Since the major financial crisis of 2008, books critically examining capitalism from a historical angle have enjoyed wide public interest. The most notable examples are Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013) and Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014). A few years later, Jason Moore and Raj Patel made fame with their A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things (2018), while Andreas Malm, in his How to Blow up a Pipeline (2021), defended the moral imperative of sabotaging the fossil fuel industry as a life-saving act of resistance.
Environmental historians have been observers rather than leaders in this debate and seem to be reticent even to use the word “capitalism”. At least one would think so when environmental historian Mark Stoll, in his Profit: An Environmental History, takes profit as the pars pro toto for capitalism. Stoll actually appears to be less shy about using the word “capitalism”, and he has been using it for a long time. Throughout his career, he has triangulated religion, capitalism, and environmentalism. He has found his own niche by asking questions about how Protestant denominations intersected with both environmental concerns and capitalist ethics.
Pointing out that capitalism as such is not unique in exploiting labour and nature – the problem existed for most of human history – Stoll invites us to reflect on how our addiction to fossil fuel, combined with consumer credit and individualized Protestant ethics, has shaped a turbo-charged capitalism. But before doing that, he goes back in time and positions the birth of capitalism in European Antiquity. He distinguishes four historical phases of capitalism: i) Greek and Roman merchant capitalism; ii) early modern imperial trade capitalism; iii) industrial capitalism; and iv) consumer capitalism. The Ancient Roman latifundia were the ancestors of the fully commodified plantations, and, in turn, these were the precursors of industrial plants, again fully commodified. Industrial capitalism introduced new commodities, new means of transport, and faster communications. This, in turn, laid the basis for mass production and the consumer capitalism of the twentieth century.
While not denying that capitalism may have also existed in Asia well before 1500, Stoll confines his narrative to European and American history in particular. This makes sense considering the book's relatively brief canvas of 256 pages and its focus on “consumer capitalism”, in which the United States took the lead in the early twentieth century. Actually, Stoll's discussion of consumer capitalism comprises almost half of his book and is also its best and most original part.
Above all, the book is a history of American capitalism, connecting consumerism with a relentless individualization. Stoll illustrates this with an example of transport, which moved from public utility to the black T Ford to a multitude of fashionable shiny cars. Marketing techniques and the credit card greased the wheels of a consumer capitalism, generating a constant desire for ever more and fancier products. As such, this observation is far from novel, but it becomes interesting when Stoll connects it to religion, playing both a crucial role in consumer capitalism as well as being reshaped by it. He takes the reader back to nineteenth-century Puritan Protestantism, to which he attributes a sense of social and environmental responsibility. It gave rise to a conservationism that tried to restore the “chain of being” broken by industrialization, which, indeed, sounds like a religious counterpoint to Marx's metabolic rift. But then, in the course of the twentieth century, and in the 1970s in particular, this Puritanism gave way to Evangelical Protestantism, with its emphasis on personal religious experience and salvation. Stoll points out that this culturally and politically conservative Evangelism was sponsored by capitalist enterprise and equipped with modern marketing techniques. Here, he presents a disturbing analysis of how capitalism, or perhaps we should say neoliberalism, invested in a new individualized religious culture, turning Weber's thesis on Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism on its head.
In contrast to Jason Moore, Stoll does not predict the end of capitalism caused by its inner contradictions. For him, it is a matter of intellectual honesty to recognize that the tremendous ingenuity and flexibility of capitalism enable us to live on this planet with nine billion people. Obviously, it results in gross environmental destruction and the current situation in which our planet simply cannot sustain the pleasant life of so many of us, and of the “readers of his book” in particular. But there is no “back to nature”. Nor does Stoll put his money on the environmental movements, which, in his view, are highly fragmented. They are no match for corporate capitalism, which has resulted in “a handful of gigantic multinational corporations, answerable only to shareholders, [which] now dominate many areas of the global economy” (p. 224). The scale and concentration of the oil industry, as well as the food industry for that matter, have created a capitalism that, according to Stoll, is no longer capitalism but a set of monopolies or at least oligopolies.
So, is there any hope? Paradoxically, it is neoliberalism itself that has put a brake on consumer capitalism, Stoll argues. Material consumption has lagged as middle and lower incomes stagnated in the wealthiest countries of this world. Since the 1970s, the world has changed less than in the fifty years before, since clothing, food, transport, and our daily necessities did not change that much. What we have seen is an information revolution, which is not material. While consumer capitalism is changing, old industries have invested heavily in their polluting practices, and the fossil fuel industry in particular is a case in point. Breaking up these and other huge corporations, with their tremendous political power, would be a first step towards a steadfast introduction of renewable energy, Stoll advises. Indeed, he expects more from governmental anti-trust regulations – like those enacted by the American government more than a hundred years ago, in the gilded age – than from consumer or environmental movements.
The book is clearly intended for a general readership and focuses heavily on American realities. It does little to engage with different academic strands that scrutinize capitalism as a historical phenomenon. On the other hand, it provides us with a well-organized overview of the themes in the history of capitalism. Above all, it offers us a view, both disturbing and welcome in equal measure, on how neoliberal capitalism has splintered social cohesion, including religious and environmental consciousness.
