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An Italian professor of sociology in Paris, Alessandro Stanziani, has written a hugely ambitious, satellite-scale overview of our planet and all its human affairs, from the 13th century to modern times. Within this immense topic, however, the author follows a singular enquiry into the way capitalism has interacted and shaped both us and the biosphere.
The book requires a sort of health warning. While it might be, as Thomas Piketty says in his foreword, a must-read, you will find nothing here to suggest that Nature is the self-regulating totality of life, the sacred source of everything we are, as well as all we ‘own’. The author’s name for these life forces – ‘Earth capital’ – confirms a hard-headed anthropocentric perspective. In all his analysis of agriculture and land there is no notion that the more-than-human world has moral, let alone legal, rights.
Yet what Stanziani does offer us is a planetary spotlight illuminating the systemic and widening injustices of our times. He also gives us the broadest possible context to understand how we have arrived at the twin crises of climate chaos and the Sixth Extinction. Therefore, read this book not necessarily for its solutions, but for its immensely powerful evidence.
The author divides the millennial course of capitalism into three phases: from the 12th to 19th centuries, 1870 to 1970, and the last 50 years, which has seen the global triumph of neoliberal economics. The long preliminary account of medieval and early modern history describes Europe’s emergence as the decisive force in world affairs. The next 100-year period – what Stanziani calls “the great transformation” – entailed major corrective processes that established rights and fair wages for labourers as well as ending many forms of enslavement and the creation in Europe and North America of a broader welfare state.
These developments suggest a period of gradual amelioration, but there was no shortage of accompanying horror. This included catastrophic famines in late-19th-century India, China and Brazil that collectively claimed 22 million lives. Yet the imperial powers continued to export grain throughout the acute shortages in those regions and connived at disaster in the name of correcting the ‘laziness’ of Indigenous peoples. The author’s unequivocal point is that capitalism was directly implicated in those mass deaths. Lest we assume that the landed classes have a monopoly on heartlessness, Stanziani reminds us of the politically engineered famines in Stalin’s Russia (7–8 million deaths) and Mao’s China (30–33 million deaths).
Most powerful of all are the book’s revelations about our own times, during which largely western capitalist entities have strengthened their grip on planetary resources. What possible hope for justice and equity can we hold when ten multinational corporations possess more wealth than the poorest 180 countries on Earth, and five European or American companies control three-quarters of the world trade in grain?
An equally troubling pattern is the surge in buying up land itself. This involves oligarchs of the global north but also the newly empowered giants of China and India. Two examples will have to stand for this whole terrifying process: an India-based company producing roses, which recently bought an Ethiopian region the size of Luxembourg, and a Russian billionaire who acquired a similarly sized parcel of Namibia, partly for the canned hunting of rhinos. A non-governmental organisation called GRAIN recorded 300 such acquisitions, amounting to 30 million hectares in seventy countries, an area almost equal to Britain and Ireland combined. The World Bank found that in two years of purchases to 2010, just a third of the land was ever used. In short, the planet is succumbing to the most unequal forces, and we should thank Stanziani for explaining the origins and the latest manifestations of the entire process.
Earth Capital: The Long History of Capitalism and Its Aftermath by Alessandro Stanziani. Polity, 2025. ISBN: 9781509571505
