Keywords

1 Introduction

This chapter brings the history of geology into conversation with economic history to suggest that the earth sciences are deeply bound up with the imperial project of resource extraction. The core thesis I wish to defend is that geology ought to be understood as an extractive science. By this, I mean two things. First, on a mundane level, the practice of geology primarily consists of extracting samples – rocks and minerals, fossils, larger-scale distributional patterns, and so on – from far-flung parts of the world to make broader claims about the history, morphology, and physical structure of the earth. Second, and more profound, is the fact that the earth sciences developed in tandem with the imperial project of extractive capitalism. To substantiate those claims, I offer a schematic history of geology that highlights the theme of extraction by linking the practice of science to the project of imperial statecraft and the political economy of capitalism.

To be sure, this is hardly the first attempt to connect the earth sciences to mining and other forms of extractive industry. Classic work by Roy Porter (Porter 1977), Ted Porter (Porter 1981), Stephen Turner (Turner 1987), and William Goetzmann (Goetzmann 1978), as well as more recent contributions by James Secord (Secord 2018, 1986), Paul Lucier (Lucier 2008, 2018), Shellen Wu (Wu 2015), and Simon Knell (Knell 2000, 2012), all place the history of geology squarely within an economic context. At the same time, another strand in the literature primarily focuses on intellectual history, sometimes going so far as to argue that theoretical debates in geology and paleontology are completely divorced from politics and economics (Parsons 2001). Martin Rudwick’s ambitious syntheses are particularly notable for their remarkable breadth and depth (Rudwick 2005, 2008, 2014), but the earlier work of George Merrill (Merrill 1964) and Mott Greene (Greene 1982) remain instructive as well. Perhaps inspired by widespread anxieties about the so-called “Anthropocene,” however, recent years have seen a flurry of new publications that explicitly integrate the intellectual history of the earth sciences with the cultural history of capitalism and imperialism. These include a spate of new books about dinosaurs (Brinkman 2010; Nieuwland 2019; Noble 2016; Rieppel 2019), mammals (Manias 2023), humans (Milam 2019), earthquakes (Valencius 2015), and extinction (Sepkoski 2020), among many others. More recently, still, historians have called for a new earth history to be written from the South (Bashford et al. 2023), especially focusing on the “modern” history of the supercontinent Gondwanaland (Bashford et al. 2021; Chakrabarti 2020).

This chapter brings that literature into conversation with a lively debate about the emergence of “extractivism” as a distinct mode of capital accumulation in modern Latin America. While Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson offer a fairly neutral description of economic extraction as “the forced removal of raw materials and life forms from the earth’s surface, depths, and biosphere” (2017, 188), most scholars building on the foundational work of Eduardo Gudynas (2015, 2021) stress the high levels of exploitation and violence that often obtain in extractive economies, whose lack of attention to social equality and ecological reciprocity makes them fundamentally unsustainable. Thus, Macarena Gomez-Barris argues that extractive capitalism “engages in thefts, borrowings, and forced removals, violently reorganizing social life as well as the land by thieving resources from Indigenous and Afro-descendant territories” (Gómez-Barris 2017, xvii), while a recent review in The Journal of Peasant Studies describes the complex assemblage of “practices, mentalities, and power differentials” that structure “socio-ecologically destructive modes of organizing life through subjugation, depletion, and non-reciprocity” in extractive contexts (Chagnon et al. 2022, 4).

In what follows, then, I want to use the conceptual vocabulary developed by Latin American political economists to highlight some of the specific ways in which the earth sciences contributed to, and benefitted from, the violent and exploitative history of extractive capitalism. In that respect, my project resembles Kathryn Yusoff’s provocative “geophilosophy of the Anthropocene” (2017), which seeks to expose how the earth sciences “naturalize (and thus neutralize) the theft of extraction” by framing “geosocial ‘events’” like climate change as a purely geological process (Yusoff 2018, 12–13). However, rather than focus on the discursive realm, as Yussof primarily does, I want to interrogate the material entanglements between the intellectual history of geology and the economic history of resource extraction. To that end, I also draw on critical insights from political ecologists like Andreas Malm and Tim Mitchell, who have documented how the transition to a carbon economy allowed for greater centralization and control over production processes, yielding increased profits and power for economic elites (Malm 2016; Mitchell 2011). Finally, because the history of extractive capitalism cannot be understood without interrogating its role in imperial statecraft, this chapter also engages with recent work that documents how the earth sciences contributed to the history of settler colonialism (Wolfe 2006) by rendering the rich mineral resources of conquered lands available for exploitation (Lester 2023a, b). Supplemented by the work of Indigenous STS scholars like Zoe Todd (Todd Forthcoming), Paulette Steeves (Steeves 2021), and Vine Deloria Jr. (Deloria 1995), the chapter’s overarching goal is thus to frame the development of the earth sciences within the context of what Michael John Witgen evocatively describes as “the political economy of plunder” (Witgen 2022).

