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  JOURNAL OF WORLD-SYSTEMS RESEARCH 
 

 

 

Periodizing the Capitalocene as Polemocene 
Militarized Ecologies ofAccumulation in the Long Sixteenth Century  
 
John Peter Antonacci 
SUNY Binghamton 
jantona2@binghamton.edu   

 

 

 

 

  

Abstract 

Lewis and Maslin explore geological markers for the beginning of the “Anthropocene”-beginning, in their 

periodization, in either 1492 (naming the birth of capitalism as the cause of planetary crisis) or 1945 (naming elite-

driven militarization as its cause). In this essay, I argue for a synthesis of these two dynamics, locating both the 

birth of capitalism and a transformation of elite-driven militarization in the conquest of the New World during the 

Long Sixteenth Century. As such, I propose narrating planetary history through a “capitalocene as polemocene,” 

“the age of capital as an age of war” framework. 

 

 

Keywords:  History of Capitalism, Military History, Capitalocene, New World, World-Ecology 

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In 2000, Crutzen and Stoermer proposed the Anthropocene, or the “age of man,” as a novel unit 

of geological time; aiming to locate, periodize, and name, in Earth’s stratigraphic record, 

humanity’s influence on the global environment (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Geological 

historians have since debated the periodization. Where should we “start the clock” on human- 

induced, global environmental change? 5,000-10,000 years ago, humans developed settled 

agriculture (see Balter 2013; Foley 2013; Ruddiman 2013). 10,000-50,000 years ago, a massive 

Megafauna extinction resulted in four percent of all mammalian life of Earth dying, leaving a fossil 

record behind (see Baronsky 2013; Gradstein et al 2012). 

Or should we begin with the Industrial Revolution, as Crutzen and Stoermer’s influential 

periodization proposes? In this article, an alternative periodization of global environmental change 

will be articulated. Rather than thinking through global environmental change through the lens of 

the Anthropos, or man, here the relations of war-making and capital accumulation will be centered 

through an exploration of the idea of a polemocene, or an age of war. I conceptualize the 

polemocene in reference to the ancient Greek mythological “Polemos,” a daemon embodying war. 

The article will argue that the global environmental change/ecological crisis that the Anthropocene 

aims to theorize stems from capital’s need to militarize ecologies towards endless accumulation. 

Contributing to the capitalocene/necrocene conversation (McBrein 2016; Moore 2016), 

which frames the age of capital as an age of death, the polemocene is here proposed as a mediating 

force between the two. Capitalogenic global environmental change raises the specter of global 

mass-extinction, as does the threat of nuclear total war through “mutually assured destruction.” 

The accumulation of capital and the production of death are both cause and consequence of the 

waging of warfare. 

The birth of capitalism following the Columbian invasions of 1492, the sixteenth century’s 

“Great Dying” of human and extra-human natures of the Americas, and the export of the “Military 

Revolution” to the colonies in the Second Sixteenth Century (~1550) form an interconnected, 

mutually reinforcing historical whole. The world-history of capitalism’s trajectory, from its birth 

in the Long Sixteenth Century to the present, has been punctuated by frequent and recurrent 

warfare. To think through this formation, of capitalism’s restructuring of ecologies through 

militarization towards extinction, is to speak to the crisis of the contemporary conjuncture. The 

capitalocene, the age of capital, should thus be understood as a polemocene, an age of war. 

 

The Stakes of Periodizing the Anthropocene 

To begin, I would like to start by thinking along with Lewis and Maslin (2015) who found two 

compelling periodizations for the start of the Anthropocene in geological-historical terms (i.e., in 

terms of the existence of so-called “golden spikes” in the Earth’s surface); either beginning with 

the new world genocides associated with the arrival of Columbus in Hispaniola (dubbed the “Orbis 

Spike”) and along with it, in their words “a swift, ongoing, radical reorganization of life on Earth 

without geological precedent” (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 174) or, on the other hand, the deployment 



 

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of nuclear weapons in the middle of the twentieth century, dubbed “the great acceleration” (Lewis 

and Maslin 2015: 176). 

 Lewis and Maslin were ultimately faced with a choice between the two “golden spikes,” and 

thus between two periodizations for the beginning of the Anthropocene. This is surely an indicator, 

as Lewontins and Levins (1998) remind us, that the natural and social sciences are not so different 

after all. They argue that, despite our preconceived notion that the natural sciences are somehow 

more “objective” than the social sciences, the performing of natural science is laden with what we 

might call “subjective” criteria:  

 
The formulating of a problem, the definition of relevant variables, the choices of 
what to include or leave out, the decision as to what is an acceptable kind of answer, 
the interpretation of results, the rules of validation, and the linking of conclusions 
from different studies into a theoretical framework are all the results of social 
processes. (Lewontin and Levins 1998: 86)  

 

 Which marker were Lewis and Maslin (2015) to choose? Periodizing the beginning of the 

Anthropocene in relation to the Orbis Spike “implies that colonialism, global trade, and coal” (in 

other words, the birth of capitalism, as their citation of Wallerstein betrays) “brought about the 

Anthropocene” (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 175). Periodizing it in relation to the bomb spike “tells 

the story of an elite-driven technological development that threatens planet-wide destruction” 

(Lewis and Maslin 2015: 177).  

 Geological historians are confronted with a multitude of discipline-specific criteria, socially 

determined by their field,1 in identifying and naming a stratigraphic layer of the Earth’s surface as 

an indicator of geological eras. Those of us doing what I, and the world-ecology perspective call 

“geohistory,” or the narration of geological and geographical histories, are not so constrained. We 

are not compelled, as geologists are, to choose a singular historical moment, relation, or process 

that defines a geohistorical epoch. We might instead attempt to see moments, processes, and 

relations as interconnected, and narrate them as such. Deploying a synthetic narration, which can 

conceptually link and historicize both the birth of capitalism and the transformation of elite-driven 

militarization (the Military Revolution) in the sixteenth century, is exactly what the capitalocene-

as-polemocene—the age of capital as an age of war—frame promises.  

 The periodization of the Anthropocene is of immediate relevance to scholars who wish to 

understand the driving forces of contemporary ecological crises. How we understand the origins, 

evolution, and conditions of crises can speak volumes to the ways in which we think about solving 

them. Understanding from where and when dynamics that drive the ecological crisis—which 

characterize the contemporary conjuncture—begin is intimately connected to the question of how 

humans, as an environment-making species, produce their environments in historically specific 

ways (Lewontin and Levins 1997; Marx and Engels [1932] 1970). 

 
1 See Bourdieu (1993) for my understanding of “the field,” in this case, of geography/geology, which are embedded 

in wider “fields of power,” determining, as Lewontin and Levins (1998) articulate, what kinds of questions, 

conceptualizations, and answers are appropriate to ask/answer. 



 

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 The assertation that humans make environments raises a critical line of questioning: do all 

humans have an equal, collective responsibility for the production of ecological crisis? This is the 

narrative offered by the “Anthropocene,” the “age of man;” that qualities inherent to “human 

nature” drive a collective “humanity” to destroy their global environments. This is a thoroughly 

substantialist reading of the problem, that “humans as things” cause ecological crisis. It is simply 

“in our nature” to “destroy nature.” We should instead attempt to think relationally (Bourdieu and 

Wacquant 1998) about the current conjuncture: what are the processes and relationships that drive, 

for instance, climate change or ocean and soil toxification? This is precisely what Lewis and 

Maslin (2015) offer us. Rather than placing blame for human-induced global environmental 

change on the shoulders of a collective, abstract substance called “humanity,” their quote offered 

above highlights the centrality of (in their conceptualization) either capital accumulation or elite-

driven militarization as relations and processes that inaugurate global ecological change. But we 

can go further still.  

