Colonial Abundance and the Resistance of Nature

In the early eighteenth century, unprecedented affluence was bringing societies across Europe and East Asia up against ecological limits. Unlike Great Britain, France could not escape the organic regime through coal. Instead, its elites sought to overcome limits to growth through a particular form of colonialism—one organized around a political economy of abundance, which asserted that the right configuration of markets and institutions would permanently unlock the natural fertility of the earth. But in the colonies, visions of abundance continually produced scarcity: deforestation, species extinction, disease, soil exhaustion, drought. This paper has two primary objectives. First, to show how the Enlightenment’s investment in abundance was motivated by a desire to overcome the resistance of nature to growth. Second, to document how colonial landscapes refused to yield to the abstract categories and normative ideals of political economy. Ultimately, the Enlightenment’s attempt to engineer lasting abundance only exported the resistance of nature overseas, provoking a series of ecological crises that culminated in revolution.