2 The Deep Time Horizons of Modern Capitalism

One way to begin fleshing out the argument sketched out above is to consider what William Sewell memorably described as the “temporalities” of modern capitalism (2008). Following Marx, social and cultural historians of the economy often describe the capitalist mode of production as a temporally extended process that centers on self-perpetuating cycles of accumulation in which “the past devours the future,” as Thomas Piketty famously put it (Piketty 2014). For example, Jonathan Levy describes capital as a “pecuniary process of forward-looking valuation,” (2017, 483) whereas the sociologist Jens Beckert argues that capitalism engenders a future-oriented cognitive disposition. According to Beckert, “the evolution of capitalism was accompanied by fundamental changes in the temporal orientations of actors,” who came to regard “the future as open, containing opportunities to be seized and risks to be calculated” (2016, 22; see also Muniesa 2017). In other words: Because money only becomes capital once it is invested in the means of production, the political economy of capitalism orients itself around a speculative future that has been framed as a lucrative space wherein profits are found. So far, so good. What this narrative leaves unaddressed, however, is the coincident invention of deep time. Precisely at the same moment that saw economic actors begin to devise formal tools like discounting curves to project themselves forward in time (Deringer 2018), practitioners of what came to be called the “earth sciences” also developed sophisticated techniques to imagine themselves back into the furthest recesses of prehistory by reconstructing a lost world from the material remains left behind (Rudwick 2005).

The new sciences of deep time helped to extend the temporal horizons of capitalist accumulation in more ways than one. In addition to expanding our imaginative capacity to travel through time, the earth sciences also contributed to the creation of a new energy regime whose commercial and geopolitical impact can hardly be overstated. Although the metabolic capacity of human and animal bodies to perform work did not become any less valuable during the industrial revolution, the invention of increasingly efficient steam engines incentivized the exploitation of fossil fuels on a scale that was simply unimaginable before (Smith and Norton Wise 1989; Odum 1970; Rosen 2010). Insofar as it entailed harnessing millions of years’ worth of metabolic labor performed by long-deceased microorganism to power industrial technologies, the energy revolution of the nineteenth century constituted a form of exploitation across vast chasms of time – the future also devours the past! – creating a temporal rift in the carbon cycle that contributed directly to global climate change (Foster 2000; Clark and York 2005; Beldo 2017). Finally, the transition to steam power also allowed for an unprecedented centralization of the industrial production process, further concentrating political power in the hands of entrenched economic elites and all but ensuring that popular opposition to the implementation of so-called “labor-saving” technologies would not get very far (Bailey 1998; Hobsbawm 1952; Malm 2016; Thompson 1963).

According to Kenneth Pomeranz (2000), the productive capacity that geologists helped to unleash by documenting the location and abundance of fossil fuels played a decisive role in bringing about the Great Divergence, a dramatic difference in economic wealth and political power that came to characterize the relationship between Europe and other parts of the world during the long nineteenth century. Of course, the global inequities that emerged at this time were not simply created by burning coal. The systematic application of physical violence was decisive as well, meaning that colonial dispossession and coerced labor were central to the creation of European hegemony (Beckert 2014; Liu 2020). The combustion of fossil fuels and the violent expropriation of economic resources went hand in hand, mutually reinforcing each other to create the foundation of Europe’s immense military, political, and economic might (Barak 2020). By creating the epistemic foundation that allowed European states to extract immense thermodynamic power from fossil fuels, the earth sciences thus played a central role in what Marx described as “primitive” (or ursprüngliche) accumulation, the violent extraction of resources whose devastating socio-ecological consequences are slowly unfolding today (Daggett 2019; Marx 1872; Moore 2015; Nixon 2011).

The production and circulation of geological maps offers an especially informative trace of the history sketched out thus far, linking the intellectual labor of scientists with the extraction of mineral wealth in far-flung parts of the globe. Some of the earliest systematic attempts to represent the distribution of valuable resources cartographically took place during the mid-eighteenth century. In 1746, for example, a French naturalist named Jean-Etienne Guettard published a Carte Mineralogique of mineral deposits in France, England, and Wales. By the end of the eighteenth century, over a dozen similar maps had been produced, but they were still restricted to locating various rock types and mineral resources on a two-dimensional plane. That changed at the turn of the nineteenth century, as naturalists and surveyors began to experiment with new techniques to represent the three-dimensional structure of geological formations in section. An especially notable example was produced by the orphaned son of a village blacksmith from Oxfordshire named William Smith, who figured out how to use the fossil remains of extinct life forms to ascertain the relative age of various rock types while he worked as a “Mineral Surveyor” for the wealthy owners of recently enclosed land. This gave Smith a considerable advantage over other mining consultants in that it allowed him to make stratigraphic inferences when called on to speculate whether a particular locality contained enough coal to warrant the expense of sinking a shaft. By the start of the nineteenth century, it also gave him the idea of producing a comprehensive geological map of the British Isles. When it was finally published in 1815, the result measured over 8 feet by 6 feet in total. But what made it especially important was Smith’s use of watercolors to indicate the different layers or “strata” of rocks. In addition, clever use of shading allowed readers to surmise the stratigraphic superposition of different rock types, which made it possible to predict where a particular stratum was likely to continue away from a surface outcrop. Thus, although it was both esthetically beautiful and conceptually ambitious, the primary purpose of Smith’s map was practical: to aid in the efficient extraction and accumulation of valuable resources (Sharpe 2015; Torrens 2016; Macfarlane et al. 2020) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
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William Smith, A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with Part of Scotland, Exhibiting the Collieries and Mines, the Marshes and Fen Lands Originally Overflowed by the Sea, and the Varieties of Soil According to the Variations in the Substrata, 1815. (Courtesy of the Natural History Museum, London)

