Europe without Borders: Environmental and Global History in a World after Continents

In 2012 the historian Julia Adeney Thomas restrained her temper but unleashed a warning. The occasion was a forum in the American Historical Review on ‘historiographic “turns” in critical perspective’. The perspectives offered were critical enough, Thomas wrote in praise of the other authors, but the forum had a blind spot: ‘alongside the turns analyzed here, a world-altering force has been emerging, one larger, more devastating, and more definitive even than “contemporary flexible forms of capitalism”: I speak of climate change – or climate collapse – and all of its related global transformations’.¹ Since then, some intersectional scholars have gone beyond that to argue that climate collapse and racial capitalism are not separate topics at all, but are bound together by white supremacy and lingering forms of European imperialism.² Over the past decade some environmental historians have grappled with these connections and deployed new frameworks for thinking about scale, the interdependence of the local and the global, the implications of a Euro-centric analytical framework for our understanding of the world and the relationship between economic systems and environmental change. Although they have developed separately, both environmental history and global history have called upon historians of Europe to rethink boundary making in their methodologies and in their categories of analysis. In an era of global climate catastrophe, global pandemic and global economic crisis, where does the ‘European’ environment end?

In an attempt to answer this complex question, I will trace the ways that European environmental history has developed in relation to global history, drawing attention to the complex entanglements between questions of scale and the relevance of national, social and economic categories. These scholarly legacies and innovations have shaped a distinct European environmental history that is at once bound to Europe's history of colonialism and global questions, while it simultaneously reshapes our understandings of European ecosystems and challenges national frameworks for doing history. European environmental history predates the explosion of global history, but both approaches offer productive challenges to the organisation of historical scholarship around the nation state.

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The potential for environmental history to be placed in a global context does not render smaller-scale studies of European environments less important. The two are intimately bound together. Understanding the migration patterns and processes of walruses and reindeer in the Arctic has the capacity, as Bathsheba Demuth has demonstrated, to change the ways we think about such grand historical narratives as what makes a capitalist or socialist citizen and how the forces of global capitalism transformed the lives of indigenous peoples.³ Environmental history offers ‘seemingly built-in globality’, as Sebastian Conrad notes: ‘the effects of soil erosion, earthquakes, and tsunamis, as well as the spread of germs and pathogens, diseases and epidemics, and so forth, plainly require perspectives that are open to spaces constituted by the object of study, which do not necessarily converge with national and imperial borders’.⁴ Opening one's eyes to ecological considerations can make even the most seemingly parochial concerns get very global very quickly, as David Harvey learned during a dispute with a co-editor about how to frame the conclusion to a book about the Oxford Motor Industry Research Project.⁵ A story that began with a conflict between management, union leadership and workers at one Rover car plant in southeastern England soon revealed the limitations inherent in ignoring the conflict's global context: ‘I found myself arguing for at least a European-wide perspective on adjustments in automobile production capacity, but found it hard to justify stopping at that scale when pressed. There were also important ecological issues to be considered deriving not only from the plant itself (the paint shop was a notorious pollution source) but also from the nature of the product. Making Rover cars for the ultra-rich and so contributing to ecological degradation hardly seemed a worthy long-term socialist objective.⁶ When Harvey placed an initially local labour story in a larger global scale, he found new arguments about impact and exploitation that raised the spectre of concentric circles of privilege – concerns that lurk in the shadows of European histories that do not acknowledge global contexts.

