1501 Neil Avenue, Room 120
Columbus, Ohio 43201
Jason W. Moore
Associate Professor of Sociology
Binghampton University
Jason W. Moore is associate professor of sociology at Binghamton University, and coordinator of the World-Ecology Research Network. He writes frequently on the history of capitalism in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, from the long 16th century to the neoliberal era.
His research has been recognized with the Braverman Award of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (1999), Bernstein and Byres Prize in Agrarian Studies (2011), Distinguished Scholarship Award for the American Sociological Association’s Political Economy of the World-System Section (2002, and 2011 honorable mention), and Alice Hamilton Prize of the American Society for Environmental History (2004).
His Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital will be published with Verso in July, 2015. He is presently completing Ecology and the Rise of Capitalism, an environmental history of the rise of capitalism, for the University of California Press.
Abstract
Where and when do we find the origins of today’s planetary crisis? In this lecture, the Moore argues that rise of capitalism in the centuries after 1450 marked an environment-making revolution greater than any since the dawn of agriculture. Arguing that capitalism develops not only through economic process but by cultural and territorial conquests, Moore shows how the modern world was forged in a peculiar – and destructive – relation of work and energy. In this account, the work of human and extra-human natures is foregrounded, implicating the creation of “Nature” and “Humanity” – including the powerfully racialized and gendered expulsions of humans from “Humanity.” At its core, capitalism works through a strategy of Cheap Nature: one premised on the de-valuation of ‘women, nature, and colonies.’ The limits of this strategy are increasingly revealed in the ongoing exhaustion – and growing opposition to – of Cheap Nature in the early 21st century.
World-Ecology Research Network 