Trekking on the Bedrock of Capitalism

Earlier this year I travelled to Madeira, a small Portuguese island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. My reason for visiting was to hike a 120km ultra-marathon route which traces the spine of the island. Madeira’s peaks rise vertically from the coastline, reaching upwards towards 2,000 metres. Madeira is not a place of rolling hills. It is a steep, sharp, unforgiving landscape with sheer faces and dizzying drops in all directions.?

Myself and a friend hiked from the north-west to the far south-eastern tip of the island, experiencing four seasons along the way. We began in lush, verdant rainforest (the nice way of saying we walked in a wet cloud for two days). We bumped into hikers coming the other way who warned us that the tap at a peak we were planning to camp at was out of water due to a lack of rainfall. In our fully-saturated state, we struggled to conceive that within a couple of days hiking the conditions could be that different. Sure enough, however, as we traversed the island our surroundings rapidly changed. The sun came out and our attention shifted from staying dry to staying hydrated. Across a 40km difference, one part of the island can be drenched, while another faces drought.?

Madeira in recent years has become something of a hiking mecca. This is in no small part due to the network of levadas, man-made irrigation tunnels which carve their way across the island. The levada network extends over 3,100km, channeling water from the north of the mountain to the more populous areas in the south. As I walked along the levadas, careful not to become a statistic (as soon as it rains the levadas become a slippery death trap - many people, especially Brits, fall from levadas every year), I was unaware of the story that these levadas tell us about the making of the modern world.

Jason Moore, in his essay “Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the “First” Sixteenth Century”, explains, “Madeira is a small island with a large place in the origins of the modern world.” Madeira’s occupation represented one of the earliest examples of the economic model that took over the world and evolved into the global capitalist system we exist within today.?

Change requires necessary conditions?

I’ve mentioned before in this series that change doesn’t just happen overnight. Think of it like a forest fire. They don’t happen because something extremely hot comes and ignites an entire forest. On those first long, wet days in the Madeiran rainforest, nothing could’ve been hot enough to set the place alight, save an actual volcanic eruption (not impossible in a tectonic hotbed like Madeira). Instead, it takes a long and gradual build up to create the hot, dry conditions that make a forest vulnerable to fire. At this point, once the necessary conditions are in place, it only takes a spark for the fire to spread.

This is the situation we find ourselves in today, aware of the challenges we face, but without the necessary conditions to address them. This logic also means that our current status quo, rather than being assumed as an inevitability, also required a very specific set of necessary conditions in which to emerge. The stories we are told, our individualism, our attitudes to nature and each other, the systems and ideas our society is built upon and which we now take for granted, were all unimaginable once upon a time. A unique range of economic, social and political conditions, emerging in different times and in different places, all had to coalesce and be packaged into stories with enough weight and momentum to transform the very fabric of our world.?

Understanding how the necessary conditions emerged, and eventually tipped into the hegemonic forces of global capitalism, ecological destruction, and societal atomisation can help us recognise what went right, what went wrong, and whose interests were served along the way. Once we understand the necessary conditions which have shaped and trapped us in the present, we can recognise what needs to change to provide the necessary conditions for change moving into the future.?

At a social, philosophical and political scale, sweeping changes to ideas and norms regarding how the individual, the state and religion in society were necessary in setting the wheels of modernity in motion. On the economic side of things, the potential power and benefit of global capitalism required proof of concept and proof of scale. With this in mind, the example of sugar plantations in Madeira is key to understanding the origin of capitalism.?

Boom, bust, quit - the Madeiran model of capitalism

Madeira is one of those places that when you visit, you struggle to believe that humans would have decided to settle there. It’s a volcanic environment where the forces of nature feel primal and elemental. When Alvise Cadamosto, a Portuguese navigator who arrived on the island in the 15th Century remarked, “there was not a foot of ground that was not entirely covered with great trees”. Imaginatively, early explorers named the island ‘ilha da madeira’ or ‘island of wood’.?

Where I saw an imposing, inhospitable landscape, the Portuguese explorers of the 15th century saw opportunity. On top of its abundance of wood, Madeira is blessed with fertile volcanic soil and a subtropical climate, making it an ideal location for the cultivation of sugarcane, a crop that was already in high demand in Europe but still relatively rare and expensive. What unfolded on Madeira was revolutionary: a system of large-scale, monoculture agriculture driven by an emerging global trade network, international financiers, and fueled by the exploitation of enslaved labour from Africa.

