Full bibliography

The most important historical work on the Anthropocene to date is J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke’s The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (2016). The authors argue that the Anthropocene began in 1945, not in the eighteenth century, as some scientists have proposed. They single out unintentional “human actions” as the driving force behind the significant changes in biogeochemical processes unfolding since the middle of the twentieth century (McNeill and Engelke 2016, 4, 208). The main title of their book mimics a phrase first used at a 2005 conference on the future of the planet and refers to the escalating human threats to the so-called Earth System. The title was meant to parallel Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944). Born in 1886 in Hungary, Polanyi became one of the world’s greatest economic historians. In an endnote to their book, McNeill and Engelke explain that Polanyi saw the “market economy” as a recent invention that “must be understood as embedded in social traditions, customs, and habits of the mind.” Likewise, they continue, human impacts on global ecology “are embedded in societies and their traditions” (McNeill and Engelke 2016, 213).