Marx’s chapters on “primitive accumulation” identify two putative sites of capitalism’s emergence: sixteenth-century expropriation of English peasants and Dutch-led commercial exploitation of the wider world. This article follows up both suggestions. It examines Robert Brenner’s influential attribution of capitalism’s origin to class struggles in the English countryside, which increased food production and released labor for industrial employment, eventually making possible the Industrial Revolution. There was, however, an earlier breakthrough to capitalism, the seventeenth-century “Dutch Miracle.” Brenner eventually claimed that Dutch capitalism also arose from an agrarian breakthrough, but this article shows instead that precocious development of Dutch shipbuilding and maritime commerce, undertaken to compensate for inadequate local food production, made the “miracle” possible. Indeed, this article argues that the eighteenth-century English Industrial Revolution was itself significantly indebted to commercial, maritime, and financial initiatives borrowed from the Dutch.

Political philosophers have recently recovered the tradition of “rhetorical redescription”—the art of changing the world by changing the language we use to represent it. The philosopher Amia Srinivasan has called this strategy worldmaking. This article elaborates worldmaking as a process of revolutionary change through a close reading of the slavery debates in the antebellum United States. Antislavery abolitionists were paradigmatic worldmakers. But their efforts to redescribe slavery prompted a counterrevolution. In the 1850s a new and final wave of southern proslavery writers, led by George Fitzhugh and Henry Hughes, attempted not to refute abolitionist redescriptions but to coopt them. This reactionary strategy, which tries to preserve the material reality of the ancien régime beneath the language of revolution, I call worldsaving. Turning our attention to the worldsavers in moments of revolutionary upheaval can be instructive, for their emergence both confirms the success of worldmaking and threatens its ultimate undoing.

There is an increasing sense that capitalism may have broken time itself and now is rushing human society toward a catastrophic extinction event. But despite a substantial body of literature on capitalist temporalities and another on the ruptures in historicity that attended the French Revolution, there has not yet been an exploration of the fact that the two intersect in the figure of Georges Cuvier. He and his followers formed a school of “catastrophists,” who raised questions about the finitude of time and of the natural world. Their ideas were ultimately defeated, relegating catastrophism to the category of pseudoscience until it returned under a variety of different scientific, philosophical, and political guises in the 1980s. Since capital is predicated on future returns, capitalism on continual growth, and continual growth on unlimited natural resources, the lost “chrono-economics” of finitude and catastrophe offers a repressed alternative to the intellectual preconditions for industrial capitalism.

Capitalist development since the 1940s has been fueled by global oil extraction. Cheap oil was the core energy input in the post–World War II expansion. By the 1970s, the limits of this oil-fueled accumulation regime began to appear. During that decade, a series of oil price hikes combined with other sources of tension to form a deep accumulation crisis. The crisis of the 1970s showed the effects that a strategic circulating capital—in this case, petroleum—has in shaping profitability trends. Today, the possible recessionary effects caused by oil price hikes are joined on the environmental side by another problem: the continued burning of fossil fuels exacerbates the climate crisis. To address this double contradiction, I revisit the Marxian theory of crisis in a world-historical and world-ecological framework. With this framework, I unpack the historical connections between petroleum, uneven development, accumulation crises, and climate change.