Carbon Conscripts: Slavery and the Origins of Climate Change
Eric Herschthal — Assistant Professor , Department of History
“Carbon Conscripts” explores the role racial slavery played in the origins of climate change. In recent years, interdisciplinary scholars working across the humanities have suggested that slave plantations may have been an early driver of human-induced climate change. Yet the notion has remained a theoretical conjecture rather than an empirically-tested idea. Drawing on a collaboration with climate scientists, “Carbon Conscripts” models the carbon emissions of the major slave-grown crops in Anglo-American Atlantic World from the seventeenth through nineteenth century and compares them to emissions from the major non-slave grown commodities of the period. The study ultimately shows that, with some key exceptions, slave-grown commodities dramatically expanded the carbon footprint of the British and American empires long before the transition to fossil fuels, crystalizing a form of racial capitalism that continues to fuel carbon emissions globally today.
