[from Goldfrank, et al., eds., Ecology and the World-System Economic Ascent and the Global Environment: World-Systems Theory and the New Historical Materialism, 1999] Stephen G. Bunker & Paul S. Ciccantell INTRODUCTION The manipulation and reorganization of the relationship between nature and society is the most complex task confronting any ascendant economy. Gaining secure, inexpensive access to the huge volume of raw materials building blocks of capitalist industrial production requires economic, political, technical, and organizational innovations that restructure both existing social relationships (e.g., core- periphery relations) and the characteristics of the nature-society nexus (e.g., what raw materials are extracted where and by whom). The strategies of states and firms in ascendant economies to accomplish this task create what we term "generative sectors": leading economic sectors that are simultaneously key centers of capital accumulation, bases for a series of linked industries, sources of technological and organizational innovations that spread to other sectors, and models for firms and for statefirm relations in other sectors. These generative sectors in raw materials and transport industries have driven economic ascent throughout the history of the capitalist world-economy. Our analysis of economic ascent requires the refraining of world-systems theory in terms of what we call the new historical materialism. Our argument is that the distinctive feature of the capitalist world-economy is the systematic expansion of the exploitation of nature via a division of labor on an increasingly global scale. This also does not mean that this was the first time this effort had been undertaken; earlier expanding core powers and empires had sought to intensify agricultural production and to expand their raw materials supply systems. The key difference was the intensification and extension of capitalist extraction around the globe, beginning in the "long sixteenth century" and sharply increasing in scale and scope from the mid- eighteenth century onwards, restructuring social relations and the relationship between society and nature in support of capital accumulation. This chapter will first examine the role of generative sectors in the economic ascent of Holland, Great Britain, the United States, and Japan using the method we term the new historical materialism. The striking similarities of these nations processes of economic ascent via these generative sectors provide the basis for a nomothetic explanation of economic ascent in which the natural environment and the regularities governing material characteristics and processes play central roles. The ascent of each of these nations has restructured the capitalist world-economy by restructuring the underlying relationship with nature; in a very tangible sense, economic ascent is both a social and material process rooted in the global environment. MATERIAL PROCESSES AND ECONOMIC ASCENT: HISTORICAL STRATEGIES Within the capitalist world-economy, ascendant national economies require expanding access to cheap and secure sources of raw materials to sustain their challenge to established industrial economies. Lowering raw materials costs is critical to competition in international markets and is particularly important to the ascendant economy because it is also extending productive and transport infrastructure faster than the average of the established economies. Stability of supply is required for operating plants at full capacity; this is particularly important in the heavy industries in an ascendant economy because these industries involve higher than average fixed capital investments and inflexible sunk costs. Because the states and firms of established industrial economies have often already succeeded in structuring global raw materials markets to their own advantage, the state and firms of the ascendant nation have to restructure these markets in order to compete effectivefy. Such restructuring is likely to collide with environmental and spatial constraints imposed by the physical characteristics of the raw materials and the location of their sources. Previously ascendant, and still dominant, economies will have organized raw materials markets in such a way as to reduce their own costs and increase their own security of supply. The established market systems are therefore likely to accommodate the organization and location of extraction, processing, and transport to the natural features and locations of natural resources and their raw material forms. The ascendant economy must therefore find new ways to accommodate to natural characteristics and to use these so as to loosen or restructure markets already built around these natural features. Historically, ascendant economies have done this via several strategies. The first strategy is direct conquest of resource-rich peripheries, followed by wars Of diplomatic actions that impede access by the established economies. The second strategy is to incorporate new technologies that effectively change established relations between economy and environment. These can include new forms or expanded scale of mining, processing, and transport. The third strategy is to induce host countries to assume a significant share of the cost of reorganizing world markets, introducing new technologies, and developing new transport routes. These three major strategies have evolved historically to allow ascendant economies to continue their advance. The first strategy has an extremely long history, predating the emergence of the capitalist world-economy. Direct imperial conquest of resource rich peripheries and the defense of these formal and/or de facto annexations by force and/or diplomatic actions, such as Belgiums conquest of the copper-rich Congo region of Africa (Packenham 1991), have, however, become increasingly difficult and expensive to carry out and maintain. The second strategy has been employed in a number of instances, including the adoption of James Watts vastly improved steam engine to remove water from coal mines; Britains relatively early industrialization based on low-cost coal was an essential element of Britains rise as a hegemonic core power. Similarly, the rapid expansion of the domestic railroad transportation infrastructure in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century linked the United States widely dispersed raw materials and agriculture-producing peripheries to markets and industrial centers in the East. This creation of a low-cost transport