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Scientific representations of “vertical” space also functioned as tools of imperial expansion, helping to turn far-flung territories into zones of economic extraction. As the geographer Bruce Braun explains, geological maps did far more than just make otherwise invisible resources legible from above. By “bringing into view the ‘verticality’ of the state’s territory,” Braun contends, practitioners of the earth sciences helped to incentivize colonization, enabling recently conquered territories “to be drawn into global circuits of extractive capital” (Braun 2000, 13, 24). For example, the abundant coal deposits whose location Smith indicated in dark gray and black on his map directly fueled the stupendous growth of the British Empire during the nineteenth century, whose insatiable demand for mineral resources increased dramatically as it grew larger in size and power. As the historian On Barak has shown, Britain’s armada of steam-powered warships not only reinforced the empire’s naval supremacy, but it also touched off a race to identify overseas coal deposits to supply the complex network of off-shore bases and refueling depots being constructed across the globe (Barak 2020). As a result, the British dispatched a small army of geologists to render the world’s mineral resources visible to colonial administrators and available for economic extraction.

The legions of survey geologists who were charged with mapping the Empire’s mineral resources often participated in celebrating new scientific discoveries as well. An especially notable case in point occurred when the British East India Company ordered a colonial engineer named Captain Proby Cautley to begin excavating a section of the famed Doab Canal, which led him to unearth abundant coal and lignite deposits in a borderland region located between modern India and Pakistan. Cautley’s work eventually prompted the Scottish physician Hugh Falconer, who had just taken up a post as the assistant surgeon for the EIC in Bengal, to begin exploring the so-called “Siwalik Hills,” where he found rich trove of prehistoric fossils. Relying on manual labor from local people who had long used “Bijili ki har” or “lightning bones” as traditional medicine, Falconer and Cautley disinterred literally tons of vertebrate fossils that caused a sensation throughout the empire. Among many others, this included a giant tortoise named Colossochelys atlas that was widely associated with Hindu traditional knowledge about turtles carrying the world on their back (Chakrabarti 2020; Nair 2005). In other words, what might at first sight appear to have been purely intellectual achievements by scientists without any practical applications were often connected to the imperial history of extractive capitalism.

Of course, not every geologist was directly engaged in mineral extraction and colonial administration. Still, an argument can be made that the very idea of “earth science” rests on the epistemology of empire. For the earth, itself, to be conceptualized as a unified object of knowledge with a single, coherent history, European scientists had to develop techniques that would allow them to cast their gaze over – and into – the entire globe. Such an ambition only took shape once scientists began traveling to distant parts of the world, usually as part of state-sponsored projects to promote imperial expansion along both a vertical and horizontal dimension (Pratt 1992; Anthony 2020). Moreover, the synoptic desire to map the earth’s interior structure and catalogue its most valuable resources would not have been possible without a sophisticated bureaucracy that organized the creation of huge specimen collections housed in well-funded institutions of knowledge production. Examples could be adduced almost indefinitely, ranging from the global network of botanical gardens that sought to acclimatize exotic plants in the name of imperial self-sufficiency (Drayton 2000; Endersby 2008; Schiebinger and Swan 2005; Williams 2021) to the construction of so-called “universal” or “encyclopedic museums” in metropolitan centers of learning like Paris and London (Delbourgo 2017; Hicks 2021; Ratcliff 2016; Sheets-Pyenson 1988). Regardless of the specificities that characterized each of these institutions, their core mission was remarkably similar: to amass large and supposedly comprehensive collections of specimens in a single, circumscribed space, making it possible to gain a synoptic overview of the world’s vast, complex, and abundant natural, cultural, and economic resources (Latour 1986; Delbourgo 2017; Rieppel 2016).

