The Vortex

For the past decade, I have taught an introductory undergraduate course on the environmental history of the modern world. Built on critical historical engagement with the concept of the Anthropocene, the course attempts to make sense of how and why humans—or specific groups of humans—have had such powerful and accelerating impacts on the more-than-human world over the past half millennium. The course has been a challenge to teach. Trained as a US historian, I have had to acquaint myself with the environmental histories and historiographies of other parts of the world, and, along with my students, I have had to try to distill the central causal forces that explain the humanization of the Earth during the early modern and modern periods. So it was with some excitement that I greeted Frank Uekötter's ambitious new synthesis, The Vortex: An Environmental History of the Modern World. Other scholars—John McNeill, John Richards, J. Donald Hughes, Clive Ponting, and Joachim Radkau, to name a few—have attempted such a task in whole or in part, but no one has approached the task in quite the way that Uekötter does.The Vortex is a big book, with 650 pages of text and another small book's worth of notes. It is divided into eight thematic parts and forty chapters, with an introduction, an interlude, a coda, and a conclusion. The overarching interpretive framework is embodied by Uekötter's titular metaphor: the environmental history of the modern world, he suggests, is best understood as a vortex. As Uekötter explains, the vortex “highlights the interconnectedness and dynamism of the modern world” (8). It aggregates a set of material flows, resource appetites, and environmental consequences that are created by humans, even as it suggests the power of more-than-human forces to shape history in ultimately disorientating ways. The vortex emphasizes turbulence and chaos, as well as the difficulty of obtaining a universal perspective on the accelerating forces that are sweeping us along and pulling us into the spiral. The vortex metaphor leads Uekötter to a narrative that is complex, entangled, and nonlinear, and one that eschews simple moral lessons. “This book,” Uekötter admits, “grew out of a sense of disaffection with world histories where the narrative was oozing order” (14).Instead of offering an orderly synthetic narrative, Uekötter has provided forty well-chosen case studies (plus two bonus case studies in the interlude and coda) that each cover specific topics and themes. Examples include sugar, shipbreaking, guano, whaling, cane toads, Saudi Arabia, the water closet, air conditioning, cholera, the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, Eucalyptus, the Aswan Dam, the Pontine Marshes, the Autobahn, DDT, and plastic bags. The chapters themselves are often captivating, and they generally work well as “exemplary explorations of general challenges” (20). They are also built on an extraordinary depth of reading and, in some cases, original research. In its breadth of coverage and mastery of many topics, The Vortex is a major achievement. The chapters themselves are concisely written in a lively fashion, with Uekötter's contrariness and snark adding welcome character to the stories he tells. But these case studies are, to use an environmental metaphor, often more trees than forest; while Uekötter relentlessly cross-references his chapters, larger lessons are slow to emerge.Despite the book's disordered and nonlinear qualities, Uekötter does provide some guidance for navigating it and grasping its broader conclusions. In his introduction, he offers readers twenty-one different thematic paths through the book, each of which would involve reading different groups of chapters nonsequentially. The book's eight parts are also thematic, each with a short introduction that explains the five-chapter clusters that follow (though, frankly, I often struggled to understand the organizational logic of the various parts). And in his “Inconclusive Conclusion,” Uekötter boils down his “vortexian history” into five big trends: the Great Need (the modern hunger for more material goods), the Great Externalization (the skill with which modern societies have externalized environmental impacts), the Great Reckoning (how modern societies have come to understand the environmental implications of their actions), the Great Regulation (how modern humans have attempted to manage the vortex and respond to growing knowledge about their environmental impacts), and the Great Narrowing (the shrinking range of options for dealing with our environmental predicament). These summary concepts are useful to a degree, and they are presumably meant to echo other “great” trends historians have used to explain aspects of global environmental history, such as Kenneth Pomeranz's “Great Divergence” and John McNeill’s and Will Steffen's “Great Acceleration.” But they might have been better deployed at the beginning of the book—or, indeed, throughout the book—rather than as an afterthought.In the end, The Vortex seems more useful as a reference work than as a textbook or new master narrative. I will certainly return to its rich case studies as I continue to develop my global environmental history course. But precisely because Uekötter sees modern global environmental history as “a big mess” (611), and gives us a narrative to match, The Vortex did less to advance my broad conceptual understanding of the engines driving global environmental change than I hoped it would. The Vortex, Uekötter explains in his introduction, “does not come together at all, and that is precisely the point” (7)

Economic history · Environmental ethics · Environmental history · Geography · Meteorology · Vortex · American Environmental and Regional History · History · Philosophy