 

Capitalocene and Polemocene, or Capitalism as Polemocene 

The Anthropocene as concept has been radically de-constructed. Somewhere between 80 to 90 

different nomenclatures articulating geohistorical alternatives to the “Anthropocene” have been 

suggested by scholars (Chwałczyk 2020). These nomenclatures, such as the capitalocene (Moore 

2015, 2016, 2017a, 2017b), cthulucene and plantationocene (Haraway 2016), and so on each 

articulate geological time by framing and narrating the centrality of various processes and 

relationships that have driven change over time and across space.  

 These interventions are incredibly important. Many of them offer alternative geohistories to 

the one implicitly found in the notion of the Anthropocene; that an abstract and undifferentiated 

“humanity” has collective responsibility for the climate crisis (Moore 2019). Never mind that 

some, for instance, have profited immensely from the radical reorganization of life since the dawn 

of modernity, that relations of power and domination between humans might have something to 

do with the problem. I argue that we now need to engage in a radical synthesis and re-construction 

of these important alternatives.  

 The reconstructive synthesis in question turns on how might we connect these two geological-

historical moments offered by Lewis and Maslin (2015), these two periodizations, which each 

propose salient points. In other words, how do we put into conversation the world-historical 

centrality of the accumulation of capital and the world-historical centrality of elite-driven 

militarization, and connect these two moments to the dynamics of ecological crisis? How can we 

see, think, and narrate the capitalocene-as-polemocene? 

 Moore (2019) proposes narrating the geohistory of modernity in and through an analytical 

focus on capitalism’s drive towards endless accumulation. His periodization, the capitalocene, 

articulates capitalism as a world-ecology of power, profit, and (re)production in the web of life; 

that the origins of the crisis we are trying to name stems from capitalism’s need to mobilize power 



 

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(at once symbolic and material) to appropriate natures as cheaply as possible towards the endless 

accumulation of capital. To quote:  

 
The great innovation of capitalism, from its origins after 1492, was to invent the 
practice of appropriating nature. That nature was not just an idea but a territorial 
and cultural reality that encaged and policed women, colonized peoples, and extra-
human webs of life. Because webs of life resist the standardization, acceleration, 
and homogenization of capitalist profit-maximization, capitalism has never been 
narrowly economic; cultural domination and political force have made possible the 
capitalogenic devastation of human and extra-human natures at every turn. (Moore 
2019: 53. Emphasis added) 

 

 Bonneuil and Baptiste-Frezzoz (2017), on the other hand, propose the “polemocene,” or the 

“age of war,” as one of a number of nomenclatures that can be used to think through the kinds of 

synthetic re-construction proposed here.2 Taken as a whole, their book The Shock of the 

Anthropocene is meant to probe some connections that can be made between different 

geohistorical narrations of the Anthropocene. But in their treatment of the capitalocene, they seem 

to miss out on an opportunity to do just this, writing “The last three centuries have been 

characterized by an extraordinary accumulation of capital: despite destructive wars, this grew by 

a factor of 134 between 1700 and 2008” (Bonneuil and Baptiste Frezzoz 2017: 222). Despite 

destructive wars? It will be my aim in this article to articulate an alternative formulation, that 

capital accumulation has commenced so spectacularly because of destructive wars.  

 Lewis and Maslin ultimately decided to periodize the beginning of the Anthropocene with 

the Orbis Spike (Lewis and Maslin 2015). However, if we could historicize a transformation of 

the dynamics behind “elite-driven militarization” to the Long Sixteenth Century, making the 

connection between war-making, environment-making, and capital accumulation in reference to 

the Orbis Spike and the Great Dying post-1492 (Koch et al 2019), we would be compelled to 

consider the history of the emergence of capitalism as a history of militarized accumulation in the 

web of life. This reformulation would frame the emergence of capitalism in terms of the 

development of novel strategies of environment-making, in which ruling classes would set in 

motion the militarization of planetary natures—towards the end of endless accumulation—in the 

Long Sixteenth Century.  

 In arguing that the capitalocene is a polemocene, I’d like to focus, for the purposes of this 

article, on capitalism’s fundamental reliance on the use of military force to achieve its end: endless 

accumulation. Scholarship dealing with the relationship between war-making and capital 

accumulation typically highlight what we might call the “rising organic composition” of capital in 

 
2 It is important to note that my conceptualization of the polemocene differs from the one used by Bonneuil and 

Baptiste-Frezzoz. Their conceptualization comes in Ch. 11, “Polemocene: Resisting the Deterioration of the Earth 

since 1750” in The Shock of the Anthropocene. In their conceptualization, the polemocene, drawing on a contemporary 

formulation of polemics, the act of debate or dispute, is an age of resistance to ecological breakdown. What I have in 

mind in my conceptualization is something closer to their conceptualization of the Thanatocene Ch. 6 “Thanatocene: 

Power and Ecocide,” an “age of death” narrated through a focus on power. My focus is thus, for the purposes of this 

article, more narrowly engaged with capitalist war as an exercise of power. 



 

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the history of the fighting of war; that is, they focus on the tendency for the fighting of modern 

wars to become ever more highly capital-intensive (see for example Parker 1976, 1991; Tilly 

1991). This is an incredibly important body of literature, highlighting the role of the state in the 

creation of standing armies, the development of bureaucracies, and the associated invention of 

public debt as a means of “primitive accumulation” (Marx [1867] 1990: 915).   

 I’m proposing to focus on a related relation, on the centrality of warfare’s ability to deliver 

cheap inputs (food, labor, raw materials, and energy) to capital (Moore 2015). My concerns here 

are thus more in line with Christian Parenti’s (2016), who argues that the power of the state over 

territory (dubbed “geopower”) is a fundamental, historical precondition for the delivery of “cheap 

natures” to capital, and thus to the process of the accumulation of capital (Parenti 2016. See also 

Parenti 2020). He understands geopower as “the statecraft and technologies of power that make 

territory and the biosphere accessible, legible, knowable, and utilizable.… I am less concerned 

with the “writing” of the landscape and more concerned with geopower’s actual technologies and 

practices of measurement, regulation, and resource management” (Parenti 2016: 171). In line with 

Parenti, I argue that capitalist warfare (as a mode of deployment of geopower, situated within and 

producing ecologies) mobilizes both ethico-political/symbolic power (cultural domination, 

ideology, “civilizing” logics) and material power (force/warfare) towards capital accumulation, 

and that the two are intimately connected. 

 We typically think of the fighting of war, of war-making, as a concrete historical process: 

battles are fought, places are invaded, people are killed. Here, when we consider warfare as 

process, we can locate the “material moment” of capitalist warfare, that “cheap natures…essential 

to capitalist accumulation…are found upon the surface of the earth” (Parenti 2015: 167), and that 

territories conquered can offer capital reserves of cheap natures. I’d like to suggest the idea that 

war-making can also be understood as a project, as a “governing conceit” (Moore 2015: 2), a claim 

by the war-makers and capital accumulators that they can do with Nature what they please. 

Crucially, from the world-ecology perspective, the appropriation and delivery of cheap circulating 

capital requires the deployment of “real abstractions” (Moore 2015; Toscano 2008), ideas with 

operative power and force in the material world. This is the ethico-political/symbolic moment of 

capitalist warfare. War-making as project, in this formulation, is intimately connected to 

capitalism’s cheap nature strategies, that human and extra-human natures need to be identified, 

measured, and controlled, they need to be “seen” cheaply.  

 What would identifying war-making as a project and process simultaneously entail? We can 

start to frame the capitalocene as a polemocene, the age of capital as an age of war, if we locate 

historically the logics, the real abstractions, that orient and animate what we might call “militarized 

accumulation.” I’d like to suggest that militarized accumulation rests on both temporal and spatial 

logics. Temporally, militarized accumulation rests on the deployment of the logic of “Death from 

Above” as an historical project. Spatially, militarized accumulation depends on the logic of the 

“Labor Camp.”  