An especially fascinating case in point is the Royal Cabinet of Madrid, which was inaugurated in 1776 after Pedro Franca Dávila persuaded King Carlos III to establish a natural history museum in the Spanish capital. The very same year, Carlos III issued a “Royal Order” instructing local governors throughout the colonial administration to “gather any curious pieces that they may find in their districts” and send them back to the Iberian metropole. In this way, it was hoped that the Royal Cabinet would amass a complete collection of “whatever Nature produces in his Majesty’s vast Domains.” Among many things, this resulted in seven boxes containing the fossil remains of a ponderous quadruped that were found on the estate of Francisco Aparicio near the Luján River being shipped from Buenos Aires to Madrid in 1788. When a series of engravings commissioned by Juan Bautista Bru from the Royal Cabinet made their way to Paris, the French anatomist Georges Cuvier compared them to his specimen collection at the Jardin des Plantes and concluded the massive bones must have belonged to an extinct relative of the modern ground sloth that he christened Megatherium. Eventually, Cuvier went so far as to argue that, given only a single bone, his comparative method allowed paleontologists to reconstruct the entire skeleton of previously unknown organisms with uncanny accuracy, so long as they had a suitably comprehensive collection at their disposal (Dawson 2016; Podgorny 2019; Pimentel 2017).

Cuvier’s daring feat of informed speculation now ranks among the most celebrated events in the founding mythology of vertebrate paleontology, allowing him to proclaim that he had become “a new species of antiquarian” who knew “how to burst the limits of time and … recover the history of the world” from a careful comparison of its fragmentary remains (Cuvier 1812; Rudwick 1997, 183, 185). In other words, earth scientists such as Cuvier explicitly claimed that extracting specimens from distant parts of the world and accessioning them to metropolitan institutions like the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where they could perform synoptic comparisons, would finally allow scientists to begin piecing the earth’s one true creation story together. Hence, as the extraction and accumulation of specimens like the Megatherium fossil plainly shows, practitioners of the earth sciences contributed to the imperial hegemony of powerful states in more ways than one. In addition to being involved in the extraction of valuable resources like coal, their more self-consciously intellectual pursuits were part and parcel of the imperial project as well, making it possible for them to claim epistemic mastery over the entire globe, its interior structure, as well as its deep history.

3 Extractive Capitalism in the United States

So far, this chapter has offered an overview of the material and conceptual entanglement between the earth sciences and European imperialism. In what follows, I want to travel across the Atlantic and take a somewhat closer look at the United States during the long nineteenth century. In part, this choice is informed by my scholarly background and expertise. However, historiographical considerations are at play as well. The territorial reach of the United States increased dramatically during this period, which resulted in violent conflict with many Indigenous Nations. Moreover, white settlers who colonized the North American interior primarily moved west in response to economic incentives, often involving mineral extraction. Imperial expansion and economic extraction also fueled industrialization. As a result, the US economy grew at a stupendous pace during the decades after the Civil War, so much so that by the eve of World War I its industrial output exceeded that of France, Britain, and Germany combined. Taken together, these factors helped make the earth sciences a favorite pursuit among upwardly mobile elites. In turn, that helped to ensure practitioners of the earth sciences would enjoy lavish funding from both the US Federal Government and wealthy philanthropists, whose industrial firms benefited so much from the period’s booming extractive economy.

When British colonists began to settle the eastern coast of North America, they were especially interested in its abundant resources. Hence, it was not long before they began cataloguing the riches one could find in the proverbial “New World.” Hoping that it might encourage others to “helpe forward the Plantation,” for example, William Wood issued a “true, lively, and experimentall description” of Massachusetts Bay in 1634. According to Wood, New England featured the “best ground and sweetest Climate.” It also contained abundant “timber” that “grows straight, and tall,” as well as meadows so full of wild strawberries that “one may gather half a bushel in a forenoon”(Wood 1634, 3, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13). Wood’s text helped to establish a whole genre of similar boosterish catalogues, including Thomas Jefferson’s famous Notes on the State of Virginia (which praised the state’s coal deposits as being of “very excellent quality” (Jefferson 1787, 42)). A third example was by the French nobleman Constantin François Volney, whose (1803) study of North America’s climate and soil included a detailed map that William Maclure went on to use as the basis for the first geological map of the United States. (Like both other texts discussed in this paragraph, Volney’s book also included a lengthy discussion of North America’s Indigenous people.) Although it was not as detailed or sophisticated as Smith’s map of England, Maclure nonetheless hoped that his efforts would yield “many practical advantages,” especially in the “search for coal, gypsum, salt, limestone” and “all kinds of metallic veins and repositories” (Maclure 1818, 4).

Around the time that Maclure published his geological map, the US Federal Government dispatched several armed expeditions to the North American interior. By far the most well-known example was the Corps of Discovery, a special unit of the US Army led jointly by Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark that Jefferson sent to explore the Louisiana purchase. These expeditions were complex enterprises whose brief was to document the natural resources one could find across the continent, to form trading relationships with Native Nations, and to lay claim to vast swaths of territory that, in practice, remained under Indigenous control. In effect, the United States sought to use survey documents to project epistemic power over Indigenous lands, using two-dimensional representations of the continent’s physical geography to assert sovereignty from afar. But survey documents had a more practical purpose as well. By publicizing the location, extent, and abundance of the continent’s valuable resources for economic extraction, they also incentivized white settlers to physically colonize large swaths of territory wherein the United States had only nominal power. To that end, the first decades of the nineteenth century witnessed a concerted effort to map the entirety of North America (Goetzmann 1978; Short 2001; Schwartz 1980). Besides the US Army Corps of Topographical Engineers, much of this work was done by geological surveys, which were initially organized on a state-by-state basis. In addition, the General Land Office, which functioned as something akin to a federal real estate agent and eventually evolved into the Bureau of Land Management, also hired geologists to map the lands that it offered for sale (Ablavsky 2020; Hubbard 2009; Rohrbough 1968).

