italian and Flemish 'capitalists'.
Who worked these fields? In Madeira "Indigenous Peoples of the Canary Islands, North African slaves and - in some cases- paid plantation laborers from maniland Europe." pp16
The slaves were used to carve enormous irrigation channels across the islands. Sugar requires 50x its weight in wood for fuel to boil for the production process, and this led to the total deforestation of the island by 1530, leading to a crash in the island's sugar production, which increased the move to the New World for sugar production, taking its drive for deforestation with it. "Europe's wealthy ate the sugar, and sugar ate the island."pp17. The economy on Madeira then became a slave port (which role it functioned in until the 18th century) with land turned to vinyards. Wine production did not demand slave labour, but it did demand wood for the barrels - again this was brought from the New World.
Patel and Moore then begin a conversation about frontiers and how Capitalism works that I will return to later. They discuss how Capitalism is constantly using frontiers, boundaries,
to filter communities/ecologies of life cycles and exchange, and consume
them. To my mind they describe Capitalism as essentially a giant
paper mill, mulching the entirety of the world's ecology and all life
within it to pulp for profit: I am also reminded of the comment somewhere that the role of states is to make nature/people/resources 'readable', or processible, in the same way as a bar code at the supermarket. [There is a left-brain process at work here - see The Master and his Emissary]. Frontiers are necessary for Capitalism (see Eleanor Meiksins Wood on this as well) because they are where the complex web of life is transformed into the readable - the currency - the dollar. Frontiers are where the analogue becomes digital.
"we mean by cheapness: it's a set of strategies to manage relations between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism's crises. Cheap is not the same as low cost - though that's a part of it. Cheap is a strategy, a practice, a violence that mobilizes all kinds of work - human and animal, botanical and geological - with as little compensation as possible. We use cheap to talk about the process through which capitalism transmutes these undenominated relationships of life-making into circuits of production and consumption, in which these relations come to have as low a price as possible." pp22
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