network was a central part of the United States rapid industrialization, the key to United States ascendance in the world-economy. The third strategy has a similarly long history in the capitalist world-economy. Raw materials producing nations have long been induced (and sometimes forced) by ascendant core powers to pay a significant share of the costs of reorganizing world markets, introducing new technologies, and developing new transport routes. Imperial core powers, for example, taxed their colonies to support armies to control indigenous populations and used corvie labor to construct infrastructure. Even in nonimperial situations, ascendant core powers have been able to induce raw materials extracting peripheries to finance the construction of railroads, for example, often justified in terms of local economic development but mainly benefiting foreign investors and raw materials consumers. Numerous examples of the employment of this strategy by Britain occurred in Latin America during the nineteenth century (Coatsworth 1981; Duncan 1932; Lewis 1983). Similarly, British and North American rubber buyers and consumers were able to induce members of the economic elite in the Brazilian Amazon to finance the expansion of the wild rubber industry in the region to supply the cores industrial plants in the late nineteenth century (Bunker 1985). This strategy dramatically reduces both the costs to and risks assumed by the ascendant core economys firms and state in the raw materials extracting region. Because these propositions relate to the location of the extraction, processing, and ultimate transformation of huge amounts of matter and energy, they have implications for both the global environment and a large number of specific local environments, as well as for the economic activities of human populations. Because a key component of any national raw material access strategy involves the COnstruction of efficient transport networks on a global scale, successful strategies to restructure global raw materials markets also reorganize the global environITient. Finally, these strategies may bear directly on the benefits and prejudices to human populations in natural resource exporting societies. Let us now turn to an examination of four key examples of economic ascent based on generative sectors that have restructured relations between nature and society: Holland, Great Britain, the United States, and Japan. HOLLANDS ECONOMIC ASCENT Transport is the "circulatory system" of the capitalist world-economy and the process of capital accumulation; the economic ascent of Holland and later Great Britain provide particularly dramatic examples of this phenomenon. Transport industries have in many periods and nations been a focus of capital accumulation itself, and transport is in all periods the link that binds extraction, production, consumption, and waste disposal. The period commonly referred to as the mercantilist era in Europe is better characterized as the era of transport capitalism, with shipping and shipbuilding industries at the center of capital accumulation and the technological, organizational, and institutional innovations that provided the foundation for the economic ascent of Holland and later Great Britain to hegemonic positions in the capitalist world-economy (Bunker and Ciccantell l995a, 1995b). While trade in high value, low volume luxury goods has been the central focus of much of the analysis of this period, cursory examination of the material composition of transmaritime trade during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows that the transport of bulk goods was far greater than the trade in preciosities (Wallerstein 1982; Nef 1964). While the greatest profits per voyage were clearly made in the trade in preciosities, far more boats, and thus boatbuilders, sailors, stevedores, and other linked industries were involved in the bulk trades. Linkage and spread effects from boat building and ship repair, as well as ship provisioning, were far greater in the bulk trade than in the trade of preciosities. The location of the Netherlands as an entreptt for exports from and imports into a vast European hinterland, in combination with the vast and diverse timber resources available in this hinterland and the early position of the Dutch as a colony of the Spanish Empire, made the Netherlands a center of shipbuilding and shipping, particularly for the movement of large volumes of bulky, low-value raw materials. The grain and wood supplies available in the Rhine and Baltic regions led to the transformation of these regions into raw materials peripheries to supply capital accumulation in the Netherlands. The characteristics of wood shaped Hollands economic ascent in important ways. Easily transported down rivers, it is very costly to transport wood on the open seas. Bulky, rigid, and heavy, it required large ship tonnage to transport, was difficult to load and unload, and made ships both top-heavy and rigid, thus making them more likely to break up in heavy seas. Insurance and labor were both costly and difficult, especially as shipowners tended to risk only older boats in the trade. The Dutch could move timber to shipyards without an ocean voyage; even from the Baltic, the Dutch could sail along the coast, and they developed a cheap, capacious fiat-bottomed boat, the Fluyt, that could move timber very cheaply. ThIS advantage meant that it was ultimately far cheaper to build boats in Holland and sail them to Spain or Portugal than it was to ship timber overseas. The Dutch used this advantage to develop a highly sophisticated boat building industry, with craneS, winches, wind-driven sawmills, and experienced craftsmen that further increased their competitive advantage. As the Dutch expanded the control of the herring and the grain trades, as well as the reexport of Mediterranean wines and their own finished textiles, the different parts of the economy stimulated each other (Wallerstein 1982). Wallerstein (1982) and other analysts of Dutch economic ascent have argued that the textile trade explains Dutch dominance in the Baltic trade, since rates of return were highest in textiles and because Dutch productivity in textiles retarded British development in the textile sector. Barbour (1950) shows that Dutch ships dominated traffic through the sound long before the textile trade became important, and both Barbour (1950) and Wilson (1973) place shipping and shipbuilding at the center of a complex mix of entreptt trade, manufacture, and finance that lifted Amsterdam