These efforts increased dramatically during the mid-to-late nineteenth century, especially after the California gold rush of 1848 touched off a mining boom in the North American interior (Paul 1963). The 1859 discovery of immense silver deposits near Virginia City, for example, drew hordes of prospectors to what is now western Nevada. They were joined by wealthy speculators whose capital investments turned the Comstock Lode into one of the world’s largest mining districts, producing upward of $325 million (over $8 billion in today’s currency) in silver over the next several decades (Lucier 2018). The frenzy only increased after the Civil War, especially once a transcontinental railroad was completed in 1868. Without ready access to a reliable means of transporting freight, it did not pay to work even the most lucrative lode. Knowing that an extensive transportation infrastructure was essential to the development of a thriving extractive economy, the US Federal Government invested enormous resources to make these capital-intensive projects attractive to private corporations like the Union Pacific. To that end, it authorized numerous surveys to explore the feasibility of various routes. The United States also helped finance construction directly by issuing government bonds and paying for public bailouts when railroad companies threatened to declare bankruptcy (which they frequently did). Finally, the Federal Government offered generous land grants along proposed railway lines, essentially inducing private developers to fund railway construction with mineral-rich lands dispossessed from Indigenous people (White 2011).

Before the overland route was even completed, the United States Congress dispatched several additional surveys to locate and publicize the vast tracts of mineral lands that were about to be made accessible to extractive industry. The first was led by Clarence King, whose brief was to map the land adjacent to the fortieth parallel (along which the railroad was being built). At the same time, Ferdinand V. Hayden led a team of surveyors into Nebraska, Wyoming, and Colorado. Then, in 1871, two more surveys were sent out from Washington: The Geological and Geographical Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region, led by John Wesley Powell, and the Geographical Surveys West of the One Hundredth Meridian, led by the Army Corps of Engineers Lieutenant George M. Wheeler. Their disparate efforts were consolidated in 1879, when Congress passed legislation to form the US Geological Survey (USGS) under the direction of King, whose exploration of the fortieth parallel was praised as an especially successful example of how federal investment could underwrite the creation of a thriving extractive economy. To that end, King decided that one of the new survey’s first orders of business would involve a thorough investigation of the country’s most lucrative mining districts (which included Eureka and Comstock, as well as Leadville, Colorado), hoping they might serve as a model that could be replicated elsewhere as well (Rabbitt 1979).

The Federal Government also supported basic research without any direct ties to the mineral industry. Long before the US Geological Survey had been established, for example, the United States began building an encyclopedic museum in Washington DC. The impetus that led to its creation was a philanthropic bequest by the English polymath James Smithson, who donated 11 boxes of gold sovereigns toward the foundation of “an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men” (Goode 1897, 20). By the time that its first physical building (the “Castle”) was completed in 1855, the Smithsonian Institution had already amassed a sizable collection, including thousands of specimens the United States Exploring Expedition brought back from the Pacific. The Smithsonian also acquired an immense collection of fossils and minerals, especially after being designated as the official repository for US Government Surveys. Moreover, under the direction of John Wesley Powell (who would go on to lead the USGS), the Smithsonian also embarked on a program to “salvage” the material culture of countless Indigenous people. This effort was informed by a widely shared but erroneous belief that Indigenous cultures were naturally doomed to extinction, which scientists such as Powell believed was a tragic but inevitable consequence of evolutionary “progress” (Dippie 1991; Redman 2021). As a result, the Smithsonian quickly amassed an enormous collection of plants, animals, fossils, and minerals, as well as ethnographic objects and human remains (Hinsley 1994; Oehser 1970).

The Smithsonian’s collections resembled a geological map in that both aimed to provide a totalizing vision of North America and its abundant resources. Maps and specimen collections both also functioned as an expression of bureaucratic authority, engendering the illusion that scientists and government officials could gain mastery over vast areas of geographic space, its biological and cultural diversity, as well as its mineralogical wealth, all without having to leave the comfort and security of the nation’s capital. As Fig. 2 clearly indicates, however, museum curators soon found themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of material under their care. If the task of organizing an enormous specimen collection exceeded the organizational capacity of Smithsonian scientists, the United States found itself even less capable of governing the vast territories to which it lay claim. Indeed, the Federal Government’s inability to control unruly settlers often resulted in violence. During the 1860s, for example, throngs of mineral prospectors began traveling along the Bozeman Trail on their way to the Montana Gold Rush, violating a treaty the United States had negotiated with Plains Indians Tribes in 1851. Tensions especially flared over their habit of harassing the buffalo, respected kin as well as an indispensable source of protein to many tribes in the region. When the US military intervened with shocking brutality, the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Arapaho forged a powerful alliance led by the Lakota headman Mahpiya Luta (Red Cloud). Between 1866 and 1868, the Lakota and their allies won many pitched battles in what came to be known among the American public as Red Cloud’s War, forcing the United States to negotiate a new treaty at Fort Laramie during the summer of 1868. But it was not long before the insatiable desire for mineral wealth led white settlers to violate the terms of the 1868 treaty as well. This resulted in renewed conflicts and eventually culminated in the brutal massacre of some 300 Lakotas (more than two-thirds of whom were women and children) at Wounded Knee (Estes 2019, 89–131; Ostler 2004).