This issue of scale was raised by Alfred Crosby in an essay on the ‘The Past and the Present of Environmental History’ in 1995.⁷ According to Crosby, American historians’ lack of ‘burning interest’ in environmental history until after the Second World War was not from lack of subject matter. From Krakatoa and the ensuing tsunami, which killed 40,000 in 1893, to the explosion of a comet in Siberia that ‘flattened 2,000 square kilometers of forest’ in 1908, to the devastating importation of rinderpest into sub-Saharan Africa, to multiple species extinctions, the overrunning of Australia with sheep, the overpopulation of the planet with humans, deforestation, urbanisation, pollution: Crosby showed that the period from 1875 to 1945 was rife with opportunities to engage the changing physical environment on a scale that dwarfed national concerns. Crosby's goal was to sketch the genealogy of post-war US environmental history, which he traces to a combination of the Annales school and French geography, the spectre of nearly unlimited US military power during the Cold War, the moon landing and, finally, the environmental movement.⁸ More interesting to me, however, are the multiplicity of scales that Crosby used to set the stage for this story of first neglect and then attention. In the first three pages of his essay, Crosby mentioned Cleveland, Krakatoa, Siberia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Horn of Africa, Somalia, the Cape Colony, Amsterdam, Cincinnati, Ohio, North America, Australia, Europe, the United States, Brazil, the Atlantic, the Great Lakes, the northeastern United States, Great Britain's Midlands, the Ruhr Valley, Buenos Aires and Chicago.⁹ Crosby's broad geographic coverage (which inexplicably overlooked Asia) relied on examples from the microscopic to the continental. His spatial units included cities, countries (and the occasional nation state), regions, oceans, one single volcano and an island-continent. His agents and actors included viruses (influenza, rinderpest), celestial objects (comets), seismic events (tsunami), humans (Africans, Italians, Bernard Bailyn, riverine populations, nomads, Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot), other animals (cattle, wild ungulates, quagga, buffalo, sheep, guanaco, kangaroo, antelope, ostrich, emu, rhea, marsupials, placental animals) and one specific bird (Martha, the world's last passenger pigeon). From the global population to the 1.3 million Europeans who ‘steamed’ to the United States in 1907 (‘more living biomass than had ever crossed an ocean in such a short time’) to single individuals, from specific places (the Cincinnati zoo) to types of ecological spaces (grasslands, forests, rivers), to the planet itself: nothing was too large or too small for Crosby's attention. In this, if nothing else, he was like Franz I, the first self-proclaimed emperor of Austria, who is credited with saying ‘there is no affair that a priori and according to general principles could be called large or small; matters are only large or small in comparison to and in relation to other things.’¹⁰

Neither global nor environmental history need be planetary in scale, but historians do have to be self-conscious in choosing scales.¹¹ Deborah Coen's recent book on climate science historicises the concept of working across scales, locating its emergence in the unlikely halls of Habsburg climatological science. ‘What makes modern climate science modern is its integration of phenomena of radically different dimensions’, an integration that requires ‘thinking across scales of space and time’.¹² This way of thinking, according to Coen, came naturally to an empire self-consciously composed of a patchwork of larger and smaller territories, with their own political histories, legal practices and even climates.¹³ But thinking within nations has been a hard habit to break – and that is one of the advantages of both global and environmental history, which Sebastian Conrad has suggested leads historians to ‘break out of all established spatial units, including empires, religions, and civilizations’.¹⁴ Although this suggests an attack on all spatial units, ‘venerable Eurocentric spatialities’, most especially nation states, inspire global history's most ardently ‘polemical dimension’.¹⁵ One of the problems that inspired global history in the first place is the too long, too frequent and too unthinking precedence of European perspectives. Europe does not occupy a neutral place in global history. Kären Wigen and Martin Lewis argue, for example, that one of the advantages of investigating ‘world regions’ instead of ‘continents’ was that it would ‘demote Europe to its proper place’.¹⁶ Even understanding the Global North's outsized role in creating (and exporting) the capitalist underpinnings of environmental crisis requires paying attention to the costs of climate change paid across the Global South. Global environmental history often speaks to the history of Europe and Europeans – the foods Europeans eat, the clothing they wear, the aftereffects of their ideological, military, and material exports.¹⁷ Dipesh Chakrabarty has suggested that if the connection between European and global history was once based on imperialists ‘exporting the border-form outside Europe’, it now comes from the ‘new subalterns of the global economy – refugees, asylum seekers, illegal workers’ who ‘can be found all over Europe’ for reasons embedded in both environment and economy. ‘Do not one billion human beings already live without access to proper drinking water?’ he asks with anguish.¹⁸

