A network of Enlightenment-era intellectuals debated processes still with us, such as industrialization. The endurance of their ideas reflects their status as mostly privileged white European men. They debated the big questions. Some saw socio-environmental relationships as subject to natural laws. Malthus and Liangji argued that human populations will outstrip food supplies, Ricardo that population growth will increase land rents, and Jevons that efficiency will increase natural resource use. Marx favored historical explanations, considering food poverty and soil degradation to be alterable and functions of linked social and environmental systems. Romanticism vied with materialism. Von Humboldt glorified nature as being in harmony which humans could disrupt. His voyages inspired Darwin, who viewed nature as instead emerging from Malthusian logic, with organisms evolving in conflict over resources. Though inspired by Humboldt, Marsh rejected a view of nature as all-powerful given the environmental destruction he documented. Ultimately, these authors debated whether a better world is possible, a topic still timely as climate change, extinction, and disease threaten us.

This chapter introduces and develops an initial critique of ‘eco-determinist’ thought on climate, water and environmental security. The chapter shows, against this tradition, that the tension between local geographical constraints and demographic pressures is not the central cause of contemporary water-related insecurities, and that there are good structural reasons for this, rooted in the logics of global capitalism. The chapter demonstrates that eco-determinist thinking is both substantively misleading and normatively questionable. And it argues, on these grounds, that climate change–induced scarcities are in and of themselves unlikely to become a major source of conflict. These arguments are advanced both theoretically and via empirical analysis of, among other things, the patterns of water stress and scarcity across the book's ‘divided environments’, claims about 'water wars' on the Euphrates, Jordan and Nile Rivers and evidence on the current and likely future impacts of climate change on water resources. Overall, the chapter shows that what Robert Kaplan has called a ‘revenge of geography’ is unlikely, even under conditions of accelerating human-induced climate change.

This chapter argues that racialised constructions of the Other deriving above all from European colonialism remain central to problems of climate, water and environmental security and insecurity, in both theory and practice. Thus on the one hand the chapter demonstrates that environmental and climate security discourse is premised on, and still today structured around, racialised assumptions about history, geography, nature and freedom. And on the other hand it shows that racialised colonial understandings of foreign peoples and their environments played a crucial role in constituting modern political identities, with reverberations for patterns of environmental security and vulnerability which are still very much with us today. This latter argument is developed through a case-by-case and comparative analysis of the historical and political–ecological origins of the major identity divisions within post-colonial Israel–Palestine, Cyprus and Sudan, this paving the way, in conclusion, for a set of reflections on the politics of identity and alterity under circumstances of accelerating climate change.

This introduction presents the main challenges raised by the economic analysis of the long period, as well as the most recent economic approach called Unified Growth Theory. The introduction also presents the goal of this textbook - to allow all students from economics and the social sciences to have access to Unified Growth Theory, as well as the different parts and chapters of the textbook.

This chapter provides some major stylized facts for the economic analysis of the long period, by focusing on statistical series of GDP, population size and GDP per capita for the last two millenia. The structural break observed in the GDP per capita series is presented as a major challenge for existing economic theories of the long period. How could one explain both a long period of stagnation and, then, an economic take-off followed by sustained growth?

The Conclusion reexamines Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population from the perspective of the transformative mode of demographic governance explored throughout the earlier chapters, as well as in terms of the eighteenth-century debates about the limits and locus of demographic agency examined in Chapter 4. Rather than seeing Malthus’s Essay as marking a definitive break with earlier demographic thinking, it argues for strong continuities, particularly concerning the importance of situation, the providential nature of demographic processes and the real effects of intervention in demographic governance. Instead, it identifies Malthus’s key departure as an emphasis on the propertied and rational individual as the legitimate locus of demographic agency under God. The conclusion ends by considering some of the implications of the history of early modern demographic governance for reinterpreting – and broadening – the history of modern demographic thought.