Fig. 2
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Government scientists attempting to organize specimens for the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. (Image NHB-3680, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 95, Box 32, Folder 19)

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The career of Othniel Charles Marsh weaves some of these disparate threads into a single narrative, demonstrating how the scientific study of seemingly arcane topics intersected with the imperial expansion of American capitalism. In addition, Marsh also ties the territorial dispossession of Indigenous people to the extraction of specimens from Native lands. Finally, Marsh had the good fortune of being the nephew of George Peabody, one of nineteenth-century America’s wealthiest business tycoons who endowed a new museum of natural history to secure Marsh a professorship at his alma mater, Yale University. Thus, Marsh brings many of this chapter’s elements into relation, showing how the practice of imperial statecraft, the political economy of modern capitalism, the institutional history of museums and other archival institutions devoted to amassing huge specimen collections, and the intellectual pursuits of earth scientists were all entwined, mutually reinforcing each other during the long nineteenth century.

Let us follow the money: George Peabody established himself as a leading financier during the mid-nineteenth century, principally by marketing railroad bonds to European investors in London. After his retirement in 1864, he passed on his firm to Junius Spencer Morgan, so he could devote all his attention to charitable causes. In addition to founding numerous libraries and institutes – including a music conservatory that is now part of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – he donated large sums toward the creation of several museums, such as the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. At the request of his nephew, Peabody also donated the funds to establish a natural history museum at Yale. He did so on the condition that Yale appoint Marsh as the museum’s first curator of paleontology and grant him an honorary professorship in the college. Within just a few years, Marsh had leveraged his position at Yale – as well as the $100,000 inheritance he received after his uncle’s death in 1869 – to become one of the most widely known and respected geologists in the United States. Thus, when Powell replaced King as Director of the US Geological Survey in 1882, he put Marsh in charge of its Division of Vertebrate Paleontology. Since the USGS was one of the most well-endowed federal agencies at the time, Marsh now had access to almost limitless funds. As a result, he enjoyed a huge advantage in the race to uncover and name the abundant prehistoric fossils that one could find in the North American interior. In turn, Marsh’s success in the field allowed him to compile a series of lavishly illustrated monograph publications, each of which claimed to be last word about a particular group of extinct organisms. Taken together, Marsh’s extensive collection of fossils coupled with his impressive monograph publications aimed to provide a comprehensive account of North America’s deep history, illustrating how present life forms had evolved from their extinct predecessors over vast swaths of geological time (Schuchert and LeVene 1940; Jaffe 2000).

Marsh was a shrewd social climber, and he began making his name as an intrepid geologist through a series of expeditions he organized almost immediately after arriving at Yale. While attending a scientific meeting in Chicago during the summer of 1868, he accepted a complimentary trip on the Union Pacific Railroad to Omaha. “As we passed westward,” Marsh recalled, “I felt sure that entombed in the soft sandy clays … there must be remains of many strange animals new to science” (Schuchert and LeVene 1940, 97). As a result, Marsh decided to lead a group of Yale undergraduates into the North American fossil fields during several seasons starting in 1870. These excursions would prove very successful, yielding many invaluable specimens that Marsh eagerly accessioned to his growing collection at Yale. Among the most notable was a series of toothed birds that Marsh used to establish a phylogenetic link between extinct dinosaurs and modern birds, and which Charles Darwin described as “the best support to the theory of evolution, which has appeared within the last 20 years.”Footnote 1 But these expeditions were more than just a scientific endeavor. They also provided experiences that Marsh used to fashion himself into the masculine figure of an intrepid explorer who helped conquer the western frontier.

Throughout the rest of his life, Marsh developed a reputation for recounting interminable adventure stories to anyone who would listen. These invariably included a confrontation with hostile Indigenous people, necessitating an official escort from the United States army (which detailed William “Buffalo Bill” Cody to accompany the Yale expedition during its first field season). Truth be told, however, the situation was far more complex than Marsh’s grandiose tales of geological adventure let on. In fact, he was absolutely dependent on the extensive knowledge of Native guides, who had long taken a keen interest in the fossilized remains of prehistoric creatures that littered their ancestral hunting grounds (Dussias 1996; Mayor 2005). Relying on Indigenous knowledge, Marsh removed literally tons of valuable fossils from recently conquered tribal lands, accessioned them to the so-called permanent collection of the Peabody Museum, and built a reputation as the foremost expert on North America’s deep history (Bradley 2014). Once they arrived at the museum, these fossils were inserted into a speculative theory of evolutionary progress wherein the extinction of supposedly “primitive races” was believed to open the ecological space for more “advanced” lineages to evolve (Manias 2023; Rieppel 2020), thus helping to supply an ideological foundation for the removal and dispossession of Native people from their ancestral lands (Dippie 1991; Qureshi 2013) (Fig. 3).

