In his latest book, Alexander Etkind surveys human history from the earliest states to the twenty-first century with dizzying sweep. But what appears to be an inordinately long period by the standards of historical writing is little more than a flash for some of Etkind’s central actors, none of which are human: resources like metals, coal and oil, on which human civilization has relied for the past four millennia. Whether for the sake of military power, wealth or pleasure, Etkind argues, the drive to accumulate resources has had a corrosive effect on societies and, indeed, on the planet itself.

Though the argument unfolds on a planetary scale, much of the book’s most evocative empirical material stems from Russia and the European empires it competed with. An English translation of the author’s Priroda zla. Syrё i gosudarstvo, which appeared with the renowned Russian publisher Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie in 2020, this book continues a line of inquiry opened in Etkind’s 2011 Internal Colonization. In that book, Etkind linked Russia’s authoritarian political system to its reliance on revenue from the export of fur in the seventeenth century and oil in the twentieth. “The state’s dependence on them [fur and oil exports] makes the population superfluous,” he argued. “Extracting, storing, and delivering these resources makes security more important than liberty.”1

In the present volume, Etkind takes the story of the extraction, accumulation, and trade of resources beyond Russia to offer a commentary on the collective future of humanity in the face of the climate catastrophe. The result of the almost 100-fold increase in fossil fuel consumption over the twentieth century, climate change appears in Etkind’s narration as the latest – and most terrifying – instantiation of the ancient theme of corruption through power. The twist is that, for Etkind, it is not the powerful who control the resources, but the resources that control the powerful. This dynamic, we are told, continues to be salient in humanity’s response to climate change. The resources of nature – sometimes figuratively referred to by Etkind as Gaia, the mother of all life in Greek mythology – cast a spell over humanity’s collective future; today’s incumbent elites (“Gaia’s errand boys”, p. 298) appear all but incapable of addressing the problem. Despite the urgency, the addiction to resources – to use one of Etkind’s favorite metaphors – appears as hard as ever to break.

A historical understanding of the relationship between natural resources and state power, Etkind suggests via Walter Benjamin, is critical to make sense of our contemporary predicament and muster forces for change. The particular form of this relationship is outlined in a series of eight historical essays, each dedicated to a specific resource. The book’s first part focuses on biological matter, with chapters on timber, grain, sugar, spices, and fibers (silk, flax, hemp, wool, cotton) as well as animals for food and fur (“the remains of foreign bodies”). Following Sidney Mintz and Sven Beckert in their accounts of the plantation system as pivotal to the expansion of trade in the modern age, Etkind shows how the enormous demand for sugar and cotton fueled imperial expansion in the Americas, leaving extractive institutions and environmental degradation in its wake.2 But he rightly reminds his readers of the often-overlooked centrality of Russia in providing raw materials to European empires. The British navy, for instance, relied heavily on Russian hemp for their sails and ropes. Hemp exports, in turn, provided the economic foundation for the oprichnina of Ivan IV (“The Terrible”), which Etkind calls a “special economic zone” (p. 98) avant-la-lettre. After a chapter on metals come two chapters on the history of economic thought, in which Etkind reminds the reader, through a range of examples from the physiocrats to Keynes, that imagining the economy was always as much about the use of physical resources as it was about prices that have come to dominate neoclassical reasoning.

In the final three chapters, Etkind analyzes the politics of energy leading up to our days. The fossil fuels peat, coal and oil illustrate another of the author’s guiding ideas: the distinction between topical (oil) and dispersed resources (peat and coal), which translates into the starkly different political economies of resource-dependent and labor-dependent states. While the latter “encourage internal competition, protect property rights, secure technical progress, and promote public goods and services,” (p. 285) states whose economy is centered on the exploitation of one or more topical resource (such as gold, diamonds, oil) tend to be notoriously unaccountable to their own population. Since the extraction of a topical resource usually involves only a small part of the population (who, like the prisoners employed in the Nerchinsk silver mines or slaves in the plantations of the West Indies, often have no rights), its extraction tends to embolden autocrats. Etkind’s fitting illustration is the mythical king Gilgamesh, who, “tired of squabbles with his subjects, leaves the city and captures the cedar forest. By cutting cedars and bringing their precious timber to town, he gains true power” (p. 215–16).

The provocation of this eloquent and in many ways entertaining book lies in situating resources as actors in world history. To be sure, some of the conclusions that this perspective entails may appear overdetermined: For example, the claim that in resource-dependent states “institutions don’t develop, nature is degraded and people fail to thrive” (p. 285) does not account for the starkly different forms of resource dependency: While Chile and Russia are similarly reliant on the export of raw materials, the quality of institutions in Chile (ranked 25 in the Corruption Perceptions Index) has little in common with Russia (ranked 129)3. However, such quibbles hardly distract from the broader theme of Etkind’s essay which narrates humankind’s interaction with natural resources as a tale of unrestrained desire resulting in calamity and punishment, a story so grand it ultimately defies judgement on empirical grounds. Yet, whatever one makes of the book’s implicit metahistory, readers will doubtless appreciate Etkind’s effort to provide a framework for the historical study of resources through the identification of recurrent themes (imperial competition over resources, topical vs. dispersed resources). Surveying a vast amount of literature across disciplinary or chronological boundaries, he rewards his readers with a dazzling richness of historical examples (the chapter on metals covers ground from the Hittites and Moses through the Song and Han dynasties, Martin Luther and Jakob Fugger, Swedish alchemists and German cameralists up to Nikita Demydov’s introduction of metal smelting techniques in the Urals and Siberia).

Historians of Russia and the Soviet Union, may wonder, however, about the book’s implications for the future of the Russian state. If, as Etkind claims, oil ordains an authoritarian present, readers may ask what will become of Russia in the wake of climate catastrophe: Is a decarbonized world the only hope for those in- and outside Russia who aspire for a more democratic, more accountable government? Or will Russia, given the vastness of its territory and the entrenched interests of its elite, remain a “resource-bound” economy? After following Etkind on his journey through the punishing effects of resource extraction, the reviewer is inclined to bet on the latter.

Notes:
1 Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization. Russia’s Imperial Experience, Malden 2011, p. 89.
2 Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power. The Place of Sugar in Modern History, New York 1986; Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton. A Global History, London 2014.
3 Transparency International: Corruption Perceptions Index 2020, https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020 (12.11.2021).