Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 2 (2020), p. 307

Understanding the relationship of our economic system to the environment is no longer the preserve of specialist climate scientists. As the global environmental crisis has grown over the last decade a plethora of writers have wrestled with the question that Nick Ashton-Jones sets out to answer in these books: ‘How did we come to this cruel and unjust state of affairs?’

Few of these writers have tried to analyse capitalism’s rapacious nature through the sweeping historical approach taken by Ashton-Jones. These books, the first two volumes of a projected six, begin with an overview of British geology before moving to a discussion of pre-class societies in what would become the British Isles. Part II analyses the development of feudalism and what this meant for the interaction between humans and their landscape.

This long view ought to give the reader an appreciation of how exactly how we have arrived where we are. As Ashton-Jones explains, geography on its own can only explain a ‘lifeless planet, but it is required to ‘appreciate the impact of life … upon the nature of landscapes’. This approach, which locates humans at the centre of the creation of the landscape we see today, is important but Ashton-Jones fails to get to grips with the nature of the historical change that happens in the period he covers.

A society’s mode of production is a specific combination of different forces of production (technology, infrastructure, etc.) with the relations of production (the particular organization of society). Thus as modes of production change, relations between people change and, crucially for the topic covered here, so does society’s relationship with the natural world. A hunter-gatherer society and feudal or capitalist modes of production have very different relationships with nature. The process of transformation is itself important because it shapes how the new society is organized. This dynamic ought to be at the heart of Ashton-Jones’s analysis but he tends to see continuity when a break with the past is more generally accepted.

So, quoting Yuval Noah Harai, Ashton-Jones says that the ‘agricultural revolution was history’s biggest fraud’ despite it being clear that there are fundamental differences between nomadic societies based on hunter-gathering and sedentary, or near sedentary, societies based on farming. He tells us that ‘William of Normandy made a point of respecting immemorial feudal English law’ but after 1066 the Normans created a new set of feudal relations. As Marc Bloc explained in Feudal society: The growth of ties of dependence (1939, trans. 1961), ‘No definite break with the past occurred, but the change of direction which, despite inevitable variations in time according to the countries or the phenomena considered, affected in turn all the graphs of social activity … There were … two successive “feudal” ages, very different from each other in their essential character.’

Ashton-Jones’ claims of continuity stretch the bounds of credibility at times. For instance he argues that we can ‘trace the state capitalism of the defunct Soviet Union to the Viking settlement of Novgorod a millennium earlier’. But the economic nature of the USSR was the consequence of a number of historical events that took place after the Russian Revolution – none of which were inevitable.

This approach is particularly problematic when it comes to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Here the author focuses entirely on the alleged development of capitalism through the commodification of land under feudal society, a process that began, he claims, with the Conquest and a Norman state ‘built upon a foundation of the ownership of land rights rather than … personal loyalty to a superior lord’.

However, capitalism is more than the private ownership of land, or indeed the existence of commodities. Capitalism is a system of competitive commodity production very different from feudal society and its ascendance was not inevitable. The emerging capitalist class in England (which Ashton-Jones claims came to dominate Parliament following the Wars of the Roses) needed the Civil War to defeat Charles I before capitalist relations could break free of their feudal chains. Similar processes on the continent failed to lead to the break-through of the bourgeois order.

Why does this matter? Well if capitalism is the result of inevitable processes begun when the Normans conquered England then there is no alternative. However, capitalism is a break from the past. The motivations of oil companies in driving the degradation of the environment and the exploitation of people in South America and Africa may appear superficially to be the same as William’s grab of England, but the motivation is entirely different. Ashton-Jones claims that the duke wanted England ‘with a sort of insanity’ but if he did, it was only to satisfy the needs of his feudal lordship. The motivation of capitalist multinationals is the need to accumulate wealth or risk bankruptcy due to competition with other firms. Ashton-Jones, by contrast, argues for continuity. The ‘characteristic colonialism of the British Empire started in England in 1066’. This approach devalues the horrors of colonialism and imperialism while simultaneously implying these were inevitable.

Oddly, for a series of books predicated on understanding the way that humans shape their environment, ordinary people, and their role in contesting or making historical change is almost entirely absent. A striking omission of his account of feudalism is any sense of the way that ordinary people challenged their lords, struggled for control of resources and opposed processes like enclosure.

As I write this review, appalling news of the scale of bushfires in Australia dominates my social media news feeds. Understanding exactly why, in the face of global and local environmental catastrophe, politicians seem unable to act requires a coherent analysis of the origins and nature of capitalism. Despite Ashton-Jones’s long view of British history, his approach fails to offer the clarity we need.