 Spatially, capitalism, from Hispaniola (the Orbis Spike) to Hiroshima (the Great 

Acceleration), depends on the mobilization of geopower on the part of the state to produce abstract 



 

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social nature. Moore writes “If geopower enforces Nature, it also renders Nature a motor of 

accumulation through the production of abstract social nature…the substance of abstract social 

nature is space” (Moore 2017a: 245). For Moore, geo-managerialism as a specific form of 

geopower “entails the restructuring of knowledge as a force of production” (Moore 2017a: 245). 

Geo-managerialism’s task is to identify, quantify, and map; and make legible to capital reserves 

of cheap natures found upon the surface of the earth. Here, revolutions in cartography, navigation, 

and surveying3 have been historically central to the process of accumulation by appropriation.  

 Temporally, capitalism rests on the production of abstract social labor. Time is the central 

content of abstract social labor. Socially necessary labor time regulates the value of commodities: 

the amount of average labor-time put into the production of a given commodity determines its 

value. For this to work, labor time must be reduced to an abstraction so it can be quantified, 

regulated, and controlled (Marx [1894] 1993). 

 Abstract social labor allows capital to treat labor as disposable, homogenized labor-time as 

interchangeable and replaceable. It thus allows capital to disregard, to abstract, the complex and 

sensuous life-making activities necessary for the (re)production of labor power. We recognize that 

capital cares not for the life and life-making regimes of the worker, that the only consideration 

capital has for the (re)production of the laborer is reduced to the paying of the wage.  

 What I think is underappreciated is the “productive” (productive, that is, for capital) role that 

death and death-making play in the accumulation of capital. McBrien’s (2016) concept of the 

capitalocene as necrocene helps us to bridge this lacuna. Arguing powerfully that “Capital was 

born from extinction, and from capital, extinction has flowed” (McBrein 2016: 116), McBrein 

argues that capital’s power over human and extra-human natures turns on its ability to transform 

ecocide and genocide into a means of profit-making. 

 He argues that the necrocene is the contradictory “shadow double” (McBrein 2016: 117) of 

the capitalocene; that capitalism’s drive towards endless accumulation (which itself represents the 

continual production, reproduction, and transformation of seeable, knowable, and controllable 

webs of life) depends on capital’s production of what we might call “regimes of death-making.” 

McBrien here focuses on a particular relation: that scientific revolutions under capitalism emerge 

as ways of controlling and managing death-making towards profit.  

 My argument here is meant to serve as a sympathetic corollary to McBrien’s. If we can 

periodize the capitalocene as necrocene through the narration of scientific revolutions in the 

production and management of ecologies of death to the benefit of capital, it ought to follow that 

we can periodize the capitalocene as polemocene through a narration of the ways that military 

revolutions (and, as treated here, “the” Military Revolution between 1530-1710 in particular) 

produced and were produced by the production of militarized ecologies geared towards endless 

accumulation. To do so, we now turn to the Long Sixteenth Century, to examine the origins of a 

transformation in “elite-driven militarization” within the capitalist world-ecology of power, profit, 

 
3 See Mukerji (1984) and Crosby (1989) for discussions on the importance of changes in European cognition of the 

world, of “nature” that came in the sixteenth century. 



 

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and (re)production in the web of life-setting in motion the militarization of ecologies towards the 

accumulation of capital. 

 

The Military Revolution and the Origins of Capitalism: The Army4 as Capitalist Technics 

The Long Sixteenth Century (~1450-1640) (Wallerstein [1974] 2011) is considered by many in 

the world-systems tradition to be the period in which a “vast but weak” capitalism developed. It 

was also an epoch characterized by endless warfare, rapid militarization, the incorporation of vast 

swathes of territory into the modern world-system, and the emergence of the Westphalia system 

of states. Wallerstein offers the following scheme of capitalism’s emergence and subsequent 

spatiotemporal expansion: “My own view is that the genesis of [historical capitalism] is located in 

late-fifteenth-century Europe, that the system expanded in space over time to cover the globe by 

the late-nineteenth-century, and that it still today covers the globe” (Wallerstein [1983] 2011: 19). 

As Lewis and Maslin (2015) remind us, the Long Sixteenth Century was also a period in which 

global environments changed dramatically.  

 To see the capitalocene as polemocene, we need to engage with these historiographies 

simultaneously. Why was the militarization of accumulation so pivotal to capitalism-as-ecology’s 

origins, so central to its world-historical project and process, and what can a recognition of 

militarized accumulation tell us about the contemporary conjuncture?  

 Military revolutions, which punctuate the history of capitalism5,  should be understood as 

ecologies of power, profit, (re)production and destruction in the web of life. The Long Sixteenth 

Century’s Military Revolution fundamentally re-ordered the way wars are fought, but it was also 

a revolution in the way that war-makers and capital-accumulators saw the world. It birthed a new 

productivity regime, changing production itself, organized along the lines of the new technics of 

military power.  

 Of course, warfare had existed long before the rise of capitalism.6 We can also be sure that 

much of the militarization associated with pre-modern warfare was elite-driven. Yet the Military 

 
4 Although abstracted here, the argument presented in this section corresponds with that made by Rediker (2008) and 

Linebaugh and Rediker (2013), that maritime work represents a vector of proletarianization. An interesting 

comparison could be made between proletarianization via naval warfare versus proletarianization via land warfare.  

5 We might consider, for instance, armed excursions by the Dutch via the VOC in the seventeenth and eighteenth 

centuries, British naval domination in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the development of 

American air power during and after the world wars as military revolutions in the plural. Further research might 

highlight the ways in which these revolutionary moments in the waging of warfare restructured global environments-

albeit under different historical conditions.  

6 Interestingly, the link between environmental change and warfare seems to be quite old—researchers have recently 

made the case that the first known wars (dating back ~13,000 years ago) were driven by climate change associated 

with the onset of the Holocene (the “age of the sun”) following the end of the Pleistocene (the “Ice Age”). However, 

these conflicts are characterized as sporadic—a far cry from the regimented violence that characterizes the 

Capitalocene-as-Polemocene (See Crevecoeuret al 2021). 



 

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Revolution of the Long Sixteenth Century marked a point of departure from earlier warfare, on the 

part of Europeans. What changed? In Parker’s words, 

 
By 1650 the West had already achieved military mastery in four separate arenas: 
central  and northeast America; Siberia; some coastal areas of sub-Saharan Africa; 
and in some parts of the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagoes. Different as these 
regions, and their inhabitants, undoubtedly were, their experience of European 
invaders was, in one crucial respect, identical: the white men, they found, fought 
dirty and (what was worse) they fought to kill. (Parker 1991: 163, emphasis added) 

 

 During the Long Sixteenth Century, while most wars were fought on defensive terms, or to 

capture slaves, Europeans began fighting wars with the explicit intention to kill, and to conquer 

territory.  

 But the conquest of the globe took time. Parker illustrates the point: 

 
But, until the late eighteenth century [which fits quite well with Wallerstein’s 
account of the geographical spread of capitalism] the Europeans, for the most part, 
did not even try.  Recent research has stressed how anachronistic it is to see the 
West as bent upon world domination from the voyage of Vasco de Gama onward. 
In fact, the Europeans originally came to Asia to trade, not to conquer, and most of 
them only undertook military expenditure either to coerce reluctant buyers or in 
order to safeguard themselves against attack from their European rivals. (Parker 
1991: 179) 

 

 Inter-European warfare, however, constituted a mechanism for the geographical spread of 

capitalism: “It became inevitable that, whenever Britain and France (for example) went to war in 

Europe, the conflict would now spread to the colonies” (Parker 1991: 181). Violence in the core 

was gradually exported to the peripheries: “Whereas wars in Europe normally involved limited 

aims…those fought abroad aimed at the permanent and total subjugation of the enemy population, 

the destruction of their political system, and the appropriation and exploitation of as many of their 

assets as possible” (Parker 1991: 194). This geopolitical pressure, expressed through inter-

European rivalry and exported to the rest of the world, as we will see, would later help drive the 

development of the Industrial Revolution.  

