Page 10 - Changing Living Spaces

Satosthi Murayama

The two economies have rarely been discussed together. According to
Jeffery D. Sachs (2008, 222), his evolutionary scheme of economic devel-
opment includes two parts: (1) the traditional subsistence economy, and
(2) the modernized economy, which evolved from a trading economy to an
emerging market economy and on to an innovation economy. The scheme
is based on Euro-American, Japanese, and global economic development.
The newly economically developed countries all initially belong to a tradi-
tional or emerging market economy, which eventually evolves to the sec-
ond stage. Sachs’ scheme can be described as a traditional evolutionary
understanding with developmental stage theories.
On the other hand, the early modern or pre-modern world can be
viewed from two different aspects. According to Wrigley’s argument, the
pre-modern era is understood as a transitional period to modern fossil
fuel society: (1) as a process of liberation from agricultural constraints in
organic economies (Wrigley 2016), and (2) as a process of long-term estab-
lishment of differentiated organic economies (over at least hundreds of
years), almost as in the case of European and Japanese agricultural his-
tories. However, developing countries have often been unable or have not
had the opportunity to complete the development of their own organic
economies, as they have been and are being swept up in a short and pre-
cipitous time by the global fossil fuel society.
Wrigley’s work on the path to sustainable growth opened a new horizon
in the history of energy. Subsequently, Paolo Malanima (2020) revealed
a unified global history of the earth during the long nineteenth century,
from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth.
The history of labour dependent on fossil energy reached its peak on the
eve of the First World War. Organic economies, whose ecological founda-
tions varied around the globe, had various long histories based on Living
Spaces. However, with the advent of the concept of energy efficiency, the
history of production evolved to tell an economically similar global his-
tory, introducing the ‘Anthropocene’ that is currently transforming the
Earth.
Paolo Malanima’s excellent work following Wrigley’s history of liber-
ation from the natural constraints of organic economies to sustainable
economic growth would suggest something else, what might be called a
‘tragedy’ of sorts in environmental history caused by global economic de-
velopment. It is true that ‘animals and humans are poor converters’ of
food to work (Malanima 2020, 495). But does this history of efficient fos-
sil fuel ‘production’ really cover the entire spectrum of ‘production’?

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