Chapter 14 - Capitalist Explosions

Summary

Chapter 14 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet explores cities’ role as creators and creations of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. It focuses on several “spatial fixes” that punctuated the rise of industrial capitalism, moments when the world’s most powerful imperial states helped capitalists invest in new built structures that allowed profit-makers to continue amassing wealth in the face of crises they could not resolve on their own. The expansion of cotton production by means of conquests, new factory technologies, and new docks and railroads is one. Large steel mills that came into being partly to meet rival states’ need for weaponry was another. It also shows how states and corporations teamed up to build “tentacular” structures such as railroad tracks, pipelines, and rubber-encased electric and telegraph wires that resulted in a human habitat that contiguously encased Earth for the first time by 1900. The story of the “capitalist city” is one that involved many actors and that involved far too many plot twists to be summed up by the concept “process of capitalist urbanization.”