to economic preeminence. Wilson argued that shipping and shipbuilding constituted the major sources of linkages and multipliers as well as the critical source of raw materials to supply Dutch ascent: There seems an incontestable case for arguing that the richest society so far in history had been the creation of sea transport" (Wilson 1973, 329). In short, the critical comparative advantages underlying Dutch ascent were its geographically provided control over river routes to the agricultural lands and forests of Poland and Germany. The shipbuilding and shipping industries based on these natural conditions became generative sectors that spread technological innovations in labor-saving machinery, organizational techniques, the adaptation of windmill technologies to wood sawing, economies of scale in protoindustrial shipyards, and the development of linked industries of finance, warehousing, and other industries like textiles that could benefit from these types of innovations. Shipbuilding and shipping based on the competitive advantages provided by Hollands raw materials peripheries provided the foundation upon which Dutch hegemony was constructed. At the same time, these generative sectors were restructuring agricultural production systems and the use of timber in the Rhine and Baltic regions, reshaping these areas into extractive peripheries that exported raw materials to Holland. GREAT BRITAINS ECONOMIC ASCENT Rising economies attempt to foster the construction of global transport systems in patterns that reduce the costs of the raw materials they consume. The lower the value to volume ratio of raw materials, the more critical this cost reduction becomes for economic competitiveness. The sectors that pushed the development of large-capacity sailing ships with lower sailor to tonnage ratios were the timber and coal industries. National economic dominance in the preindustrial and early industrial period was closely linked to maritime trade in wooden boats, to naval Security, again in wooden boats, and to wood-fueled metallurgy. In addition to depending on water for cheap transport of wood, many of the early technical advances in both wood processing and metallurgy depended on water power to drive Sawmills and to power the bellows and hammers that increased fuel efficiency and labor productivity in iron smelting. Agricultural products also moved more cheaply by water, though the savings were not as important as in shipbuilding. The importance of water transport meant, though, that wood and agricultural land near watercourses were highly prized and that the various entrepreneurs who required timber extraction for metallurgy, boatbuilding, and a series of other uses competed with each other and with agriculturalists, as well as with representatives of the state, for control over and access to wood. Albion (1926) points out that naval requirements for timber competed with both corn and iron, and Ashton (1964) described what he termed the tyranny of wood and water in the development of the iron industry. This conflict over the use of internal peripheries would persist until the development of techniques for using coal to smelt iron ore. In contrast to the Dutch intense focus on the development of cheap transport, the British specialized in the development of warships that were used to displace Holland as the economic and political center of the capitalist world-economy. Britain became increasingly dependent on the import of bulk goods in foreign ships, and the tremendous value added that transport created provided the incentives for the Navigation Acts (Davis 1973). These acts were notoriously unsuccessful at limiting the competition from the more efficient Dutch fleets. It was only through the capture of thousands of Dutch boats that the British bulk carrying trade became competitive (Davis 1973). The British maritime industry could only develop through capture because of its cost disadvantage in relation to the Dutch. British boatbuilders built for strength and maneuverability, which required longer lines, sacrificed cargo space, and larger and more complicated rigging, and thus required more men per ton. This kind of building was useful for defense and capture, but was not particularly efficient. The British had the military edge, but not the carrying edge. In this sense, the struggle was between the locational advantages of the Dutch and the technical advantages in building and management that they accumulated through their ability to build many boats, and the bellicose strategies of the British who were compensating for their locational disadvantage with state-supported initiatives toward military prowess. Boxer (1965) attributes Dutch decline to wars, inflation, and the flight of capital into finance, but their real advantage was perhaps in location, which allowed them to develop their extraordinary entreptt trade in heavy goods; war with Britain essentially restricted their trading advantage, and thus there was far less incentive to sustain the boatbuilding industry. Weber (1981) and Cipolla (1965) both link the development of the metallurgical industry to the military requirements of protecting transport. The dynamic mercantile development of Britain was very much the source and the result of the timber problem there. Trade drove production and generated the income needed to stimulate it, as well as stimulating the need for armaments to protect shipping, limit rival shipping, and keep open sources of raw materials. Britains military needs were themselves the result in large measure of continental attempts to limit British trade. The rapidly developing iron industry had been almost stagnant until the crown decided to promote domestic production of cannons and the establishment of smelters (Cipolla 1965). As that industry expanded, so did its consumption of oak, leading it into conflict with both farmers and the royal navy. The growing costs of administration, including the support of a navy necessary for the security of trade, drove the crown to look for new sources of revenue; a particularly easy one, in the short term, was the sale of trees from royal forests to the more dynamic industrial interests. Thus the burning of oak for smelters was a very hot issue during most of the seventeenth century. The success of the mercantile economy, and its demand for inputs, stimulated other economies that required the same raw materials. Access to foreign timber thus became critical for multiple purposes, especially in dramatic surges of demand such as that occasioned