Fig. 3
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Othniel Charles Marsh posing with the Oglala Lakota headman Red Cloud while holding a sacred pipe, 1883. (National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

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Although Marsh always insisted that he was only interested in science, Native people had good reason to be wary of this strange foreigner who seemed to exhibit such an unhealthy obsession with fossils. They understood perfectly well the extent to which the “pure” science of geology was entangled with mineral extraction. And Marsh was no exception. For example, when Colonel George Armstrong Custer mounted a military expedition into the Black Hills during the summer of 1874, Marsh was invited along. Although he was busy conducting his own fieldwork that summer, Marsh made sure to send a promising student – George Bird Grinnell – in his stead. Custer’s expedition was in direct violation of the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, and it was designed to engineer a gold rush that would force the US Federal Government to open the Black Hills to mineral prospectors (Ostler 2010). Thus, when Marsh approached Red Cloud and asked for permission to collect fossils in the White River Badlands later that very same summer, it is easy to understand why the Lakota headman was more than a little suspicious. After several days of tense negotiations, Red Cloud only allowed Marsh to proceed under armed escort if he agreed to bring Red Cloud’s complaints about the corruption of local Indian Agents, who routinely embezzled funds the United States had promised his people, to Washington. This agreement allowed Marsh to enter the Badlands and collect specimens for his museum back in New Haven. As these fossils were transported east on the recently constructed transcontinental railroad, they were stripped of their Indigenous meanings and repurposed as evidence for a new, teleological narrative about the history of life on earth (Ruse 1996). Thus, the extraction of specimens worked as a form of temporal dispossession, all the more so since they were subsequently used to rewrite the deep history of lands being colonized by the United States (Schuller 2016).

In addition to the prominent role that earth scientists played in the extraction of epistemic and economic resources, they were also deeply entangled in a process that I have elsewhere described as cultural resource extraction (Rieppel 2019). This was a result of their close connection to some of the period’s most famous philanthropists, of whom George Peabody was a prominent early example. During the decades that followed his endowment of the Yale natural history museum, Peabody’s conspicuous generosity came to be widely admired and imitated among subsequent generations of wealthy elites. The latter were especially keen to be seen as magnanimous benefactors of culture during a period of widespread class conflict. The industrial juggernaut might have been booming at the end of the nineteenth century, but American capitalism was in a state of crisis as well. As the social theorist Henry George famously wrote, “It is as though an immense wedge were being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below it are crushed down” (George 1879, 9). This sentiment was especially widespread among working people, which touched off a wave of labor unrest that could be remarkably violent and bloody, often resulting in pitched battles on the streets of industrial cities such as Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Anxious that incendiary labor leaders might succeed in bringing the industrial economy to its knees, wealthy elites responded with highly visible acts of public munificence that were designed to demonstrate that modern capitalism worked for the good of all mankind, not just the wealthy few (Carnegie 1900).

To make a convincing claim that, through philanthropy, industrial capitalism could generate public goods in addition to profits, it did not suffice for wealthy elites to build monuments to their own vanity. It was absolutely essential for their philanthropic bequests to attract the attention, admiration, and approval of diverse audiences, including working class people. Thus, in addition to constructing grand concert halls for the performance of symphonic music and magnificent art galleries in which to display classical statuary and paintings by European masters, they also invested in more popular sites of public amusement. At the same time, however, rich benefactors of high-brow cultural institutions remained equally anxious to ensure their philanthropic bequests also help them perform their social distinction (Bourdieu 1986; DiMaggio 1982). For that reason, they did not want to be seen as engaging in mere showmanship, treading carefully to avoid the impression of pandering to popular tastes. As luck would have it, they discovered an institution that met all these complex and seemingly contradictory demands. Natural history museums were already developing a hybrid institutional mission that mixed public education with popular amusement and the furtherance of original scientific research (Rader and Cain 2014). Hence, it did not take long for these institutions to become a favored target of philanthropic largesse, which resulted in the creation of several new civic museums of natural history at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to the American Museum in New York, this included the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and the Field Museum in Chicago, all of which engaged in a fierce competition over who could attract a larger and more socially diverse crowd of visitors into their public galleries (Brinkman 2010) (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4
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A massive plant-eating sauropod dinosaur from the North American interior on display in the Hall of Fossil Reptiles, American Museum of Natural History, 1921. (Image ID: 38715)

