Edited excerpts of an email interview with Shantanu Nandan Sharma:
How serious is the crisis of climate change today if we try to understand it from historical perspectives — of about 5,000 years of written history or even beyond?
Why should we frame historical perspectives in human terms? We will get a very different answer if we do not. For almost all the earth’s existence, going back 4.5 billion years, the atmospheric conditions would not have supported human life at all. We are in a ‘goldilocks zone’ that is perfect for our species.
So in the grand scheme of things, if that changes, for example because carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere become overwhelming, or because global warming leads to cascading biodiversity loss, then the world we live in suddenly looks a lot more precarious. Or, at least, it does for us: some other organisms, animals, plants, bacteria, fungi and protists can do well under different conditions. So in the grand scheme, this is only a crisis if you are a human.
But if we want to separate the last 5,000 years or so, then things still look worrying. There are more people alive on this planet than at any time in history. That creates wonders: the best cricketers we have ever seen; huge diversity of food, literature, culture and so on. But it also creates vulnerability: the more of us there are, the less needs to go wrong to tip millions, perhaps billions, of people into trouble. That, of course, is what we learned from one bat in Wuhan four years ago — a single moment brought the world to its knees. So a historian might look at climate as a key factor that might not serve as the catalyst to dramatic change in the decades ahead, but as a complicator that will aggravate existing problems and make them worse.
How complex were the interlinkages of trade and climate in the past compared with today?
Absolutely critical. But it is important to remember that trade is a very broad and general term, and hides very easily the fact that new materials, substances, resources can suddenly become important. In 1900, few had any idea how important oil would become — yet in some ways the story of the control of oil resources was not just one of the stories of the next 100 years, but the most important of the 20th century. The location of oil reserves was central to the division of the Middle East at the end of World War I. It drove Japanese and German military planning in World War II. And it was fundamental to Iran, Iraq, the rise of the Middle East and the orientation of India especially after Independence. It is easy to forget that the location of the world’s great hydrocarbon basins of oil and gas was formed by past climate changes: so all of this is deeply linked.
Climate in real time too has been critical: the strength of monsoon winds and rains, the impact of long-term weather patterns on crop productions, the incidences of chronic food shortage and famine are all pinned on how we live, connect and trade with each other. So too, by the way, is the spread of disease: pandemics do not occur because pathogens spread; they occur because we move around and because we move things around for trade. In my book, I also write about the spread of animals into new ecosystems because they hitch a ride on shipments of goods. Some, like the emerald ash borer, have done damage to millions of trees in the US, and might cause hundreds of billions of dollars of costs to tree loss — not to mention the ecosystems that will change as a result.Do you foresee climate change leading to more frequent cross-border trade wars now than in the past?
I think political leaders are perfectly capable of starting crossborder wars without needing to blame climate, trade or anything else. Conflicts often start as opportunistic attempts to take advantage of the weaknesses — real or imagined — of neighbours and rivals; or to deflect from problems closer to home. Human error, arrogance and misjudgement have been a key part of history and I do not expect that to change in the future. What climate change can and will do is put pressure on decisionmaking; as a result, it will serve to raise the stakes because wars will seem to offer shortterm ways of solving problems. Unfortunately, history will tell you that they do the opposite, and almost always make things worse, rather than better. But yes: compression of food and water availability; rising healthcare costs because of heat-related illnesses; falling productivity as temperatures rise; and the challenge of developing a clean energy revolution will put pressure on political systems. I would assume it will put pressure on the concept of democracy too.
What are the major instances in global history when traders and explorers triumphed and remained resilient to climate shocks, and also examples where they stumbled?
The triumphs of traders and explorers are of course not shared out equally. Those who set out to find the best commercial opportunities do not share the fruits easily; and explorers, likewise, see conquest as a reflection of their own glories, rather than of others – understandably so, in some ways. How I see it, however, is that the expansion of all empires – Roman, Chola, Mughal, Ming, British, you name it – is always driven by the drumbeat of ecological colonisation: traders and rulers want to gain access to natural resources at the lowest possible price, and to use those benefits to cement their own privileges and position at home. Expanding horizons is closely linked therefore to gaining control of minerals, foods, labour and all kinds of things that can then add power to the imperial engine.
In that sense, the issue is not so much about climate shocks as the sustainability of economic extraction and as to when that model topples over. When empires exhaust resources, or find it harder and more expensive to extract them, they fall away. That applies to any number of examples – such as the British in India. But then there are other cases of poor decision making, often involving poor decisions around expenditure: that could be said about the Mughals, for example, or the Ming in China, or the Spanish in Europe in the 17 century, all of whom saw their moments of financial bonanza and immense wealth go up in a puff of smoke when costs suddenly rose and revenues fell. In each case, the house of cards came tumbling down. As it so happens, climate shocks were important in all three cases.
Don’t you think new climate incentives (for domestic players) and climate tariff (for imports) as being evolved by advanced economies will distort global trade and in a way act as an antithesis to globalisation itself?
Of course, I welcome all and every way in mitigating not just global warming but ecological degradation. I am fairly agnostic about the merits of the market, of incentives, of regulation and of innovation: all can and will play important roles and I do not see that they need to be in conflict with each other. Likewise, I do not have a problem with the concept of climate tariffs nor even their roll-out: the question is simply about pricing and agreeing what these are worth – which does not seem to me the most complicated question facing humankind at the moment.
I think too that globalisation needs to have some time off from being used as a negative term. There are so many ways in which our exchanges of goods, ideas and information make us all better and more interesting people; it has been hi-jacked as a term of abuse and as a negative. That is not because exchange is bad or negative, but because governments have not understood the consequences of their actions and have not put institutions in place to protect from the excesses of capitalism.
If environmental agencies do not function properly or punish those who cut corners, if big businesses are able to lobby the right people to gain concessions, if the rule of law does not deliver justice to rich and poor equally, then of course things go wrong. As it so happens, these questions deeply concerned leaders in the past, from Hammurabi 4000 years ago to Ashoka to name just two. It is the erosion of institutions, not least in democratic states that worries me most.
What are the lessons to be learnt from history on how to tackle climate change, and whether and how trade and climate can thrive together?
Ah – well now you are asking me to be a politician and to provide solutions ! I am a mere historian, and a humble and modest one at that. What I would say in my professional capacity is that the key lessons to learn from the past are about vulnerability and risk on the one hand, and resilience on the other. Big things fail when little things go wrong: it did not take much for the Roman Empire to fall, or for the English to come from thousands of miles away in very small numbers and to become the masters of much of India.
I’d be thinking about these sorts of examples when considering the world of today and tomorrow: what are the problems we are likely to face; when and where are they likely to surface; how should we prepare for them now, rather than be taken by surprise. And who solved those problems well in the past. All the answers, of course, can be found in my book!