 The existence of a Military Revolution was first theorized by Michael Roberts (1956). Within 

the annals of military historiography, it became incredibly influential, paving the way for the 

development of a frame of analysis that scholars refer to as New Military History, which devotes 

considerable attention to the interrelationship between war-making and social change, rather than 

devoting a singular focus to the tactical-operational aspects of warfare (Black 1991; Black 2002; 

Rogers 1995). While the concept of a Military Revolution has been employed to theorize “such 

diverse issues as bureaucratization, the nature of revolutions, state-formation, and the rise of the 

west” (Rogers 1995: 3), its relationship to the rise of capitalism remains undertheorized.  

 For Roberts, The Military Revolution of 1560-1660 saw changes in (1) a revolution in tactics, 

requiring trained, professional soldiers and a standing army (in contrast with the use of mercenary 



 

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troops, used earlier),7 (2) a revolution in strategy, (3) an increase in the scale and scope of warfare 

within Europe,8 and (4) the increased impact of wars on society (Parker 1976, succinctly 

summarizing Roberts’ argument). 

 Maurice of Nassau’s (1567-1625) innovations in the tactical waging of war came in the form 

of the development of highly uniform, regimented, and rationalized companies of troops, trained 

to coordinate the firing of weapons, maximizing the tactical efficiency of firepower. Thus was 

born the military company as an administrative unit (Parker 1976; Roberts 1995), and military 

administration as a modern form of power and domination.  Here, geo-managerialism, the 

structuring of knowledge-power as a force of production, finds its militarized expression.  

 Geoffrey Parker, a student of Michael Roberts, rearticulates the Military Revolution frame. 

One of his central contributions has been to alter Roberts’ periodization. Rather than arguing that 

the aforementioned shifts in the waging of war arrived at the behest of the Dutch and Swedish 

during the period 1560-1660, and especially during the 30 Years’ War (1618-1648), Parker 

demonstrates that Spanish war-making in the period beginning in 1500-1530 exhibited all of the 

characteristics of Roberts’ original theorization (Parker 1976, [1988] 1996). The development of 

fortresses, the use of gunpowder, and the proliferation of artillery in the sixteenth century enabled, 

for Parker, the “rise of the west.” 

 Accounts devoting considerable attention to technological innovation9 have been critiqued 

through the charge of “technological determinism,” most notably by Jeremy Black (1991, 2002). 

While retaining the frame of Military Revolution, useful in that it is indicative of an historical shift, 

Black argues that an analytical focus on technological innovation alone offers insufficient 

explanations for the processes that the technology-focused accounts of the Military Revolution 

seek to explain (bureaucratization, revolutions, state-formation, and the rise of the west [Black 

1991, 2002: 213]). Rather, he argues that the Military Revolution should be understood as a process 

of the gradual militarization of Europe’s culture, institutions, ethics, and politics (Black 1991). He 

articulates these changes by framing them as a development of a “strategic culture” in the sixteenth 

century (Black 2002; see also de Brujin 2010).  

 Thus, for Black, military-technological change needs to be understood within its historical 

context. He cites European bellicosity, militarized clientelism between sovereigns and those 

raising troops, aristocratic ambition, the territorialization of identity, and the existence/lack of 

social support for campaigns as important contextual-historical elements for the rise of European 

militarism (Black 2002).  

 Notably, the pressures of capitalist competition are missing from this list. Teschke fills the 

gap, arguing “It was the pressure of (geo)political accumulation…that explains the violence of 

 
7 See Wallerstein (2011) on the substitution of standing armies for mercenary armies.  

8 Marxist accounts of state-formation (in particular Tilly 1992) have noted that the maintenance of large standing 

armies have forced states to sell their debts, transforming state revenue into private capital, thus ushering in a wave of 

primitive accumulation. 

9 Such as the Roberts-Parker theorization, but also Cipolla (1965), for example.  



 

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early modern international relations. It was these inter-ruling class conflicts, and not some 

autonomous military techno-determinism, that drove the military-technological innovations 

associated with the ‘Military Revolution’” (Teschke 2003: 221). 

 The pressures of capitalist competition, expressed through the geography of war-making, 

would drive industrialization over time. In Satia’s words, “War did not trigger every aspect of the 

industrial revolution, but it was the context in which that revolution took shape. The international 

order and the enmity of France and Spain were the ‘inescapable givens of power politics’” (Satia 

2018: 16). European powers, fighting wars in Europe and conquering abroad, could not rely on 

their rivals’ weapons industries to supply their armies—it would be ridiculous to expect two 

nations at war to trade arms with one another! States would need to intervene, to protect and 

promote their nascent weapons industries—lest these industries (1) lag behind the competition, in 

terms of technological development, (2) lose markets abroad to competition, or (3) disappear 

altogether through gun-makers leaving the country for work elsewhere; or through lack of 

profitability in peacetime (Satia 2018). They would act “out of a paternalistic sense of 

responsibility toward, and a diplomatic effort to avoid alienating, an industry essential to security” 

(Satia 2018: 40), continually purchasing weapons during war and requiring changes in their 

manufacture during peacetime.  

 The Roberts-Parker versus Black debate presents to us an either-or vision of the Military 

Revolution. Either the Military Revolution is technological revolution or it is cultural-institutional-

political one. Lewis Mumford ([1934] 2010), and his concept of technics, offer us a way out of the 

impasse.  

 Lewis Mumford ([1934] 2010) highlights the centrality of a change in cognition, in seeing 

and knowing the world, for the way that capital extracts surplus value. Technological 

developments in the waging of war are, for Mumford, situated within a wider social field, in which 

“strategic culture” matters. He argues:  

 
The regimentation of modern warfare carries much farther than the actual discipline 
of the army itself.… The general indoctrination of soldierly habits of thought in the 
seventeenth century was, it seems probable, a great psychological aid to the spread 
of machine industrialism…modern industrialism may equally be termed a large-
scale military operation. (Mumford [1934] 2010: 84) 

 

 This regimentation, as we have seen, was born out of the Maurice of Nassau’s tactical-

operational innovations during the Military Revolution of 1530-1710. Mumford continues “But 

the most important fact about modern warfare is the steady increase of mechanization from the 

fourteenth century onward: here, militarization forced the pace and cleared a straight path to the 

development of modern large-scale standardized industry” (Mumford [1934] 2010: 87). Crucially, 

for Mumford, “The army is in fact the ideal form toward which a purely mechanical system of 

industry must tend” (Mumford [1934] 2010: 89. Emphasis in original). 

 Again, here, we can see the geopolitics of warfare prefiguring the geography of 

industrialization. As the organizational/tactical-operational innovations of the Military 



 

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Revolution—which centered on the regimentation of warfare—were adopted gradually from the 

sixteenth century onwards, states and armies were confronted with the need to standardize the 

production of arms as well. They needed to do this more effectively than their rivals. 

“Standardizing weapons expedited production and enabled the uniformity of drill practice that was 

emerging as a military standard.  This was a crucial step toward development of mass production” 

(Satia 2018: 38). For a regimented infantry to effectively fire their weapons in unison, soldiers, 

units, and armies needed to have a standardized weapon that could be loaded and shot at a 

predictable pace. Crucially, states would play a role in this standardization, and in doing so, 

promoted industrialization. Satia writes of the British case:  

 
The British state was involved in technological progress in the gun industry from 
the start (which she places in the fifteenth century).… The very need to settle on a 
mass- producible standard arm to uniformly equip the army drove top-down 
tweaking of design between wars and of production processes during war.… 
Attachment to the standard weapon encouraged tweaking…and tweaking was the 
driving force of industrial revolution. (Satia 2018: 147-148) 

 

 State intervention and the promotion of industrialization for war-making would extend to 

other industries adjacent to gun-making as well, including the development of the steam engine, 

as well as copper and iron production.  

