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While industrial states competed to colonize Asia and Africa in the nineteenth century, conversion to Christianity was replaced by a civilizing mission. This new secular impetus strode hand in hand with racial capitalism in the age of empires: a terrestrial paradise was to be achieved through accumulation and the ravaging of nature.
Far from a defence of religion,
The States of the Earth argues that phenomena such as evangelism and political Islam are best understood as products of empire and secularization. In a world where material technology was considered divine, religious and secular forces both tried to achieve Heaven on Earth by destroying Earth itself.
List of contents
Preface to the English-language editionAcknowledgementsPrologueIntroduction
1. The Republic Converts to Islam: The French Expedition to Egypt and Its Afterlives
2. Giving Birth to the Universal: How the Colonization of Africa Secularized Europe
3. Race and the Inconvertible: On Apartheid in North Africa
4. Anatomy of the Fossil State: Geopolitics of Climate in Europe and Beyond
5. Gospels of the Reich: Th e Eastern Question and the Jewish Question
6. A Circle of Returns: Towards a Critique of Imperiality
Epilogue
Index
About the author
Mohamed Amer Meziane is a philosopher and historian. He is the Robert Gale Noyes Assistant Professor of Humanities at Brown University. Through a sustained dialogue with the legacies of Hegel, Marx and Fanon, he examines how the Fall of Heaven overturned the Earth. His first book The States of the Earth (La Découverte 2021, Verso Books 2024) won the Albertine Prize for non-fiction in 2023. His second book (Au bord des mondes, VdE, 2023) is a philosophical critique of the "ontological turn" and his third book will soon be published by the Éditions du Seuil.
Summary
HOW THE DISENCHANTMENT OF EMPIRE LED TO CLIMATE CHANGE
