How the British Empire Built the Food System that Is Destroying the Planet
Written by Sam Wetherell. Photo by Phoebe Davies.
The climate crisis distorts the ways we usually measure time, posing a unique problem for historians. When Friedrich Engels lived in Manchester in the early 1840s, he was struck by the ubiquitous presence of factory smoke. In his famous account of the city in The Conditions of the Working Class in England, he expressed horror at the ways that smoke and soot contaminated lungs and buildings. Little did Engels know, however, this smoke would have arguably more serious consequences that would reverberate through the atmosphere for hundreds, possibly thousands of years, bearing down on shrinking ice caps and expanding deserts.
In the words of the environmental historian and activist Andreas Malm, ‘the thermometer can be legitimately suspected as a barometer of the rolling invasion of the past into the present.’ For this reason, asking when we would begin a history of the climate crisis is a difficult question, with many plausible answers. Asking where we would begin such a history, however, is a little easier. The history of the climate crisis is inextricable from the history of Britain…