 But Britain was not alone in the fifteenth century. The Spanish, during the Reconquista, 

struggled with this exact industrial-geopolitical dilemma, initially relying on foreign made cannons 

to supply their armies. The state stepped in, and in a semi-successful attempt to alleviate this 

dependency of foreign gun production, set up five state-run gun foundries in Iberia by 1492 (Cook 

Jr. 1993).  

 Mumford then argues that the production of abstract social labor, disciplined, controllable 

workers amenable to exploitation at the point of production, comes at the behest of innovations 

made during the Military Revolution. “The regimentation and mass-production of soldiers, to the 

end of turning out cheap, standardized and replaceable product, was the great contribution of the 

military mind to the machine process” (Mumford [1934] 2010: 92). The forms of modern mass-

production and industrial labor control, and thus the modern proletariat, find their antecedents in 

the early modern military unit and the early modern European soldier. 

  Proponents of Crutzen and Stormer’s periodization of the Anthropocene, beginning with the 

Industrial Revolution in England, miss the fact that without the military regimentation of social 

life originating in the Long Sixteenth Century, there would be no Manchester factory, no industrial 

proletariat, no “classic” English capitalism. Mumford states the point succinctly: “It thus happens 

that England has sometimes been taken as the original home of inventions that had come into 

existence much earlier in Italy. So, too, the nineteenth century pinned its own brown laurels that 

often enough belonged to the sixteenth and seventeenth” (Mumford [1934] 2010: 141-142). 

 Critiques that engage in the reification of the factory and of fossil fuels as substances rather 

than on relations of power and profit in the web of life (for instance see Foster 2009; Malm 2016; 

Mitchell 2011) miss the manifold world and globe-making revolutions in the way ecologies life 



 

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were (re)produced in the Long Sixteenth Century. Militarization as an ecology of power and profit, 

from within and outside of Europe, is central to this story. Without the modern army, there is no 

factory. Without the modern soldier, there is no proletariat.  

 

Capitalist Militarism in the New World: New Spain, Labor, and the Military Revolution’s 

Export in the Second Sixteenth Century 

Mumford’s ([1934] 2010) is a powerful statement regarding the development of modern industrial 

production. Proletarians are exploited in the factory under conditions of military regimentation at 

the point of production. However, as Moore (2015) argues, every act of exploitation at the point 

of production requires an even greater act of appropriation beyond the factory. Reserves of un- or 

undercapitalized cheap labor, food, energy, and raw materials must be appropriated by capital at 

little or no cost to counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Geographical expansion and 

the deployment of geopower are essential to the maintenance of accumulation. The Military 

Revolution of the Long Sixteenth Century, and the militarization of accumulation by 

appropriation, should be read as expression capitalism as project and process along its 

geographical frontiers. Here, we can turn to the New World in the Long Sixteenth Century.  

 The export of the Military Revolution to the new world is a subject of debate. Critics have 

argued that the application of force in the colonization of the Americas was “frequently applied, 

but not much was necessary” (Raudzens 1995: 104). Others have argued that warfare played an 

insignificant role in the conquest (Hassig 1988).  

 Both proponents and opponents of the “export thesis” often fall into the trap of technological 

determinism. Proponents point to the use of firearms in the New World as evidence of the Military 

Revolution’s implementation in the Americas (O’Connell 1989; Guilmartin 1974). Opponents 

argue that the limited use of guns and gunpowder, issues with supplies, an absence of trained, 

professional soldiers, and the climate and topology of the New World hindered the implementation 

of the Military Revolution in the New World (Kicza 1992; Raudzens 1995).  

 These accounts center around a particular periodization of the Spanish conquest. Early 

Spanish advances into the New World are taken as the alpha and omega of Spanish colonization, 

and are held up as the only possible period in which war-making played a role in the construction 

of Spanish empire. The conquest of Mexico and the defeat of the Aztec empire by Hernán Cortés 

and his conquistadors (1519-1521) and the conquest of Peru and the defeat of the Inca empire by 

Pizzaro and his men (1531-1532) figure prominently in the periodization of a supposed lack of a 

military revolution in the New World.  

 Clendinnen (1991) diagnoses the problem convincingly. She argues: 

 
Analysts, save for military historians,10 have overwhelmingly concentrated on the 
first phase of the conquest, assuming the consummation of Spanish victory to be 

 
10 There is no citation given here, but I assume that Clendinnen is referring to the “New Military Historians,” with 

their emphasis on the culture, politics, and institutions of war-making, and not military-technological determinists.  



 

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merely a matter of applying a technological superiority…I would argue that it is 
only for the second phase that we have sufficiently solid evidence to allow a close 
analysis of how Spaniards and Indians made sense of each other, and so to track 
down issues that must remain will-o’-the-wisps for the first phase (Clendinnen 
1991:76-77).  

 

 The objects of analysis are different (Clendinnen’s approach reconstructs Spanish and 

Indigenous ontologies of warfare, mine argues that the age of capital, from the Long Sixteenth 

Century, is an age of war) but the historiographical problem is the same. What was going on in the 

second sixteenth century, after the initial phase of contact between the Spanish and Indigenous 

peoples of the Americas?  

 It is widely accepted that early conquistadors looted gold and silver from the cities and 

civilizations of the New World. What happened after is of extreme consequence for the rise of 

capitalism. A shift from a regime of plunder, organized around the looting of the new world, to a 

regime of productivity and plunder, in which precious metals had to be mined—produced—under 

conditions of capitalist militarization, took place in the second phase of the conquest, in the second 

sixteenth century.  

 This shift, from plunder to productivity, marks a critical historical departure. Abu-Lughod 

characterizes the economic impact of early European (pre-capitalist) military forays outside of 

Europe precisely in terms of plunder. She writes “The Crusades may have been initiated by a desire 

to capture souls, but they were sustained, in part, by the capture of booty. When conquests failed, 

however, purchases where necessary” (Abu-Lughod 1989: 48, emphasis added; see also Abu-

Lughod 1989). Europeans in the thirteenth century could use military force to plunder wealth, but 

in general, the tendency was to have to purchase goods—Europe thus faced a chronic negative 

balance of payments.  

 This relatively weak position of Europe in the world-economy, between the beginning of the 

twelfth and end of the thirteenth centuries, when read alongside Wallerstein’s periodization of 

capitalism’s life-trajectory, is indicative of a shift. How did Europe, subordinated in the world-

economy to a hegemonic Asia (Gunder Frank 1998), rise to its latter hegemonic position? “So how 

did the west rise” (Gunder Frank 1998: 277)? 

 Gunder Frank offers a model. He argues—through metaphor—that “the West first bought 

itself a third-class seat on the Asian economic train, then leased a whole railway carriage, and only 

in the nineteenth century managed to displace Asians from the locomotive” (Gunder Frank 1998: 

37). He points to the discovery of silver (but also gold) in the New World in the sixteenth century 

as decisive. Imports of silver from the New World would allow Europe to buy its way into lucrative 

Asian trade networks. What was particularly novel about this? Gunder Frank writes: 

 
How were any-literally-poor Europeans able to afford the price of even a third-class 
ticket to board the Asian train? Well, the Europeans somehow found and/or stole, 
extorted the money to do so. Again, how so? The basic answer is two-fold, or three-
fold. The most important answer is that Europeans obtained the money from the 
gold and silver mines they found in the Americas. The secondary answer is that 
they “made” more money, in the very good business first of digging up that silver-



 

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or more accurately, obliging the indigenous peoples of the Americas to dig it up for 
the Europeans. The Europeans also engaged in a variety of other profitable 
businesses they ran in…the Americas. (Gunder Frank 1998: 277, emphasis added) 

 

 It was in part the productivity of the mines of the New World that would enable Europe’s rise 

to hegemony. But we should follow Gunder Frank’s example, and ask the crucial question again: 

“how so?” In what follows, an account seeking to explain how the Europeans were able to coerce 

the indigenous peoples of the Americas into mining silver will center the importance of European 

use of military force. To extend Gunder Frank’s metaphor, before the Europeans could purchase 

their third-class seat on the Asian economic train, they first had to rob the money from the 

Indigenous peoples of the Americas at gunpoint.  