Long before Chakrabarty, W.E.B. DuBois had keened over the human and animal lives lost in Africa to feed European empires. This is a long quotation, but I assure you it is worth reading every word of DuBois's description of the ‘capitalist exploitation’ of Africa:

where the right hand knew nothing of what the left hand did, yet rhymed its grip with uncanny timeliness; where the investor neither knew, nor inquired, nor greatly cared about the sources of his profits; where the enslaved or dead or half-paid worker never saw nor dreamed of the value of his work (now owned by others); where neither the society darling nor the great artist saw the blood on the piano keys; where the clubman, boasting of great game hunting, heard above the click of his smooth, lovely, resilient billiard balls no echo of the wild shrieks of pain from kindly, half-human beasts as fifty to seventy-five thousand each year were slaughtered in cold, cruel, lingering horror of living death; sending their teeth to adorn civilization on the bowed heads and chained feet of thirty thousand black slaves, leaving behind more than a hundred thousand corpses in broken, flaming homes.¹⁹

DuBois related imperial subordination – the instrumentalisation of human beings – to ecological subordination – the extraction of natural resources and, in some cases, the extinction or near-extinction of non-human animal species.²⁰ In his extensive (and sometimes manic) 1895 diary entries, Theodor Herzl noted a now infamous plan to have ‘natives’ of whatever future territory the Jewish people might settle clear the land of dangerous beasts like ‘big snakes’ – a comment that echoes the kind of Rhodesian fantasy of white mastery that DuBois critiques.²¹ Even the best local European environmental histories inevitably miss the scale of violence that underwrites Europeans’ material comfort if they eschew its global context. Thus, as European histories reckon with legacies of racial capitalism and the many-sided traumas associated with colonialism and its afterlife, histories of Europe itself have begun to change.²²

This is clearly visible in new histories of Europe that explore racial capitalism, environmental change and cultural and social interactions both across and within continents. Wherever the history of capitalism is invoked, environmental history cannot be ignored. As a historian of the British Empire, John MacKenzie had embraced a global scale in his earliest publications on the popular culture of imperialism. He turned to environmental history in his 1988 monograph, The Empire of Nature, on the role of hunting and conservation in British imperial rule in Africa and India.²³ ‘Africa’, explained MacKenzie in a later autobiographical note, ‘had been conquered on the back of its animals’ not only because of commodity trades (see, again, DuBois) but because of the protein that hunting offered European settlers and the railway workers who built their empires. Having created animal scarcity, European settlers then transformed themselves into the protectors of African animals and transformed African hunters into poachers.²⁴ MacKenzie later published a lecture series intentionally calling up the earlier monograph's title, Empires of Nature and the Nature of Empires. Scotland was an example of a peripheral territory (within the United Kingdom) whose environment had been manipulated (by sheep, by the heather spread in order to make the moors more attractive to the grouse that tourists so loved to shoot), while Scots were effective participants in the reshaping of environments all over the world. Younger scholars inspired by MacKenzie have traced the work of those Scottish emigrants in the Great Lakes region and analysed it from the perspective of Indigenous Studies.²⁵

The recognition of the dialectical relationship between European and global history has long characterised environmental history, thanks in no small measure to Crosby himself and his 1972 book, The Columbian Exchange, which made Europeans’ immunobiology immediately relevant to the environments and the peoples they encountered in the Americas.²⁶ In the 1970s Crosby and William McNeill established what is now a crowded field of historians tracing the movements of people and pathogens across the globe.²⁷ Europeans feature prominently in such stories, as do the ectoparasites that travel on their skin, the microscopic organisms that travel in their lungs, their spit, not to mention the rats on their ships. As M. Christopher Low, an Ottoman environmental historian, has uncovered, ideas of medical quarantine, surveillance and sovereignty developed in tandem with one another during the nineteenth century; the threat of disease in a faraway port of the British or Ottoman empire was inseparable from questions of European sovereignty.²⁸

