The concept remains heavily contested, but can be summarised as the idea that humanity has, through the emission of greenhouse gases associated with industry and agriculture, begun shaping the very geology of our planet.
My thesis begins from this context, from the pressing contemporary conjuncture of fires, floods, ecosystem collapse and – paradoxically – rapid expansion of fossil capital in the form of natural gas, and other follies. It has been argued that this moment calls for ‘urgent histories’ (Rees & Huf, 2020), that the ‘shock of the Anthropocene’ ought to ramify through how we approach our work as historians. It is for this reason, that my work considers how the radical implications of our current crises might cause us to reconsider histories of capitalism in Australia.
Debates around the conceptualization of the Anthropocene have generated several neologisms that offer to capture this historic process with greater precision: pyrocene, plantationocene, Cthulucene, necrocene, to name a few. Each brings attention to the limitations of the Anthropocene as an analytic frame. This has been consistently argued by Jason W. Moore; ‘the Anthropocene perspective engages the really big questions of historical change… These are questions that the Anthropocene can pose, but cannot answer’ (Moore, 2016, p. 80). This, due to its reinforcement of the philosophical separation of Society and Nature, and its tendency to homogenise all of humanity into the Anthropos. This too-broad analytic also leads to vast differences in periodisation, with dramatic political implications. Within that conceptual debate, the ‘Capitalocene’ has been proffered as a periodization that is historically, analytically, and politically preferable. This concept clearly names the socioecological relations of capitalism as productive of our current crises. By framing the problem in this way, ‘we move from the consequences of environment-making to its conditions and its causes… [In-so-doing] a new set of connections appears…’ (Moore, 2016, p. 78). We begin to identify the ‘world-ecology’ of capitalism as ‘a relation of capital, power, and nature as an organic whole’ (Ibid., p. 81). It is the argument of my thesis, that capitalism is now the primary determinant of the production of nature, and resultant socioecological crises. We live in a conjuncture of socioecological crisis; we live in the Capitalocene.
For an economic historian, these are strong claims – characterising socioecological relations on the continent of Australia as specifically capitalist, and then arguing that these relations are directly responsible for contemporary socioecological crisis. The twin purpose of this thesis was to develop a theoretical framework to explain and characterise these relations and their internal relationships, but also to specify these theoretical claims historically. The way this was achieved was by deploying the