Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
Economic History and the Environment:
New Questions, Approaches
and Methodologies
Enric Tello-Aragay and Gabriel Jover-Avell
à
Abstract Ecological economics is enabling economic and environmental historians
to enhance their understanding of economic growth, by placing it in a broader
perspective of biophysical interactions between nature and society. In this chapter,
several ongoing researches and historical debates are examined from this standpoint
such as the missing role of energy carriers in GDP growth, the socio-metabolic
pro
les of past and present societies, the pre-industrial
'
Smithian
'
responses to
'
cient land-use in breeding livestock to increase
agricultural yields, the reasons why the Industrial Revolution began in a high wage
and cheap energy economy, the
Malthusian
'
traps, the role of ef
rst globalization as a socio-metabolic watershed,
and the question of whether there was a general crisis of biomass energies at the
coming of fossil fuels era. Research discussing long-term socio-metabolic transitions
may contribute to our understanding of how economic growth actually occurred, and
which ecological impacts affected the Earth
'
s life-support systems. Equally, these
projects leave room for the institutional settings or ruling actors needed to explain
why growth has happened and by whom. Far from naturalising history, the use of
ecology in the explanation of human history historialises ecology.
2.1 Introduction
If all the research done in the well-established scienti
c
eld of economic history
had to be summed up in one word it would be
. The main subject, if not the
single issue, studied by economic historians is when, where, and why economic
growth has taken place. In doing so, there has been a greater tendency to rely
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