Then there are the histories of hunters (so called sportsmen), explorers and naturalists traveling all across the world, of botanists, geologists and meteorologists and their links to the creation and function of empires, natural history museums and human zoos or ‘people shows’.²⁹ Europeans’ drive to get further, faster often endangered the lives of people (not to mention animals, plants, and other living organisms) they encountered through conquest and disease, as well as brazen kidnapping. ‘The most precious resource’ to explorers like Magellan and Drake ‘came in human form’, writes Joyce Chaplin, who dedicated her 2012 book Round About the Earth to Enrique de Malacca, who was impressed into the role of first man to go around the world.³⁰ Explorers, spice traders and the naturalists they towed along moved plants and animals into natural history museums, botanical gardens, zoos and laboratories, not to mention from one colonial territory to another.³¹ Scientists drew the maps and catalogued the flora and fauna that made imperial conquest possible, even if they also bemoaned the environmental and human consequences of the so-called civilising process.³²

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Environmental histories of Europe test the boundaries of the nation state and call attention to other ways of defining space in the histories we write. In no small measure due to a suspicion of the nation state as the ‘natural’ form of historical analysis, European history has embraced all sorts of supra and sub-national spaces.³³ Environmental history is a natural ally for attempts to turn away from the nation state as the primary unit of analysis, a project with such ideological force it has been referred to as ‘rescuing history from the nation’.³⁴ For some historians, environmental approaches offer a vehicle through which they can counter standard assumptions about European politics, ideology and historical spaces. Such is the case in Astrid Eckert's compelling new analysis of the environment and the West German borderlands; Carolin Roeder's work on mountaineering, international cooperation and risk; or, in a provocative way, Timothy Snyder's Black Earth, which boldly sought to resituate the Holocaust in an ecological framework.³⁵ For other European historians, like Eagle Glassheim, adopting a local environmental approach has enabled new directions for thinking about marginality and racial capitalism in Europe itself.³⁶ As David Blackbourn has noted, an ecological ‘unit of enquiry – a watershed, a forest, a desert, the habitat of a particular species – might well be simultaneously sub-national and supra-national, confounding national borders in a double sense’.³⁷ Historians have looked at European forests, rivers, deserts and fire; disease, pollution and stink; zoos, pets and animals at war; spas and seismological laboratories.³⁸ Even when their titles suggest they are about nation states, these works attend to spaces defined by some sort of ecological logic (a forested region in the Pyrenees or a single forest district in Württemberg or – in the case of my own book, for example, the surface-level political units covering subterranean petroleum reservoirs).³⁹ They call up comparisons with distant places and connections forged by people and goods on the move.

The movement of goods – whether oil, ostrich feathers or ivory; sugar, pineapples, glass or cotton – can help historians see connections across political spaces.⁴⁰ Europeans have been great consumers of global commodities. Yet Blackbourn highlights that commodity history is one way of recentring European history while acknowledging its larger contexts in a new way: ‘the German interior was linked to the slave trade, importing sugar and producing metal goods for exchange in Africa and exporting textiles to clothe plantation slaves’ and along with all those traveling people went ‘another form of global traffic’, non-human this time, sometimes deliberate and sometimes accidental. ‘Diseases like cholera that threatened humans, species like the Colorado Beetle and phylloxera that attacked domestic crops, the flora that were emptied out of the ballast tanks of steamships and floated up German waterways – all were signs of the interlinking of Germany with the wider world in ways that deserve more attention from historians, not least because of the light they shed on the environmental challenges we face today’.⁴¹ Following commodities helps uncover connections that other histories of imperialism might miss. Many of the Germans who ‘spread around the world as merchants, missionaries, scientists, foresters, mining engineers, and, of course, military advisers’ did so under the flags of other empires.⁴²

