Earth Scientists have identified the post-war ‘Great Acceleration’ of economic growth and environmental degradation as a marker of the Anthropocene’s arrival. Yet political economy mechanisms linking economic expansion with changing Earth System dynamics remain opaque. In this lecture, I re-examine Bretton Woods in the Anthropocene to foreground the role of international money as a driving force of the Great Acceleration. I argue that prospects for international monetary stability and continued economic growth in the 1960s came to hinge on practices of racialized extraction in South African gold mining, generating a specific ecology of money and shaping US policy towards Apartheid. Excavating hidden interactions between money, extraction, and race, I highlight the environmental paradoxes of a post-war international monetary order anchored by gold.
Dr Jeremy Green is Professor of Political Economy and Fellow of Jesus College at the University of Cambridge. His current research examines contemporary and historical dimensions of the political economy of green transition, exploring interactions between anthropogenic climate change and capitalism. He is working on a book examining the links between money and the Anthropocene, from the birth of liberalism to today. He has previously written on the links between late capitalist development and international order in 19th century Europe, the post-war political economy of Anglo-American finance, globalisation, and British capitalism. His work is interdisciplinary in its orientation, drawing upon influences from politics, economics, environmental history, sociology, and geography.
The event will be followed by a small reception.