by the London fire, which Albion (1926) characterizes as warming Finlands economy. Britain suffered from the limitations of her own supplies and the distance to other sources. The adoption of James Watts vastly improved steam engine to remove water from coal mines in Great Britain during the last 20 years of the eighteenth century began a shift away from wooden shipbuilding and toward the development of internal canal and railroad transport and iron industries as generative sectors. Watts steam engine made vast reserves of deeply buried coal that had previously been unextractable both technologically and economically suddenly available on a large scale at low cost to power Britains industrial revolution. A massive canal building effort to link internal coal fields to industrial and population centers became a major focus of capital accumulation in Britain (Mathias 1969, 13435; Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986, 15051). Within a few decades, the steam engine was adapted for railroad transport, simultaneously freeing Britain from increasingly expensive, complex efforts to build canals to supplement natural watercourses and creating a massive synergy between railroad transport and the iron and later steel industries during the nineteenth century. British ironmasters discovered the sulfur-reducing chemistry required to smelt iron with coal and progressively reduced coal charges per unit of production, as well as developing the Bessemer converter in 1856 that made mass production of steel possible. Further, the British development of the Siemens-Martin open hearth furnace that increased productivity and the widening of the range of ores from which steel could be made via the development of the Gilchrist-Thomas basic process (Isard 1948; Hobsbawm 1968) were also examples of the role of the coal, iron, and linked transport industries as generative sectors driving British economic ascent and hegemony. Moreover, these developments further tied Britains internal raw materials peripheries to the process of capital accumulation. In the mid-nineteenth century, the steam engine was also applied to water transport, rejuvenating Britains shipbuilding and shipping industries on the basis of steamships that linked the distant parts of the British empire; shipbuilding was a massive consumer of raw materials that were often transported on steamships themselves (Mathias 1969; Rosenberg and Birdzell 1986). The combined impacts of railroads, steamships, and the raw materials industries on which they depended were to revolutionize industry and finance in Britain (Hobsbawm 1968), becoming generative sectors that drove Britains economic ascent. Britains relatively early industrialization based on low-cost coal was an essential element of Britains rise as a hegemonic core power. This is the essence of the role of generative sectors in economic ascent; what might be termed "virtuous cycles" of linkages between raw materials and transport industries drove capital accumulation in Britain during its phases of economic ascent, based on incorporating first internal and later external peripheries, and during its period of hegemony. >From the perspective of the raw materials periphery in which inland transport systems and ports to export raw materials to a core power such as Great Britain are located, these generative sectors and the transport networks thus developed have very different impacts. Innis (1956) demonstrates the relationships between core demand for raw materials, the transport infrastructure required to satisfy that demand, the financial instruments and agencies required to finance this infrastructure, and the forms of governance necessary to assure the payment of debts incurred to build this transport infrastructure. Innis links Canadas Articles of Confederation directly to the financing of railroads and rebellions against the state to regional competition for transport. The notorious, and eventually abandoned, demand by British capitalists that Latin American nations guarantee a minimum rate-of-profit for railroads built to move raw material and agricultural products to exporting ports made similar demands on these nation-states. More generally, the nation-state, its control over its own territory, and its taxation and borrowing powers appear in many instances as a hegemonically imposed device to assure the huge sunk capital needed to create the globally built environment that Britain needed to channel adequate supplies of matter and energy to its rapidly growing industries (Adams 1982). Nationhood as a desired goal of Spanish colonies in the Americas was to Britain a hegemonically useful ideology. Canada became more autonomous from Britain precisely to allow it to assume the costs and guarantee the loans required to dredge canals, build locks, and construct railroads to allow the large scale export of raw materials to Britain. The construction of railroads in India and Afghanistan required and then molded changes in local states and in the relations between them. In all of these cases, local social relationships were restructured to permit the extraction of raw materials to support capital accumulation in Great Britain. U.S. ECONOMIC ASCENT Britains growing reliance on the agricultural and industrial development of the American colonies, particularly the development of the New England shipbuilding and shipping industries, laid the foundation for the economic ascent of the United States. Abundant U.S. timber supplies, numerous river networks to transport timber to the coast, the transport cost advantages of processing timber into ships at the rivers mouths rather than shipping to English shipyards, and the United States status as a British colony gave U.S. shipbuilding and shipping industries a tremendous competitive advantage in the world-economy. These industries were generative sectors in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centunes, transporting bulk and luxury goods over long distances to Europe, China, and other parts of the world. An important difference between New Englands and the earlier case of Hollands ascents based on shipbuilding was that Hollands hinterland had been relatively densely settled for centuries, and its societies were constituted into political units capable of significant defense and aggression. Thus, bellicose expansion of territory was impossible and wars, particularly land wars, extremely costly. The United States enjoyed a hinterland whose earlier occupants had been severely dislocated and were progressively