Placing European history in a global context reopens questions about what Europe is and where it properly ends. Here, too, environmental history offers its own set of challenges. Geographers have never done a particularly good job of defining Europe, a point that has been made before.⁴³ There is no such thing as a European environment, no such thing as Europe's nature. Giancarlo Casale has pointed out, with characteristic wit, that the European Age of Exploration is only remarkable because prior to it, Western Europe had been ‘totally confined, both physically and intellectually, to a small slice of the world bounded by the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean’ at the same time that the Ottomans were sailing towards Indonesia.⁴⁴ Once Europeans ‘caught up’, so to speak, to this urge to move outward, however, there was no stopping the expansionist drive. Europe has no natural eastern boundary at all and, as its maritime capacities increased, its boundedness to the south, west and north became more an invitation to interaction than a barrier.⁴⁵ The massive field of Atlantic history is too vast to dare even to list leading works in a footnote.⁴⁶ The legacy of Braudel's Mediterranean could rightly form the bulk of this essay, differently approached, all on its own, perhaps with the opening line ‘In the beginning, there was the Mediterranean’.⁴⁷ Indeed, Crosby, in his overview of US environmental history, cannot explain how it took over twenty years to translate Mediterranean into English or why Braudel and the Annales school more broadly ‘did not initiate the surge of environmental history in America’, as he put it.⁴⁸ Europe's conceptual existence relies on ideology, not least imperialist and racialist thinking, rather than simple physical geography.

In recent decades conversations about boundaries and borders have had a vertical dimension as well. When the Soviet Union launched the world's first satellite, Sputnik, into orbit, it drew both the United States and Europe into a panicked race for capacities to occupy and utilise the space ‘above’ us. Lisa Rand has described the process that followed as the transformation of the area between the atmosphere and the moon into a ‘landscape’.⁴⁹ The United States launched surveillance aircraft, including the U2 spy planes, from allied territories including West Germany.⁵⁰ In addition to creating opportunities for conflict (including the military consequences of debates over airspace), there were also new opportunities for connection, with satellites performing some of the same functions in connecting Europe with the rest of the world that undersea cables or steamships had done previously.⁵¹

Thinking about ‘ecosystems’ has allowed some European historians to bypass conventional political and even geographic boundaries. Ryan Jones’s study of the extinction of Steller's Sea Cow follows ships and men (and sea cows) between Russian Siberia and the Aleutian peninsula, but it begins with Rudyard Kipling's ‘haunting sense of loss that extinction has left on colonial landscapes and seascapes’, a lament that ‘sits ill at ease with [Kipling's] well-known praise of the “White Man's Burden” and ultimate sanction of the British Raj's authority over humans and animals in India’, suggesting that Kipling was attuned to the ‘paradoxes provoked by the violence necessary to civilization’.⁵² Jones reorients border zones of Europe, in this case the border between Russia and Alaska, within a global history of colonialism, a history in which naturalists were more powerful as agents than as critics of imperialism. Jones's North Pacific creates its own coherence, ‘following the boundaries that made sense to … natural historians’ that stretched from Kamchatka to the Alexander Archipelago.⁵³ A map of the northern hemisphere with the North Pole at its centre appears in Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution, and invites readers to see global trade links connecting the Aleutian islands, Okhotsk, Yakutsk, Irkutsk and Kyakhta in Siberia to Arkhangelsk, St. Petersburg and London and to York Fort, Montreal and New York in the Americas. No division between Asia and Europe is discernible.⁵⁴ The fur trade in the Bering Strait was a matter of life or death for aboriginal peoples like the Chukchi, Yupik and Inupiaq, but it also brought Alaska into Russian, British, US-American, Chinese and German history.⁵⁵ Pey-Yi Chu's intellectual history of permafrost shows how Soviet science, systems thinking and the militarisation of the Arctic combined to reframe the understanding of the very ground.⁵⁶ Recognising spaces defined by weather patterns, animal migratory behaviours, soil quality, ocean currents and other categories outside of politics has helped environmental historians see beyond the nation state – but it has also uncovered the ways in which imperialist and capitalist narratives hide the violence wrought by Europe's expansions.