 The “at gunpoint,” however, should not be taken too literally. Instead of determining the 

presence or absence of the export of the Military Revolution in the New World by determining the 

presence or absence of a given number of guns, as the technological determinists would have it, 

we should instead look for evidence of the use of militarized technics in the New World. The 

origins of capitalism are to be found at the conjuncture of militarization as process and relation, 

accumulation as ethico-political project and concrete historical process, turning around epoch-

making transformations in the web of life. Neither power nor “modernization,” neither capitalism 

nor ecological crisis flow literally “from the barrel of a gun” as object (Mao 1938: 224).  

 The Spanish economy in the First Sixteenth Century depended on flows of silver and gold 

coming from its colonial conquests in the New World (Wallerstein [1974] 2011). It was used to 

pay back debts to the Genoese for the Reconquista of Iberia and to pay for food and raw material 

imports from the Baltic (Moore 2010a, 2010b; Wallerstein 1980). The Spanish began by instituting 

a regime of plunder, robbing gold and silver from the New World’s cities and empires (much like 

the plundering of the Levant described by Abu-Lughod [1989]). But this looting could only occur 

once. Afterwards, they needed to shift to a regime that combined productivity and plunder, they 

needed to produce bullion (as indicated by Gunder Frank 1998).  

 Indigenous peoples would be drafted to work in the mines of the New World, most infamously 

at Potosí. A labor regime that would compel them to abandon their temporal life-making schedules, 

for instance their production of foodstuffs which had been organized around planting and harvest 

times, would need to be instituted by force. Federici (2004) highlights this use of force: She argues 

that until the 1550s, the encomienda (or tributary labor) system had not totally disrupted the 

indigenous economy. The ever-growing need of the Spanish crown to extract more bullion 

(remembering that Phillip II’s declaration of Bankruptcy occurred in 1557 [Wallerstein (1974) 

2011]) the recent discovery of the Potosí silver deposits, and mounting resistance to the 

encomienda led the Spanish to “declare war on indigenous cultures, paving the way to a draconian 

intensification of colonial rule” (Federici 2004: 225). 

 Orlando Bentancor (2016) lays out for us the Spanish’s material metaphysics, their way of 

“seeing” and “knowing” the world. He writes “sixteenth century Spaniards…understood mining 

through long-standing metaphysical beliefs concerning the essence of matter. This metaphysical 

framework assumed that the natural world was composed of raw and defective material that had 



 

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to be dominated from above and directed to a higher end” (Bentancor 2016: 1). The metaphysical 

principle of “natural subordination,” that imperfect or incomplete matter (in this case, in the eyes 

of the conquistadors, the indigenous peoples of the Americas) could only be perfected (read: 

“civilized”) through its subjugation by “divine artifice,” at the hands of a master (God, Sovereign, 

Conqueror) animated the Spanish’s “civilizing mission” (Bentancor 2016: 29). 

 Bentancor writes: 

 
Spaniards saw Amerindians as an imperfect matter that should be molded and 
guided to the only ends common to all humanity-civilization and salvation. 
Although the official imperial discourse appealed to civilization and conversion as 
ends in themselves, an examination of the arguments invoked by the apologists of 
Spanish empire show how the aim of these ends was to mobilize the indigenous 
labor force and accumulate riches. (Bentancor 2016: 27) 

 

 Federici continues: “Their objective was to create a space of death, where potential rebels 

would be so paralyzed with fear that they would accept anything rather than have to face the same 

fate as those publicly beaten and humiliated” (Federici 2004: 229). This creation of and control 

over this “space of death” was grounded in, as Bentancor notes, the declaration of “just war” on 

the indigenous peoples by the Spanish, on the grounds that they did not “own” and “master” the 

new world’s bullion reserves (Bentancor 2016: 29). If we synthesize Bentancor’s framing of 

Spanish Imperial metaphysics, insisting on the principle of “metaphysical instrumentalism/natural 

subordination from above,” with Federici’s emphasis on the role of violence and control over death 

in the production of abstract social labor/abstract social nature, with its concomitant reorganization 

of life-making activities, we arrive at the logic of “death from above” as project: a militarized 

metaphysic centered on the domination, alienation, and abstraction of indigenous labor towards 

Spanish accumulation of capital.  

 This space of death was not limited to human natures. Between 1558-1804, some 315,642 

km² of forests and grassland in New Spain were cleared, to provide fuel for silver amalgamation 

(Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter 2010). “These changes radically reconfigured both the 

biophysical (ecosystems, soil composition, hydrology) and human characteristics of the colonial 

mining belt” (Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter 2010: 105). This reconfiguration of the biosphere 

“pushed landscapes past the threshold where recovery was even possible, at least not in the 

timeframes afforded to human history” (Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter 2010: 111).  

 David S. Jones (2016) highlights the central role played by the waging of “just war” and the 

creation of a “space of death” in the massive mortality of the indigenous peoples. He writes, 

contrary to the “virgin soils” examination of indigenous mortality, “Spaniards confiscated Taino 

labor, disrupted subsistence activities, displaced populations, and undermined living conditions.… 

It was not simply new diseases that affected native populations, but the combined effects of 

warfare, famine, resettlement, and the demoralizing disintegration of native social, political, and 

economic structures” (Jones 2019: 29). Rai (1993) describes the Spanish waging of “just” war on 

indigenous Americans as “total war,” characterizing the legacy of European arrival in the New 



 

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World, with the resultant dialectical world-destroying and world-making genocide and ecocide, as 

“the Five-Hundred Year Reich of Columbus” (Rai 1993: 33). 

 The Orbis Spike as geological-historical marker illuminates dramatic changes in the ways in 

which global environments were made and re-made following the Columbian invasion of the New 

World after 1492. Lewis and Maslin write “One biological result of the [Columbian] exchange 

was the globalization of human foodstuffs. The New World crops maize/corn, potatoes, and the 

tropical staple manioc/cassava were subsequently grown across Europe, Asia, and Africa. 

Meanwhile, Old World crops such as sugarcane and wheat were planted in the New World” (Lewis 

and Maslin 2015: 174).  

 They continue: 

 
Besides permanently and dramatically altering the diet of almost all of humanity, 
the arrival of Europeans in the Americas also led to a large decline in human 
numbers. Regional population estimates sum to a total of 54 million people in the 
Americas in 1492…Numbers rapidly declined to a minimum of 6 million people 
by 1650 via exposure to diseases carried by Europeans, plus war, enslavement, and 
famine. (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 175) 

  

 The resultant carbon sequestration, initiated by a “near-cessation of farming and reduction of 

fire use” (Lewis and Maslin 2015:175), and subsequent regeneration of New World forests is 

widely considered to have caused the “Little Ice Age” (which lasted from the mid sixteenth century 

to the mid nineteenth century [Mann 2002]). The effects were dramatic. “Colder conditions, 

combined with altered patterns of atmospheric circulation, appeared to be tied to the prevalent crop 

failures in the more northern areas of Europe at the time” (Mann 2002: 1). Not limited to Europe, 

atmospheric change was felt in Australia, India, Africa, the Caribbean, and North America as well 

(Grove 2005). Class struggle/class warfare over the conditions over the (re)production of life 

proliferated, such that we can speak of the opening of a global class war in the Long Sixteenth 

Century (See for example Fagan 2019; McNally 1993). 

