Imperialism In The 19th Century

The 19th century guano/nitrates trade illustrates the emergence of a global metabolic rift, as guano and nitrates were relocated from Peru and Chile to enrich the soils of Britain and other imperial countries. This global metabolic rift created the decline of soil fertility in Britain and importation of Chinese “Cooley” labor to Peru, (Foster 359-361), through a law that was coercing, deceiving and even kidnapping Chinese for the slave trade. They were in such inhumane labor conditions that most of them had a very short life span, and many of those who survived were escaping their conditions by suicide.
Moreover, a rift developed through mass export of natural fertilizer caused degradation of the Peruvian/Chilean environment, war over possession
Imperialism is a continuous, expansionary drive to accumulate resources to invest in the capitalist global economy, structured as a global-world-system, with an international division of labor, causing unemployment in rich countries and a restricted top of hierarchy that guarantees the economic domination of the colonized countries.
The rise in overt capitalistic imperialism, carried out through militarism, in the twenty-first century, can essentially be attributed to attempts by the dominant interests of the world economy to gain control over diminishing world oil supplies (Foster 201): “Whether it is the renewed scramble for Africa, the flooding of global commons with carbon dioxide, or biopiracy aimed at third world germplasm, ecological imperialism is endemic within a global economy predicated on accumulation” (Foster
An economic and social system, that must either grow or die, became dependent on fossil carbon to power its growth, and the history of capitalism since then has been marked by its ever-increasing use of coal, gas and oil which are the main anthropogenic factors of global warming. The increasing reliance on fossil carbons began in the Industrial Revolution, but when scientists at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) undertook the detailed work of quantifying the changes in the Earth System that define the Anthropocene, they discovered an unexpected pattern. In almost every case, graphs of long-term trends in the Earth System, atmospheric carbon dioxide, ozone depletion, species extinctions and loss of forests show gradual growth from 1750 to about 1950, when a steep increase began (Angus