diminished in number and political strength. Thus, it was ultimately possible in the United States to combine raw materials sources and industrial centers within the same sovereign unit. This pattern would later be replicated via canal and then railroad building, incorporating raw materials rich regions as internal United States peripheries. Perhaps even more important in the early phase of United States economic ascent was that the production of the various bulk goods exported from the United States did not require huge capital outlays. In the EuropeAsia trade, for example, the cargo itself might be worth ten times the value of the boat itself. Such trade was only accessible to highly capitalized merchants. Returns on exports of wood and cotton cargoes or on shipments of ice and granite from the United States might return far less but would pay a return on the shipping itself and were therefore accessible to the smaller capitals required to build and man a ship. United States ships were for a long time smaller than European ships, especially in the Far Eastern trade, again resulting in the reduction of the total capital risked. United States trade to China started with sea otters from the Northwest; huge returns from this trade were derived from transport rather than from the cargo itself. The lack of high-capital barriers to entry and the large returns available to shipping in many export trades from the United States meant that the transport business could be more decentralized, both in terms of location and in terms of ownership. The other peculiar advantage of topography for the United States was the number of rivers flowing out of the Appalachians which could be dammed to produce power. These rivers powered textile and shoe mills, as well as sawmills. Shipbuilding skills and labor and merchant capital were drawn to New England by cheap timber and trade opportunities. Shipbuilding requirements also included a variety of other inputs in addition to timber, including nails, block and tackle, and sails, demand for which led to the creation of linkages to ironworking, sail making, and other industries which supplied these essential inputs to local shipyards. This particularly favorable coincidence of natural conditions with the leading economic sectors in the World-economy of the period (shipping and shipbuilding) and the changing political context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided the foundation for the early economic ascent of the United States. However, United States shipbuilding and shipping industries were made uncompetitive by the large-scale introduction of British steamships that restored Britains control of ocean transport. The rapid expansion of a domestic transportation infrastructure in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century based on the newly developed technology of railroads served to link the United States widely dispersed raw materials and agriculture-producing peripheries to markets and industrial centers in the East (Stover 1961; Chandler 1965; Douglas 1992). Waterways and later railroads led to the incorporation of a wide range of domestic raw materials peripheries, including agricultural products and later coal in Appalachia (Dunaway 1996), copper in Michigan (Leitner 1998) and later Montana and the Southwest, and iron ore in Michigan and Minnesota, among many others. The railroad network was also extended to incorporate Mexican and Canadian raw materials peripheries that supplied a diverse set of raw materials to the United States (Ciccantell 1995). This creation of a low-cost transport network was a central part of the United States rapid industrialization, the key to U.S. ascendance in the world-economy. This incorporation of internal, nearby, and increasingly distant raw materials peripheries to supply United States economic ascent also transformed social relationships in these peripheries, restructuring them to provide labor for extraction, while areas previously populated by indigenous groups or used for fanning and ranching were transformed into sites of extraction. United States involvement in anticolonial movements and other interventions to create and maintain raw materials peripheries and transport systems have provided similar hegemonic benefits; like the Suez Canal before it, the construction of the Panama Canal and the aborted negotiations for a canal in Nicaragua involved the creation or subordination of nation-states. In recent years, the CanadaU.S. Free Trade Agreement and the North American Free Trade Agreement represent attempts to reconstruct U.S. hegemony by restructuring U.S. raw materials supply networks via renewed, lower- cost access to raw materials in Canada and Mexico (Ciccantell 1997). JAPANS ECONOMIC ASCENT Japans ascendance from the periphery to the core of the capitalist world- economy began during the, Meiji period in the last third of the nineteenth century. Confronted by powerful economic and geopolitical rivals in the Pacific region, including the United States, Russia, China, and the European colonial powers (see McDougall [1993] for a discussion of the history of this geopolitical rivalry), industrial development became the basis of Japanese economic and military strategy (see, e.g., Nafziger 1995). Japanese efforts to industrialize and build a strong military paid early dividends in the form of victories in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Sino- Japanese War also gained for Japan its first formal and informal colonies of the modern era, as well as indemnification that helped finance the expansion of the iron and steel industries in Japan (So and Chiu 1995, 8990). Much of Japans success was, however, due to its ability to export light industrial products such as silk and to use the proceeds to import both ships and steel plates for building military and trading ships (Chida and Davies 1990). Producing consumer goods for domestic consumption and export, often by importing technological advances and then improving and adapting them for new uses, has remained an important engine of the Japanese economy. However, even these industries are critically dependent on the availability of raw materials used in their production. Efforts to deepen industrialization in Japan were undertaken during the first third of the twentieth century, most notably through expanding the steel, copper, and shipbuilding industries and through the creation of a domestic aluminum industry. This industrialization drive rapidly depleted Japans limited coal, iron ore, and