Economic Development in the Anthropocene:
Perspectives on Asia and Africa
Prospectus for the 2014 Pierre du Bois Conference
The Graduate Institute of International & Development Studies
Geneva, 26-27 September 2014
The purpose of this small conference is to bring together scholars from a range of intersecting
disciplines and sub-disciplines – archeology, economic and environmental history, economics
-- to discuss how environmental influences and human agency have interacted have
contributed to shaping the form and rate of economic development. While the context is often
global, both in terms of cause and effect, the idea is to achieve some depth by focussing on
East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
The historical focus is on the era since the industrial revolution in the West; in other
words, the era in the history of the planet that is now quite often known as the
‘Anthropocene’, with a longer-term perspective provided by a session on the preceding three
centuries (sometimes called, in different contexts, ‘the First Global Age’, the late Holocene,
or the ‘early modern era’). Our concern is not only with the gravest of global threats,
especially climate change, but also with human responses to environmental opportunities and
constraints on more local and regional scales.
The Anthropocene encompasses the extension or creation of ‘monocultural’ primaryproduct exporting economies, often under colonial rule, the chronologically and
geographically uneven spread of ‘late’ industrialization westwards from Japan, and population
‘explosions’ in much of the world. The analytical focus is on the ways in which human
economic, social and demographic behaviour has reacted in particular environmental and
economic contexts through constrained choices of techniques and institutions, which have in
turn altered the sets of opportunities and constraints subsequently available from the ‘natural’
environment. By economic development we mean not only current economic growth, but also
structural change such as industrialization. By environmental opportunities and constraints we
mean the availability of energy, water and biomass as well as cultivable or grazing land and
commercially-valuable minerals. The perspectives that we seek to bring to bear extend
beyond those of specialists in Asian and African economic and environmental history. It is
crucial to place this in conversation with colleagues in other disciplines and specialists on
other places and earlier periods.
The idea for the conference arose from an existing literature which, among other
themes, includes Kenneth Pomeranz’s argument that environmental constraints and
opportunities help explain why industrialization began in western Europe rather than east
Asia, and Sugihara’s thesis distinguishing different ‘paths’ of very long-term economic
development in different world regions, characterized by distinctive responses to their
particular factor ratios. The conference will provide a forum to develop the insights, and
explore also the limitations, of this kind of approach. Thus, it is envisaged that papers will
examine, among other things, the economic history of how a historically land-scarce, labourabundant economy like Japan become a world leader in robotics. Again, in reviewing the
histories of primary-product exporting, population growth and late industrialization, we want
to consider how contemporary trends, such as widespread intensification of agricultural and
extractive production in Africa, confirm the economic potential of the region concerned,
create openings to higher-value forms of production (as in the traditional, though now much
qualified, story of ‘staple’-based development in Canada), or expose the population to a future
of narrowing resource horizons. Not least, we want to consider economic and environmental
trends in their social and cultural context, notably in the workplace. Finally, we want to reflect
on the overarching issues of human agency and environmental ‘determinism’, and Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s question of how to write history in the Anthropocene.
The conference (or colloquium) will start at 9h30 on Friday 26 September (this year)
and finish at 13h the next day. The conference is funded by the Pierre du Bois Foundation,
which honours the memory of a former professor in the host department.
Gareth Austin (conference convenor)
Professor of African and Comparative Economic History
Department of International History
The Graduate Institute, Geneva
gareth.austin@graduateinstitute.ch
Gabriel Geisler Mesevage (conference assistant)
PhD candidate in economic history
Department of International History
The Graduate Institute, Geneva
gabriel.geisler@graduateinstitute.ch
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