 The Chichimecas War in New Spain (1550-1590) is demonstrative of capitalism’s use of 

military force to produce abstract social labor/abstract social nature. Here, we can find an 

amalgamation of changes in the way Europe relates to the rest of the world-through the 

militarization of planetary natures. New Spain’s position in the early modern global economy was 

central: from initial contact to the early eighteenth century, approximately forty percent of the 

world’s bullion reserves at the time would come from the region (Barrett 1990). In 1546, Spanish 

settlers discovered silver deposits near Zacatecas (Tenace 2012). Gunder Frank (1998) highlights 

the importance of this discovery:  

 
A major new infusion of American silver began with the discovery of the silver 
mines at Potosí in Peru (now Bolivia) in 1548 and at Zacatecas in Mexico in 1548. 



 

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This new silver made a far-reaching impact on the world-economy, beginning in 
1600 if not earlier in various parts of Asia. (Gunder Frank 1998: 132)11  

 

Given Spain’s dire balance of payments crisis at the beginning of the second sixteenth 

century, securing these silver deposits was of vital importance to the Hapsburg monarchy (Wayne-

Powell 1944). 

 The Chichimecas, the people indigenous to the region, resisted Spanish encroachment on their 

territory. This resistance threatened New Spain’s silver output. Initially, the organization of the 

defense of Spanish territory was mounted primarily by private actors. These, however, proved 

ineffective (Tenace 2012), so Don Martín Enríquez de Almanza, Viceroy of the territory from 

1568-1580, intensified the military effort against the Chichimecas. “Under Enríquez…the warfare 

against the Chichimecas was, to a considerable extent, systematized and made effective…his 

administration marks the first period of real continuity, system, and vigor in the Spanish 

prosecution of warfare against the nomads of the North” (Wayne Powell 1944: 581-582). 

 In contrast to the picture offered up by accounts of Cortés’ defeat of the Aztecs, in which a 

corps of unprofessional robbers with little military training plundered an empire, the story of the 

Chichimecas War, and of continual Spanish imperial expansion into the Second Sixteenth Century, 

tells a different story, of the export of the Military Revolution to the New World. The war marks 

the first time in which Spain sent a professional, trained army to the New World (Tenace 2012). 

A system of presidios, or forts, was set up along the frontier, manned by these professional troops 

(Wayne Powell 1944). 

A map was drawn up circa 1580, and it reveals a great deal about the Spanish settlers’ 

priorities in the period (Mapas de las villas de San Miguel and San Filipe de los Chichimecas 1580. 

See Figures 1a and 1b). Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter (2010) remark that this map is thoroughly 

ecological/topographical in nature. This is demonstrated in Figure 1a. Trees can be found in the 

mountains, and be used to fuel silver amalgamation (Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter 2010: 101). 

The logic of geo-managerialism is at work here: extra-human natures must be identified, codified, 

and mapped before they can be appropriated for capitalist production. This logic extends to human 

natures as well. The selections of the map shown here demonstrate that the map is at once an 

ecological and operational-strategic artefact. Chichimecas and Spanish warriors populate the entire 

map. The Chichimecas occupy the mind of the map’s producer, and the “strategic culture” of the 

Military Revolution informs what they choose to include (and what they choose to abstract) from 

the map. As we see in Figure 1b, they impede Spanish access to vital raw materials. As the history 

bears out, they are also a potential labor force for the Spanish silver mines. As ethico-politically 

“imperfect raw substance,” they themselves are part of the landscape, a part of “Nature” that the 

Spanish seek to exploit. This too is geo-managerialism at work: a militarized/ systematized effort 

to rationalize and control life-making in the service of capital.  

 
11 Tenace (2012) and Wayne Powell (1944) agree on the date 1546 for the discovery of silver in Zacatecas. 

Nevertheless, the discovery and subsequent militarization of production-certainly commences at the onset of the 

Second Sixteenth Century.  



 

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Figure 1a           Figure 1b 

 

 

 The creation of Spanish Imperial regimes of abstract social labor and abstract social nature 

were, however, contradictory. Del Valle (2019) helps us unpack the contradiction. Writing about 

Spanish ontologies of civilization and exploitation, she argues that these two processes “take us to 

the very heart of the contradiction, and a decisive one it is: how the Christian West understood 

itself as a civilizing project” (Del Valle 2019: 47-48). The Spanish were faced with a problem, 

“the ‘Indians’ in New Spain, who, as Quiroga states again and again, were in danger of 

disappearing altogether if their treatment continued as it had been for the last decade” (Del Valle 

2019: 50). The fact that “Indians” were “fleeing en masse in the face of the conquest” (Del Valle 

2019: 53), and to this we might add dying en masse (Koch et al 2019), presented a challenge to 

Spanish Accumulation strategies: how could they maintain a labor force necessary to keep 

extracting ecological surpluses (in bullion, labor, and foodstuffs)? An attempt to “civilize” the 

indigenous peoples, to settle them into European style-towns, seeable, knowable, and controllable; 

to transform them from “barbarians” into “the poor” was attempted (Del Valle 2019). Thus the 

creation of a “space of death” and the resettlement of indigenous Americans into reducciones 

inaugurated the birth of capitalism’s world-praxis of social regulation/control (see Santiago-Valles 

2006; 2016) and with it the fixing of laboring populations into the “labor camp,” a militarized 

mechanism of domination and accumulation which finds expression throughout the history of 

capitalism; from the contemporary American prison-industrial complex, to concentration camps 

in South Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, to Cuba in the 1890s, Europe during the Second 

World War, and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.  



 

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 The need to fix labor was of central concern to the Spanish during the Chichimecas War. The 

Chichimecas were a semi-nomadic people, difficult to fix to a labor site. While the Spanish Army 

in New Spain was funded by a combination of private capital (Kizca 1992) and the royal treasury 

(Wayne Powell 1944), lack of funds still presented challenges. The solution was, on the part of the 

soldiers, to engage in the slave trade. The situation of Roque Núñez, a Capitan in the Spanish 

Army, is indicative: “He was undoubtedly none too scrupulous in capturing peaceful Indians for 

resale as slaves in order to augment his meager official income” (Wayne Powell 1944: 587). He 

was not alone. “Captives were, as usual, given in slavery to the soldiers participating in the foray” 

(Wayne Powell 1944: 587). Captives would be taken from their homes and moved to work in 

mines far from where they had been captured. “This latter stipulation may have been due to the 

fact that the Spaniards found it difficult to keep he Chichimecas in captivity anywhere near their 

original habitat” (Wayne Powell 1944: 589). 

 As we know, the contradictions of the production of the indigenous peoples as abstract social 

labor and abstract social nature resulted in the decimation of the Spanish empire’s labor force. 

Recent estimates place the mortality rates of indigenous Americans post-Columbian contact 

around 55 million dead, out of a pre-contact population of roughly 60.5 million (Koch et al 2019).  

 We’re now in a position to return to Gunder Frank’s (1998) model. In arguing for a more 

holistic approach to the study of how and why the “decline of the east” preceded the “rise of the 

west” (expanding on Abu-Lughod 1989), he lays out what he calls a “Global Economic 

Demographic Explanation,” in which the “discovery” and subsequent appropriation of bullion in 

the New World by the Europeans plays a central role (Gunder Frank 1998). He asks “So how to 

regard this global whole historically, be it before or after 1500?…I have suggested the analogy of 

the three-legged stool. It rests equally on ecological/economic/technological, political/military 

power, and social/cultural/ideological legs” (Gunder Frank 1998: 340). 

 Interestingly, he speculates on the effect the Little Ice Age had on the decline of the east 

(Gunder Frank 1998), expressed through crop shortages, famines, epidemics, population decline, 

and economic crisis. To his credit, he recognizes that “The most neglected [consideration,] also in 

my own work, has been the ecological component” (Gunder Frank 1998).”  