Like Europe, the Middle East and North Africa is an abstraction unbounded by clear geography, a single polity or a uniform environment.⁵⁷ And yet there have been creative efforts to make sense of it ecologically. Richard Bulliet's The Camel and the Wheel created a region of analysis around the breeding and use of camels for transportation, that is, a space defined by technology and human–animal relations.⁵⁸ Timothy Mitchell's transformative chapter ‘Can the Mosquito Speak?’ linked technical expertise, capitalism, the chemical industry and militarism to the breeding zone of the mosquito and in so doing introduced the concept of the non-human actor certainly to me individually and arguably to my generation.⁵⁹ Alan Mikhail's research on Egypt led him to conclude the Ottoman Empire was itself an ‘ecosystem of collective dependence and determination’, itself connected to global exchanges: ‘a volcano in Iceland, rats in northern India, timber stocks across the Mediterranean, water buffalo in villages throughout Egypt … must be brought into our analytical frame to properly understand the empire's history’.⁶⁰ In recreating the Ottoman Empire as an ecological system with inputs and outputs on a global scale, however, it is all too easy to leave out Southeastern Europe. The boundary separating European history from the history of the Middle East and North Africa marginalises Southeastern Europe, the infamous ‘Balkans’, twice over.

Nor have Europeanists done any better in breaking down this barrier, despite all of the good intentions informing decades of research on the Mediterranean. This is not just a question of avoiding the kind of ‘civilisational divide’ ideology that has characterised studies of Europe and the Ottoman Empire from Pirenne to Huntington. Taking as an example the study of the plague, Nükhet Varlik shows that ‘separate histories of plague in Europe and the Middle East-Islamic world’ obscure the coherence of ‘the plague experiences of Europe and the Ottoman world’, which shared the ‘unified microbial zone of the Mediterranean’.⁶¹ Like ‘Europe’ itself, though, the conceptual coherence of the Mediterranean has difficulty withstanding strict scrutiny. Peregrine Horden argues that the Mediterranean cannot be defined in terms of climate or botany. His collaborator, Nicholas Purcell, wryly noted, ‘attempts to establish precise characteristics for defining what is Mediterranean have undesirable consequences’.⁶² In contrast, placing the Mediterranean in a global context reveals not only ‘vineyards, silver-green olive trees and golden-yellow cereal fields’ but also cypresses from Persia and cactus plants and tomatoes introduced after the Columbian exchange.⁶³

Judith Tucker has linked the tension between Braudel's coherent Mediterranean and Horden and Purcell's collection of microecologies to larger debates about unity and conflict.⁶⁴ The stakes in this debate can be high. It is no accident, writes Molly Greene, that the word Mediterranean is a ‘Roman/Latin word, of Greek origin’, with no resonance among the ‘Muslims of North Africa and the Levant’. It is difficult to argue for the unifying power of a word that only half of the community it purports to create has any interest in using. ‘In the most lethal use of “Mediterranean”-type thinking’, Greene warns, ‘French colonial officials fervently promoted Algeria's classical past as a way of turning their new conquest into a part of France. This connection between the word [Mediterranean] and European imperialism or, at the very least, Eurocentrism, is an anxiety that the field of Mediterranean history shares with Atlantic and Pacific history’ despite the fact that ‘one of the original motivations for the study of bodies of water was “to escape the restrictions of the nation-state”’.⁶⁵ Braudel's original work argued for the unity of the lands around the sea as a coherent analytical space, promised to bridge the divide between Europe, Asia and Africa and to transcend the limitations of national categories. But Nabil Matar notes that Braudel's perspective on the unity of the Mediterranean transplanted a twentieth-century condition of ‘European or European-sponsored mandate/colonisation’ back onto the early-modern period. The very notion of connectivity, Matar stresses, is based on a ‘European colonial conceptualisation of the Mediterranean’ that ‘completely ignored Arabic writings and Arab voices’.⁶⁶ In a 2019 volume on The Making of the Modern Mediterranean highlighting ‘views from the South’, Tucker brought Ottoman, Arab and other North African voices into the chorus of tales told about the Mediterranean. But it is the eclecticism, rather than the geography, of Tucker's volume that is perhaps the best tribute to how European histories with a focus on nature and material culture, environments and climates, animals and disease, parks and recreation can engage the global turn. The ‘rethinking of the tensions between space and place, and in particular how ways of perceiving and living in the physical Mediterranean were influenced by local, regional, and global contexts’⁶⁷ that her book offers could lead to the recognition that large parts of European history are not European at all.