copper reserves. In order to support the rapid industrialization drive in the years between the First and Second World Wars, the Japanese state and firms sought to gain access to raw materials that were being rapidly depleted in Japan via the first strategy for continuing its ascendance in the world-economy, direct imperial conquest of neighboring resource-rich areas of China, East Asia, and Southeast Asia (So and Chiu 1995). However, this raw materials access strategy brought Japan into direct military conflict with the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China. As historian Marshall (1995, x) has argued, "the United States war with Japan from 1941 to 1945 was primarily a battle for control of Southeast Asias immense mineral and vegetable wealth." The results of this conflict were the defeat of Japan in World War II, the dismemberment of Japans empire, and severe economic and political crises in Japan in the wars aftermath. Japans defeat in World War II foreclosed this ascendance and development strategy. The Japanese steel mills, with the assistance of the Japanese state, devised a model to guarantee long-term secure access to metallurgical coal and iron ore from Australia, the closest nearby politically available source of raw materials for what Japanese and American military planners hoped would prove to be a generative sector for Japans renewed economic ascent. The Japanese steel mills utilized a new model of long-term contracts, at first forced upon them by Australia and the United States, rather than using the wholly-owned foreign direct investment model utilized by U.S. and European steel firms to gain access to foreign raw materials sources. This new model accommodated the resource nationalism of host nations such as Australia, while in the process restructuring worldwide flows of metallurgical coal from mainly domestic movement from captive mines to their steel mill owners to transoceanic trade flows governed by longterm contracts, fundamentally altering the nature and composition of the world metallurgical coal industry. Metallurgical coal was extracted by Australian and transnational firms, which assumed the capital cost and risks of opening up previously unexploited coal deposits, deposits which had not even been explored for earlier because of the tremendous distances between these deposits and potential markets. The coal was transported by Australian state-owned railroads to typically state-owned ports, transferring the capital and risk burden to the raw materials periphery local and national governments. At the state-owned ports, the coal was loaded on Japanese ships for the trip to Japan. The natural availability of metallurgical coal, United States-led diplomatic efforts, and the development of long term contracts are only part of the story; coal had been acquired, but how could millions of tons be moved to the new coastal steelworks in Japan at low enough cost? Two other natural characteristics of the Australian continent, the location of these coal deposits less than 300 kilometers from the eastern coast of Australia and the characteristics of the Australian coast that permitted the construction of large-scale ports for ore carriers made it possible for the Japanese to promote a fundamental restructuring of space and nature via transport technology. The costs of the rail transport infrastructure were borne by the state government (Frost 1984, 4953). The port facilities were typically built and operated by the mining companies themselves (Frost 1984; lEA 1992, 109; Tex Report 1994b, 55255), although some ports were later built by state governments (lEA 1992, 109). This transport pattern allowed Japanese steel mills and shipping firms to take advantage of the tremendous economies of scale available in bulk shipping to dramatically reduce production costs of steel in Japan by capturing all of these benefits for themselves. The key elements of transport as a raw materials access strategy have included research and development on the construction of larger petroleum tankers and bulk carriers and the construction of large shipyards capable of building such large ships. These large ships are owned and operated by Japanese shipping firms associated with the major industrial groups; these Japanese industrial groups control ocean shipping of raw materials on an FOB raw materials exporting port basis so that any reductions in transport costs caused by technological improvements or changes in world shipping market conditions are captured by Japanese importers. The construction of large-scale port and railroad infrastructures in raw materials exporting regions paid for by extractive region governments and/or raw materials transnational corporations is based on longterm contracts for raw materials supply with Japanese importing firms to allow the efficient use of these large ships. Additionally, the Japanese government provides subsidies for the construction of maritime industrial areas in Japanese ports which eliminate the need for internal transshipment in Japan of raw materials imports (Bunker and Ciccantell 1 995a). Japans coastline was ideally suited for this form of linkage and transport- based development (Kosai and Ogino 1984, 6061). Capturing economies of scale in transport requires the construction of massive port systems, capable not only of accommodating large boats, but also of loading them and unloading them quickly enough to prevent incurring the huge costs of tying up the capital-intensive ships too long in harbor. The costs of building such ports have enhanced a feature of all constructed transport systems, that is, that to the extent that exporting and importing systems must be physically compatible to take advantage of cost-saving technologies, importers can tie exporters to their markets by fomenting mutually compatible port systems at both ends of the voyage. These investments in large-scale ports physically and economically tie raw materials exporters to only a very small number of potential customers, almost all of them located in Japan and Western Europe (Sullivan 1981), because the high capital investment in large-scale ports and mines can only be repaid by a high rate of capacity utilization. A high rate of capacity utilization is dependent on the use of large-scale ships in these large-scale ports. This natural and social restruCturing has converted Australian, Brazilian, Canadian, and other raw materials rich regions into raw materials peripheries supplying capital accumulation in Japan. These economies