The history of the European empire is conventionally told as one of empires, of kings and conquerors, of a flag planted in foreign soil and dominant cultures. But beneath these mythic models of power and missions was something far more elemental and necessary: an unadulterated, raw hunger. It was hunger not so much for riches or land itself, but for the very building materials of our world.
The search for certain chemical elements—the matter builders—reshaped the world's map, drove the machinery of exploitation, and established an international web of extraction whose legacy can be followed today. The demand for gold, silver, salt, nitrates, and finally coal and petroleum was the ever-present goad to drive ships across oceans and armies across continents. It was all about gold.
For Spanish conquistadors landing in America, gold was not just currency; gold was a madness at the precipice of madness. It was a force believed to possess quasi-magical powers, a representation of divine right and absolute power.
The quest for El Dorado, a golden city, pushed expeditions deep within South American rainforests, massacring native civilizations and losing thousands of lives. Its titanic silver mines in present-day Bolivia were a ghastly killing machine driven by the slave labor of natives and Africans.
Gold extracted from that mountain ran so plentifully into the European economy that it funded empires and wars, and even built the original world trade routes to Asia. Au (gold) and Ag (silver) on the periodic table were not ideals but were directly responsible for genocide, slavery, and the complete reconstitution of the population and culture of a continent themselves. But the need for materials went far beyond precious metals.
It was substances and materials required for existence and mastery. Salt (NaCl), to take a specific case, was more than just a spice. It was a preservation requirement, the sole method of preventing meat and fish from putrefaction in the pre-refrigeration age. Mastery of salt mines equated to mastery of alimentary supply and life. Salt was so valuable in Africa that it was traded for its weight in gold.
European colonizers set their sights on obtaining trade routes and salt pans, recognizing that this apparently harmless substance was the key to military and economic dominance. It permitted navies to enable ships to go on long journeys with provisions consumable enough for survival, and was a product that could be sold to expanding cities at home. Perhaps the most vivid case of this primal urge is the history of nitrates.
In the 19th century, soil chemistry and science revealed that nitrogen was an essential nutrient for plants. With the population of Europe expanding exponentially, farmers required strong fertilizers so that they could plant sufficient food to avoid hunger. Elevated deposits of sodium nitrate, or saltpeter, existed in the extremely dry Atacama Desert, followed by Peru and Bolivia.
This crop, being as valuable as a fertilizer and also being part of gunpowder, was "white gold." The need for nitrates in Peru and Bolivia led to the War of the Pacific (1879-1884), which was won by Chile with British financial assistance against Peru and Bolivia, so that it could have the nitrate fields. Bolivia lost its Pacific outlet and was left landlocked, a spolder of geopolitics born merely out of rivalry over one specific chemical compound hidden in desert soil. The same appetite fueled another form of brutal, industrialized farming.
The Caribbean and the Southern United States experienced a "hunger" for the ideal combination of resources: sunshine, rain, and good soil, driven by sugar demand. In the drive to supply Europe's voracious sweet tooth, stretches of land were converted into monoculture plantations. This system of agriculture was so destructive and exploitative that it created a bottomless appetite for a second commodity: human life as a commodity, traded as property. The transatlantic slave trade was, in a ghastly direct manner, a supply chain to the system of sugar plantations. The hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms of the sugar molecule had created one of the most shameful transgressions of humanity, the economic stimulus. Industrialization imparted the hunger a new element: an insatiable appetite for energy.
Rocky, carbonaceous coal replaced wood and was the blood of the empire. The steamboats would be able to move more often and faster than sailing boats, so the troops would be able to deploy earlier, along with having the ability to exert more control over overseas colonies. The factories were operated by the steam engine that transformed raw colonial output—Indian cotton or African rubber, for example—into finished production.
The need for coaling stations—ports through which ships could be recoalized—was a powerful incentive to capture islands and coastlands along the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. Control of energy resources meant control of the world. Before long, the thirst for energy turned to oil.
Petroleum, a complex mixture of hydrocarbons, is the new strategic commodity. Its vast energy content rendered it perfect for the new war machines and commercial transport vehicles: tanks, aircraft, and automobiles. The Middle East, a peripheral concern to empires before, was overnight made the most strategically vital portion of the globe as a result of the vast petrochemical reservoirs buried beneath its desert sands.
The colonial state border lines of present-day Middle Eastern states, the linear lines which European diplomacy has conventionally utilized, honor the post-Ottoman colonial partitioning of such petroleum-containing areas. The political strife and violence that have functioned to destabilize the area during the last century have primarily been an extension of the colonial competition over this single natural resource. All of this was necessitated by an economic order that conceived of the entire world in some sort of raw materials alchemy that could be developed for the advantage of a far-off metropole.
Colonies were plantations and mines, not friends or even conquered countries to be assimilated; they were measured in tons of ore, bales of cotton, sacks of sugar, and barrels of oil. This extractive culture desecrated Aboriginal environments, stripping land, polluting mining streams, and denuding islands of forest.
It also desecrated cultures, squeezing on-the-ground customary ways that were typically attuned to their own indigenous components with an export-and-profit economy.
And finally, ideology, religion, and patriotism provided colonialism's justification, but its motivation was elemental hunger.
The relentless quest by some atoms and organisms—gold, silver, salt, nitrates, coal, and petroleum—drove the exploitative machine and fueled its expansion. It was a quest for material bits of the world capable of conferring power, wealth, and security. This appetite remapped the world, created and destroyed states, and fashioned a world economic system founded upon inequality and exploitation.
To comprehend the modern world—its borders, its wealth and inequalities, and its geostrategic rivalries—trace the route of these commodities, from the depths of Potosí's belly mine to the Gulf's oil fields, and reflect on the gigantic truth that seeking the elements of the periodic table is a forceful, and sometimes cataclysmic, power in human history.