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That last sentence was, at one time, where this article ended. In the time that separated the first draft from this one, our planet entered a global pandemic. For many people – but notably not for all people – the pandemic brought about a simultaneous shrinking and widening of scales as well as a reshuffling of the social categories of intimacy and accessibility. In my own life, people I was used to seeing every day disappeared, new rules of socialising divorced from physical proximity encouraged me to reconnect with people I hadn't seen in decades. A long-lost friend, now a landscape architect, alerted me to an essay on pandemics by landscape designer Félix de Rosen. ‘Pandemics are not works of art,’ de Rosen notes. ‘They are real, tragic events, occurring in the real, physical world’. Most people have, understandably, focused on what the pandemic has done to us, to human beings and our communities. De Rosen instead cites ecological writer Jim Robbins’ 2012 article explaining that epidemics ‘don't just happen. They are a result of things people do to nature’.⁶⁸ They are, that is, embedded in both environmental and global history. De Rosen continues:

Human socioeconomic systems interact with the environment to create conditions that harbour and produce disease. Our contemporary systems are characterised by neoliberal capitalism, intensive resource extraction, and unceasing encroachment on wildlife habitat. Potential disease vectors like mosquitoes, ticks, and bats are most prevalent at the urban periphery, where human activity penetrates biodiverse ecosystems. It [is] on these peripheries that diseases are most likely to make the jump to humans. This, along with modern air travel, the intense growth of animal agriculture, and wildlife trafficking are all characters in our modern stories of pandemic.⁶⁹

De Rosen's observations echo a longstanding European ecosocialist tradition, going back to the distinctive but complementary efforts of André Gorz and René Dumont in the 1970s to incorporate an appreciation of the Earth's finitude into Marxist thought and simultaneously politicise ecology.⁷⁰ Acute environmental disasters like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima; oil spills from the Exxon Valdez to Deepwater Horizon; the slower awakening to the never-ending problems of acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, global climate change, irreversible polar melts and the so-called Anthropocene or sixth extinction have all been accompanied by a growing interest in environmental histories – histories that have, again and again, tied local disaster to global capitalism and its hierarchies of value(s).⁷¹

There is, of course, a certain irony in the global dimension of COVID-19. At some moments and from some perspectives, it seems people on every inhabited continent are experiencing some version of the ‘same thing’. At other moments, and from other perspectives, this shared experience is profoundly different depending on a person's socioeconomic status, race, gender and position within a global economy created by imperialism.⁷² For many historians of Europe, our lives seem constrained, delimited to spaces smaller than the ones most of us usually inhabit: quite literally, our apartments. When I showed my friend Emily Greble this article, she laughed, ‘we are now sitting at our kitchen tables barred from libraries and archives and yet seeking to make sense of the global scale of history’. Here, too, is a chance to foreground multiplicities of scale: scales of mobility, of community, of sacrifice. This pandemic offers the chance to revisit our understanding of how ecosystems are shaped, our attention to how racial capitalism and climate change intersect. May we all come through this safely, and wiser.