of scale in raw materials extraction and transport are tightly linked to economies of scale in steel production itself. Abegglen and Stalk (1985) argue that these three types of economies of scale, including the construction of new integrated steel mills in Japan from the 1950s to the I 970s that when built were the largest or almost the largest in the world, gave Japan a tremendous competitive advantage in the world steel industry. Because Japan lacked domestic supplies of metallurgical coal and iron ore, Japanese steel firms were able to search out and help develop the lowest-cost suppliers in the world which had access to large-scale ocean shipping potential, resulting in significant raw materials cost advantages for Japanese steel firms (Abegglen and Stalk 1985, 7378). As American and Japanese development planners foresaw in the late 1940s, the steel industry has become the linchpin of a number of linked industries which have complemented one another in a "virtuous cycle" of economic development based on generative sectors in shipbuilding and steel, transforming Japan into the worlds second largest economy and the United States most formidable economic competitor. This pattern of metallurgical coal supply relationships has also been replicated in a number of other raw materials peripheries around the world. While this pattern was well suited to Japanese needs and initially allowed Japan to resume trade with Australia despite Australian antipathy toward Japan, this transfer of capital costs and risks to exporting firms and nations has often proven to be quite deleterious to these firms and nations interests in the long term (Koerner 1993), even though the original idea for these long-term contract arrangements came from the Australians (Priest 1993, 20-25). Similarly, huge investments in railroad and port facilities have generated limited returns for extractive peripheries. In summary, the Japanese steel mills and the Japanese government, with initial support by the existing hegemon, the United States, have succeeded in restructuring the world metallurgical coal industry and other raw materials industries to support Japanese industrialization. This restructuring was a fundamental material and economic pillar of Japans rise as an industrial power and challenger to U.S. economic hegemony, based on these transformations of social relations and society-nature relations in these raw materials peripheries supplying Japanese economic ascent. CONCLUSION: WORLD-SYSTEMS THEORY, THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT, AND THE FUTURE OF THE CAPITALIST WORLD-ECONOMY A great deal of attention has been devoted (at least since the Club of Rome report of the 1 970s) to the proposition that the local and increasingly global environmental destruction and natural resource depletion underlying the capitalist world- economy are leading to a systemic collapse. The process of capital accumulation based on the exploitation of nature has been exceeding the ability of nature to replenish natural products and absorb waste for at least the last several decades. Sooner or later, this relationship between the capitalist world-economy and nature Will destroy the natural bases on which this social system depends. In a matter of years or decades, this line of reasoning argues, the capitalist world-economy will either be transformed into a more ecologically sensitive and humane system or the earths ecosystem will collapse. The analysis of economic ascent and recasting of world-systems theory in terms of the role of material processes lends credence to this line of argument by highlighting the systematic, expanding dependence of the capitalist world-economy on the exploitation of nature. As the historical examples discussed above amply demonstrate, economic ascent and, more broadly, the process of capital accumulation have entailed a continually expanding process of the depredation of nature. However, this seemingly obvious conclusion drastically underestimates the powerful incentives for innovation and adaptation in the capitalist world-economy and the fungibility of the relationship between society and nature. What does this mean? To return to an earlier example, 50 years ago it was completely uneconomic to move coal more than a few hundred miles to generate electricity or to produce steel; today, tens of millions of tons of coal are moved each year from remote, coal-rich peripheries to fuel core industries. A seemingly incontrovertible characteristic of the relationship between society and nature, that centers of coal consumption must be located near the naturally determined locations of coal deposits because of the huge costs of moving this bulky material, had been annihilated by innovations in long-distance ocean transport and land reclamation for industrial use in ocean-accessible coastal areas as part of Japanese strategies for economic ascent. Another trenchant example of innovation and fungibility is the current interest in superconducting materials. While usually discussed in terms of high-technology applications, perhaps the most important large-scale application of superconducting materials would be to permit the long-distance transport of electricity. Innovations over the last 30 years have sharply increased the distance that electricity can be transported. The development of commercial superconducting transmission lines would allow dozens of hydroelectric dams in the Amazon or nuclear power plants in lightly populated Arctic regions to supply electricity throughout North America and coal-fired or nuclear power plants in Siberia to supply Japan and Europe, relocating the environmental costs and consequences of core capital accumulation to these remote peripheries. These potential innovations and fungibility represent core powers and finns efforts to maintain or enhance their positions in the capitalist world-economy by reshaping the relationship between society and nature, just as does the emerging traffic in toxic waste exports to Africa to reduce the costs of disposing of core wastes by transferring the burden to the periphery (Frey 1998). Free trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO that tighten the links of incorporation between raw materials and low-cost labor peripheries and core powers are another example of restructuring social relations and reshaping the relationship with nature in support of core capital accumulation. High-technology industries, service sectors, and financial machinations are obviously central components of the capitalist world-economy; what is less obvious (in what is often mistakenly labeled as a "postindustrial" or "dematerializing" or "information economy") are the material foundations on which this world-system is built. The recasting of world-systems theory to highlight its material and environmental bases via the new historical materialism provides a framework for understanding the distinctiveness of the capitalist world-economy in comparison with earlier periods, the material foundations of core economic ascent and its obverse, the incorporation of peripheral regions and peoples in support of core capital accumulation, and the possible future of the capitalist world-economy as we near the twenty-first century. REFERENCES Abegglen, James, and George Stalk. 