Scarcity in the Modern World: History, Politics, Society and Sustainability, 1800–2075

Description

Scarcity in the Modern World brings together world-renowned scholars to examine how concerns about the scarcity of environmental resources such as water, food, energy and materials have developed, and subsequently been managed, from the 18th to the 21st century. These multi-disciplinary contributions situate contemporary concerns about scarcity within their longer history, and address recent forecasts and debates surrounding the future scarcity of fossil fuels, renewable energy and water up to 2075. This book offers a fresh way of tackling the current challenge of meeting global needs in an increasingly resource-stressed environment. By bringing together scholars from a variety of academic disciplines, this volume provides an innovative multi-disciplinary perspective that corrects previous scholarship which has discussed scientific and cultural issues separately. In doing so, it recognizes that this challenge is complex and cannot be addressed by a single discipline, but requires a concerted effort to think about its political and social, as well as technical and economic dimensions. This volume is essential for all students and scholars of environmental and economic history. Cover Half Title Title Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors 1 Introduction Part 1 Making Scarcity 2 Scarcity: Language and Politics 3 Untangling Scarcity 4 Rethinking the Relationships between Scarcity, Poverty and Hunger: An Anthropological Perspective 5 Renewable Energy: A Story of Abundance and Scarcity Part 2 The Power of Projection 6 Growth in the Anthropocene 7 The Great Resources Myth 8 Escapology, or How to Escape Malthusian Traps Part 3 Coping, Managing, Innovating at Different Scales 9 U.S. Mobilization during the Second World War as a Model for Coping with Climate Change 10 Scarcity and Innovation: Lessons from the British Economy during the U.S. Civil War 11 China’s Great Leap Famine: Malthus, Marx, Mao and Material Scarcity 12 Encounters with Scarcity at a Micro-Scale: Householders’ Responses to Drought as a Continuum of Normal Practice Part 4 Dynamics of Distribution 13 A Climate of Scarcity: Electricity in India, 1899–2016 14 Lagos ‘Scarce-City’: Investigating the Roots of Urban Modernity in a Colonial Capital, 1900–1928 15 Energy Shortages and the Politics of Time: Resilience, Redistribution and ‘Normality’ in Japan and East Germany, 1940s–1970s 16 Food Shortages: The Role and Limitations of Markets in Resolving Food Crises during the 2012 Famine in the Sahel Acknowledgements Index