In recent years, in the face of ever-more-spectacular manifestations of worldwide ecological crisis, public discourse about human relations with the rest of nature has coalesced around the master concept of “the Anthropocene.” On this understanding, humankind has brought about a new geological epoch in which the human species has assumed a decisive role in transforming the planet Earth as a whole. This co-taught, reading-intensive seminar takes up an alternative proposition, namely that it is not human beings in general but a historically specific social formation characterized by its own distinctive ways of organizing nature that has precipitated the cascading crises of the present. More often criticized and rejected in existing scholarly literatures, this alternative concept—the Capitalocene—has to date been the subject of neither theoretical nor historical elaboration. Drawing together works from several different disciplines, the seminar will therefore seek to explore the potential and limitations of this alternative approach to our shared planetary condition, and the prospecs for its further development at once in conceptual and methodological terms, and through concrete-historical investigations.

Beyond this specific arc of debate around capitalism and the transformation/destruction of the Earth, the course is framed more broadly with reference to the analysis of major socioenvironmental transformations at planetary, national, regional and local scales during the last four centuries of global capitalist development. We proceed through inquiry into the diverse frameworks of conceptualization that have been used to approach such issues, and through historical case studies from major world regions and imperial configurations and their present-day legacies. Key topics include the histories and geographies of environmental transformations/crises under capitalism; the conceptualization of “nature” and the “non-human” in relation to societal (and industrial) dynamics; the specificity of fossil capital within the changing energetic dynamics of capital’s relentlessly escalatory metabolism; questions of periodization, spatialization, and associated debates on the dynamics of socioenvironmental transformation/crisis across time and space (including in the context of debates on the various “-cenes” (including the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Plantationocene, and others); the interplay between infrastructuralization (fixed capital formation, infrastructure ‘stockpiling’), landscape transformation, and socioenvironmental degradation (the production of ‘sacrifice zones’/ecocide); the (geo)politics of capitalist environmental governance (from national-developmentalism and climate colonialism to emergent “overshoot” strategies such as climate geo-engineering); and finally, the historical geographies of insurgent struggles for climate justice and possible post-carbon and post-capitalist futures.