1985. Kaisha, The Japanese Corporation. New York: Basic Books. Adams, R. 1982. Paradoxical Harvest: Energy and Explanation in British History 1870 1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Albion, R. 1926. Forests and Sea Power: The Timber Problem of the Royal Navy, 1652 1862. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ashton, Thomas Southcliffe. 1964. The Industrial Revolution, 17601830. New York: Ox ford University Press. Harbour, V. 1950. Capitalism in Amsterdam in the Seventeenth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boxer, C. 1965. The Dutch Seaborne Empire: 1600-1800. New York: Knopf. Hunker, Stephen G. 1985. Underdeveloping the Amazon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bunker, Stephen G., and Paul Ciccantell. l995a. A Rising Hegemon and Raw Materials Access: Japan in the Post-World War II Era. Journal of World-Systems Research 1(10): 131. Bunker, Stephen G., and Paul Ciccantell. 1995b. Restructuring Space, Time, and Competi live Advantage in the World-Economy: Japan and Raw Materials Transport After World War II. In A New World Order? Global Transformations in the Late Twentieth Century ed. D. Smith and 1. Borocz. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Chandler, Alfred, ed. 1965. The Railroads: The Nations First Big Business. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World. Chida, Tomohei, and Peter Davies. 1990. The Japanese Shipping and Shipbuilding Indus tries. London: Athlone Press. Ciccantell, P 1995. Integrating the NAFTA Market: Raw Materials and Transport Indus tries. Paper presented at the meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, Wash ington, DC, September 2830. Ciccantell, P. 1997. NAFTA and the Reconstruction of U.S. Hegemony: The Raw Materials Foundations of Economic Competitiveness. Presented at the Annual Meeting of the In ternational Studies Association, Toronto, Canada, March. Cipolla, C. 1965. Guns and Sails in the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700. New York: Pantheon Books. Coatsworth, John. 1981. Growth Against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Davis, Ralph 1973. The Rise of the Atlantic Economies. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Douglas, George. 1992. All Aboard! The Railroad in American Life. New York: Paragon House. Dunaway, Wilma. 1996. The First American Frontier. Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Duncan, J. 1932. Public and Private Operation of Railways in Brazil. New York: Columbia University Press. Frey, Scott. 1998. The Hazardous Waste Stream in the World-System. In Space and Transport in the World-System, ed. Paul S. Ciccantell and Stephen G. Bunker, 84103. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Frost, D. 1984. The Revitalisation of Queensland Railways Through Export Coal Shipments. Journal of Transport History 5(2): 4756. Hobsbawm, E. 1968. The Age of Industry. New York: Scribners. linus, H. 1956. Essays in Canadian Economic History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. International Energy Agency (lEA). 1992. Coal Information. Paris: International Energy Agency. Isard, W. 1948. Some Locational Factors in the Iron and Steel Industry since the Early Nineteenth Century. Journal of Political Economy 65(3): 20317. Koerner, Richard. 1993. The Behaviour of Pacific Metallurgical Coal Markets: The Impact of Japans Acquisition Strategy on Market Price. Resources Policy (March): 6679. Kosai, Yutaka, and Yoshitaro Ogino. 1984. The Contemporary Japanese Economy. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Leitner, Jonathan. 1998. Raw Materials Transport and Regional Underdevelopment: Upper Michigans Copper Country. In Space and Transport in the World-System, ed. Paul S. Ciccantell and Stephen G. Bunker, 12551. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Lewis, Cohn. 1983. British Railways in Argentina 18571 914. London: Athlone Press. Marshall, Jonathan. 1995. To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mathias, Peter. 1969. The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain 1700 1914. New York: Scribners. McDougall, Walter. 1993. Let the Sea Make a Noise: Four Hundred Years of Cataclysm, Conquest, War and Folly in the North Pacific. New York: Avon Books. Nafziger, F. Wayne. 1995. Learning from the Japanese: Japans Pre-War Development and the Third World. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Nef, J. 1964. The Conquest of the Material World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Packenham, Thomas. 1991. The Scramble for Africa. New York: Random House. Priest, R. Tyler. 1993. Coal: Australia 1946-1960. University of Wisconsin-Madison. Unpublished manuscript. Rosenberg, Nathan, and L.E. Birdzell. 1986. How the West Grew Rich: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World. New York: Basic Books. So, Alvin, and Stephen Chiu. 1995. East Asia and the World Economy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Stover, John. 1961. American Railroads. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sullivan, A. 1981. Foreign Coal Ports Expand Capacity. Coal Age (May): 11015. Tex Report. 1994a. Iron Ore Manual 1993-94. Tokyo: Tex Report Company. Tex Report. l994b. 1994 Coal Manual. Tokyo: Tex Report Company. Wallerstein, I. 1982. Dutch Hegemony in the Seventeenth-Century World Economy. In Dutch Capitalism and World Capitalism, ed. Maurice Aymard, 93146. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Weber, Max. 1981. General Economic History. New York: Free Press. Wilson, Charles. 1973. Transport as a Factor in the History of Economic Development. Journal of European Economic History 2(2): 320-37. _______________________________________________ Crashlist website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