 The capitalocene as polemocene frame allows us to fill this gap-to extend Gunder Frank’s 

climatological speculation. Taking seriously the notion that Spanish incursions into the New World 

in the Long Sixteenth Century—and the subsequent Great Dying of the indigenous peoples of the 

Americas through a combination of disease, exploitation, and warfare—contributed to the global 

cooling associated with the Little Ice Age, we get a clearer picture of what it was the Europeans 

were “doing” that enabled their rise; and with them, the rise of capitalism.  

 Neither eurocentric cultural or institutional reductionism explain the rise. Rather, in and 

through the waging of wars of conquest in the New World, the European war-makers and capital-

accumulators set in motion, in the Long Sixteenth Century, a particular strategy of environment-

making. First, Spanish conquistadors came to the New World to plunder its wealth. After the 



 

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exhaustion of this frontier windfall12, the Spanish would need to shift towards producing bullion. 

They did so by making use the novel war-making logic associated with the Military Revolution, 

in order to coerce the indigenous peoples of the Americas to mine the bullion they would use to 

offset their chronic balance of payments crises (to the east (Abu Lughod 1989: Part I), as well as 

in the Baltic zone (Moore 2009).) Unintended as it was, the massive demographic decline of the 

indigenous peoples of the Americas, attributed to warfare, disease, and exploitation, and the 

subsequent sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere, inaugurated a global cooling event that 

would last into the nineteenth century.  

 What was novel about what the Europeans were doing in the Long Sixteenth Century was 

that, through their cheap nature project of de-valuing human and extra-human life, the Europeans 

were able to remake planetary natures through the militarization of ecologies and of their 

accumulation strategies, in the name of endless profitability.  

 There was, however, a way out for the Spanish, after they had decimated their laboring 

population. Slaves could be imported to the New World from Africa, serving as new source of 

cheap labor for capital via what Miller (1988) calls the “slaving frontier,” itself a geographical 

zone of militarized appropriation. If capitalism’s “innovative flexibility” rests on its ability to 

secure cheap circulating capital, then the survival of capital depends on what Moore calls 

“commodity frontiers,” geographical zones of relatively un- or undercapitalized (read: cheap) 

sources of ecological surplus, not yet commodified yet within the zone of capitalist power (Moore 

2000). Without commodity frontiers, new geographical zones of appropriation, capitalism runs the 

danger of entering into its own epochal crisis.  

 

Conclusion 

Here, we have reflected on the origins of capitalism—taking together the Colombian invasions 

and the Military Revolution of the Long Sixteenth Century as a turning point in world-history. The 

Military Revolution and the conquest of vast swathes of territory in the New World, taken together, 

would set in motion forces that animate capital’s cheap nature strategies. Warfare itself punctuates 

world-history; major wars are not always being fought. When they are, new territories can be 

incorporated into the modern world-system. But even in “peacetime,” the changes ushered in by 

the Military Revolution—from labor control strategies, changes in the web of life associated with 

ecocide and genocide, to state-promoted industrialization in the name of geopolitical 

competition—still make themselves felt. Never mind that, over the history of capitalism, “there 

were so many transitions between peace and war that it is difficult to establish what ‘normal’ 

economic conditions were” (Satia 2018: 13).  

 Warfare has been, to an extent, sidelined in relation to our historical imaginary. “Historians 

typically treat war as ‘a historical accident unrelated to the process of industrialization” (Satia 

 
12 By windfall, I mean “a profit that comes because the cost of one or more of [the factors of production] is either 

completely missing or greatly reduced” (Prescott Webb 1954: 21). 



 

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2018: 12). The same can surely be said in relation to environmental change! It is high time we 

begin to reconsider the role of warfare as it relates to the history of capitalism-as-ecology.  

 Framing the capitalocene as a polemocene raises some interesting lines of argumentation. 

Moore argues that capitalism is a way of organizing natures; that capitalism does not have an 

ecological regime, it itself is an ecological regime. This is to say that there is always an “ecological 

moment” to whatever aspect of the history of capitalism we are looking at. To this, we might add 

that capitalism doesn’t have a military regime, it is a military regime; that the use of military force 

by capital is bound up with capitalism’s movements through ecologies, there is always a “military 

moment” involved in the accumulation of capital.  

 More narrowly, I think this insight warrants a re-thinking of the way in which the 

environmental historiography of warfare is narrated. This body of literature almost always frames 

the environmental history of war through a discussion of “impacts” (see for instance, Gould 2007; 

Laakkonen, Tucker, and Vuorisalo 2017; Tucker et al 2018; Tucker and Russel 2004; Russel 

2001). When Laakkonen (2017) evokes the “polemosphere,” or the part of the biosphere impacted 

by warfare, he highlights an incredibly important aspect of the history of modernity: that warfare 

destroys. Ecosystems are “impacted” by the fighting of battles, mobilizations for war, and so on. 

But rather than treating global environments as “object,” as the “polemosphere” does, the 

polemocene allows us to see the militarization of ecologies as an historical relation and process; 

that ecologies are dynamic; that they are not merely objects that are destroyed but matrices through 

which wars are fought and fortunes are appropriated. Rather than treat ecologies as static and 

ahistorical substances that are “acted upon” or “impacted” in times of war, I think a more 

productive framework would articulate what we might call the “ontological condition” of warfare 

as spatial and ecological. Battles are fought over the terms and conditions of cheapness, places are 

invaded for their labor reserves and raw materials, and ecologies themselves—the flows of rivers, 

the fields of mud, the harshness of winters—help determine the outcomes of wars.  

 But there are limitations here too. In focusing on the origins of capitalism, and the military-

economic-ecological dynamics unleashed by its rise, we’ve only briefly encountered wisps of how 

the militarization of global environments makes capital accumulation possible over the longue 

durée. We are left here with an integrated macrohistory of a “moment.” But how might other 

“military revolutions” remake ecologies in the name of endless accumulation? We might follow 

Silver and Slater (1999) and chart out the “Militarized Ecological Origins of World-Hegemonies,” 

employing multiple incorporated comparisons (McMichael 1990) to see how, for example, British 

naval supremacy or American air power extend the capitalocene as polemocene.13 

 To conclude, the Industrial Revolution, lodestar of the “Anthropocene” as concept, is 

unthinkable without considering how the Military Revolution of the Long Sixteenth Century 

fundamentally altered global human and extra-human natures in the service of capital. From the 

production of abstract social labor and abstract social nature, to the development of the factory as 

a highly rationalized, hierarchical, and regimented technic of production, capitalism requires the 

 
13 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.  



 

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deployment of military force to achieve its end—endless accumulation. We can assert with 

confidence Marx’s historically concrete observation regarding war-making in the service of empire 

as an historically determinate relation under capitalism: capital indeed, quite literally, “comes 

dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (Marx [1867] 1990: 926). 

 

 

About the Author: John Peter Antonacci is a PhD Student at Binghamton University’s 

Department of Sociology. His research explores relations of war-making, environment-making, 

and capital accumulation through a world-ecological frame. He holds an M.A. in Sociology from 

The New School for Social Research, and a B.A. in Sociology from St. Joseph’s College New 

York. 

 

Acknowledgements: The author would like to thank the Editors of JWSR, as well as the 

anonymous reviewers, for their insightful and pointed comments on this article, which 

undoubtedly improved the argument found within. Very special thanks go out to Jason W. Moore, 

Orlando Bentancor, Dina Antonacci Shvetsov, and the author’s colleagues in Sociology at 

Binghamton University who read and commented on drafts of the article. 

 

Disclosure Statement: Any conflicts of interest are reported in the acknowledgments section of 

the article’s text. Otherwise, authors have indicated that they have no conflict of interests upon 

submission of the article to the journal. 

 

 

 

 

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