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Of all the specimens on display in philanthropic museums of natural history, none drew in so many visitors as the spectacular fossils of prehistoric monsters that paleontologists such as Marsh unearthed in the American interior. As the late nineteenth century turned into the early twentieth century, the earth sciences therefore garnered a disproportionate amount of financial support. The menagerie of extinct life forms that geologists disinterred were not just immensely popular, it also garnered a great deal of social and intellectual prestige. Indeed, geology and paleontology were widely regarded as the most notable and successful branches of American science during this period. Finally, their close ties to the mineral industry offered a welcome opportunity to transform what might otherwise have been a purely utilitarian enterprise into a noble scientific pursuit. For wealthy elites whose vast fortune was often a direct product of economic extraction, philanthropic support of the earth sciences thus offered an especially promising means to distance themselves from the rude and uncultivated aspects of commercial culture. Finally, philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie often invoked popular theories of evolutionary progress to naturalize the political history of capitalism, claiming that one and the same “developmental” process explained how prehistoric fossils gave rise to more advanced organisms and agrarian societies begat the political economy of modern capitalism (Rieppel 2020). Thus, wealthy capitalists who had grown rich from the exploitation of North America’s abundant natural resources discovered a way to extract social legitimacy from the deep past as well.

4 Conclusion

By way of conclusion, I want to offer a final reflection on how the earth sciences helped shape the temporalities of modern capitalism. As the historian Martin Rudwick has shown, the geological concept of deep time is based on the once-revolutionary idea that human history and geological history take place on radically different timescales (Rudwick 2005, 2008). During the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, European naturalists such as Georges Cuvier theorized that our planet is unfathomably old, existing on a temporal register that is almost incomprehensible to a comparatively short-lived species such as ourselves. Cuvier also argued that Earth history is episodic, linear, and punctuated by catastrophic upheavals that he likened to revolutions, claiming that “nature has also had its civil wars, and the surface of the globe has been upset by successive revolutions and various catastrophes” (Cuvier 1812; Rudwick 1997, 186). Although subsequent geologists, Charles Lyell most famously among them, argued in favor of a more “uniformitarian” vision of the deep past, the scientific community has by and large come to embrace the idea that catastrophes like meteor impacts and volcanic eruptions were a decisive factor in the mass extinction events that are used as convenient markers to divide earth history into discrete geological epochs (Sepkoski 2020). Geologists thus came to regard our planet as dumbfoundingly old and the deep past as almost incomprehensible alien. In turn, this created a radical discontinuity between human history and earth history, implying that deep time constituted nature’s own temporality and rendering prehistory as an extraterritorial space that is completely divorced from human culture and politics (Chakrabarti 2020; Rieppel and Chang 2023).

The temporal chasm opened by the invention of deep time created a moral caesura as well, marking an ethical rift between geological events and human affairs. In a fascinating account of the profound effect this had on the historical imagination, Lydia Barnett observes that “[o]nce the planet’s timescale deepened into the prehuman past, there was no longer a clearly defined role for humanity in earth’s history, either as agents of geological change or as the victims or beneficiaries of its aftermath.” In this way, she continues, the enlightenment science of modern geology “paved the way for Romantic conceptions of nature as wild, alien, and completely elusive of the human” (Barnett 2019, 194). There is a deep irony here. While its inventors understood the immense scale of the prehistory as a means to express awe for the stupendous power of nature, they inadvertently created the moral foundations for its exploitation as well. As I have tried to suggest throughout this chapter, the connection between these dynamics is far from coincidental. If extractive capitalism is characterized by lack of reciprocity, it requires an intellectual foundation to justify exploitation. Here too, the earth sciences did important work. By casting the creation of so-called “natural resources” into a temporal realm that is utterly divorced from our own, the invention of deep time created the conditions for thinking the earth as unworthy of reciprocal care.

As humans began grappling with the reality that extractive capitalism is fundamentally unsustainable, earth scientists proposed that our species has entered a new epoch in which we have been elevated to the level of a “geological force” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Steffen et al. 2007; Chakrabarty 2009). What dystopian narratives about the so-called “Anthropocene” often leave unanswered, however, is the question of how we might enter into more nurturing relationships with what Zoe Todd describes as our “fossil kin” (Todd Forthcoming). And doing that will require a temporal order fundamentally at odds with the imperial project of extractive capitalism. Instead of a linear time marked by repeated catastrophes which produce the sorts of “golden spikes” that the Anthropocene discourse requires, the sustainable relationship that critical theorists like Todd ask us to cultivate with the earth is more likely to emerge from an embrace of what the philosopher Kyle Whyte describes as “spiraling time.” This is an “intergenerational time,” Whyte explains, wherein the needs of one’s ancestors and descendants are equally present with the demands of the now (Whyte 2018). Thus, whereas geologists such as Cuvier and Marsh embraced a teleological narrative wherein extinction was required for evolutionary advancement, Whyte’s concept of spiraling time engenders a radically different temporal disposition, creating a sense of inter-generational responsibility that invites us to understand the past, present, and future as inextricably inter-linked and inter-dependent.