The sugar plantations on Madeira represented the first time that European capital was used to systematically exploit non-European lands and peoples on such a scale. The profits generated by the sugar trade were immense, and they demonstrated the potential of an economic model based on the extraction of resources from distant colonies, the use of cheap or forced labour, and the production of commodities for export to European markets. Many of the same levadas upon which I hiked were built hundreds of years ago by slaves in order to channel water across perilous mountainsides to sugar plantations.

As George Monbiot explains , Madeira also demonstrated another hallmark feature of the capitalism that would take over the world. The efficiency of the process meant that the islands resources quickly depleted. The island became the world’s biggest sugar producer, but within the space of less than twenty years, sugar production fell by almost 80%. 60kg of wood was required to refine 1kg of sugar, and soon Madeira’s madeira began to run out, meaning it had to be sourced from steeper, more inaccessible parts of the island. More labour was required, costs went up, and several endemic species were driven to extinction by forest clearing.

Monbiot calls this the ‘boom-bust-quit’ cycle that has come to define the destructive nature of capitalism. Gut a place of its resources, maximise wealth, move on, do it again. The Portuguese moved onto S?o Tomé, then Brazil, and on to the Caribbean. As Jason Moore emphasises, “The furious pace of transformation, on both sides of the peak, can hardly be overemphasised. It is this, more than anything else, which distinguishes Madeira from its medieval forerunners.”

Madeira served as a proof-of-concept of the power and potential of capitalism, and its success as a model for wealth creation did not go unnoticed. Christopher Columbus, who lived on the island for a time, observed the profitability of the sugar trade and the plantation system. When he later embarked on his voyages to the New World, the ideas and practices he had witnessed in Madeira likely influenced his vision of what could be achieved in the Americas. Indeed, the colonisation of the Caribbean and the establishment of plantations there closely mirrored the Madeira model. Without Madeira, there was no Christopher Columbus.?

To win in modern capitalism means to control the resources upon which our global economy is built. We see this clearly in geopolitics every day - our relationships with countries depend less on principle and more on the resources they own and control. Jason Moore quotes in his essay on early capitalism in Madeira, “In the long march toward the modern world-system, mass commodities-gold, sugar, slaves, cotton, coal, oil- have been its beasts of burden. They have sometimes served as markers for entire historical epochs. They are the motors of production, the ultimate hard currency of exchange”.

By providing a model on how to cultivate and control the commodities that shape our economy more effectively than anything that came before, Madeira is therefore a vital part of capitalism’s origin story. It is a story of extreme productivity and efficiency, but mainly of extraction, exploitation and ecological crises. It served as a model for the use slave-labour around the world. Although by this point humans had long since cultivated the land and kept livestock, Madeira also marked a paradigm shift in our relationship with nature. Moore encapsulates this point by arguing that:?

“(Madeira) marked a new crystallisation of the nature-society relations pivotal to the rise of capitalism. This new crystallisation represented an ensemble of new capacities to exploit and extract extra-human nature much faster, and on a much larger scale than ever before. It was a mode of socio-ecological conquest and commodification that was possible because of early capitalism’s “commodity frontier” strategy, one premised on global expansion as a constitutive moment in the formation of the modern world-system - as capitalist world-ecology no less than world economy.”

The nature of the game was visible at the birth of global capitalism. It served as an unprecedentedly effective means of pursuing a narrow set of economic and geopolitical interests (in this case, those of the Portuguese kingdom), with devastating costs, especially to the nature and labour that capitalism rests upon. From the start, there were winners and losers, and from the start, the winners set the terms. Globalisation meant that they did not have to live with the consequences of their actions, and so the plunder spread.

The brand of capitalism birthed on Madeira hundreds of years ago still exists today. Countries and corporations still plunder the earth for materials and rely on cheap labour (often forced or slave labour - I am writing this the same week that McDonald’s were caught employing victims of modern slavery), for profit margins.

I’m happy to say that the Madeira I hiked across is a far cry from the 16th century. It feels largely untouched and is a haven for nature and biodiversity, carefully protected and conserved. The levadas still serve a vital function across the island, and their use is closely governed to cater for the needs of people and nature. In modern imagination, levadas do not represent a brutal history. More public levadas were built in the 19th century to diversify farming, and to serve the nutritional needs of the local population, and are increasingly synonymous with hiking and adventure. Instead of sugar, tourism is the islands biggest revenue source, with the levadas playing a unique role in this.

Recognising Madeira’s role as the origin of commodity-capitalism is necessary, however, as it provides us one part of the puzzle of understanding the present day. As we will explore in the next piece, this model became the backbone of the European colonial strategy, and in the process evolved, bringing in different players, different tactics, and moving us closer to the set of necessary conditions which birthed modernity.?