Madeira, sugar, and the conquest of nature in the "first" sixteenth century, part I: From "Island of timber" to sugar revolution, 1420-1506

Madeira is a small island with a large place in the origins of the modern world. Lying 560-some kilometers west of north Africa, Madeira was home to the modern world's first cash crop boom, a sugar revolution. In the first of two successive essays in this journal, I explain how the epoch-making acceleration of boom and bust on Madeira, during Braudel's "first" sixteenth century (c. 1450-1557), marked a new crystallization of the nature-society relations pivotal to the rise of capitalism. This new crystallization represented an ensemble of new capacities to exploit and extract extra-human nature much faster, and on a much larger scale, than ever before. It was a mode of socio-ecological conquest and commodification that was possible because of early capitalism's "commodity frontier" strategy, one premised on global expansion as a constitutive moment in the formation of the modern world-system-as capitalist world-ecology no less than world-economy. From this standpoint, the very conditions of Madeira's rapid ascent were also the conditions of its rapid decline after 1506. These stemmed from the rapid commodity-centered organization, and consequent exhaustion, of the relations governing human and extra-human nature: labor and land.