The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection by Mark W. Driscoll

Reviewed by: The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection by Mark W. Driscoll Paul D. Barclay (bio) The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection. By Mark W. Driscoll. Duke University Press, 2020. xii, 367 pages. $109.95, cloth; $29.95, paper; $29.95, E-book. This book-length exposé of the evils attending British, French, and U.S. imperialism in China and Japan reads like an academic counterpart to Roy Harper's 1970 folk-rock anthem "I Hate the White Man." Harper, a white British devotee of American blues music, composed his broadside after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., at a time of widespread disgust at the U.S. neocolonial invasion of Vietnam. Mark Driscoll's study updates, expands upon, and appends a prodigious scholarly apparatus to Harper's [End Page 251] jeremiad. In idiosyncratic prose laced with neologisms, inventive uses of punctuation, and vulgar slang, Driscoll recounts episodes of Euro-white perpetrated ecological devastation, racist violence, arms trafficking, sexual predation, and narcotics dealing in East Asia. These practices are of a piece, as part and parcel of a uniquely noxious strain of nineteenth-century imperialism, or "what Marx called white racial capitalism's 'ruthless terrorism'" (p. 86). For Driscoll, Western gunboats propagate an economic system and ethos to East Asia "in which nonliving minerals, most women, nonwhite humans, and extrahuman nature are all alienated and reduced to 'raw' materials" (p. 4). The Anglo-Chinese clashes surrounding 1839 represent the spear tip of an invasive military-industrial complex. Thereafter, "wealth [was redistributed] from the carbon-neutral Sinocentric trading area to the carbon-intensive capitalism of Climate Caucasianism" (p. 12). One tradition of history writing about treaty-port relations emphasizes prolonged contests over terms of trade, conditions of residence, and the apportioning of jurisdiction. The negotiations, threats, and foot dragging that occurred between wily samurai officials, Mandarins, foreign consuls, missionaries, and merchants on both sides of the East-West divide conjure up a world of chaos, adaptability, and even opportunity. Michael R. Auslin's Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy (Harvard University Press, 2004), Kirk W. Larsen's Tradition, Treaties, and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Chosŏn Korea, 1850–1910 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2008), and Pär Cassel's Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012) are examples. By demonstrating that East Asian agency, ingenuity, and sovereign power persisted and even thrived in the face of Western gunboat diplomacy, these works have perhaps soft-pedaled the violence and brutality that begat the creation of international treaty ports in East Asia. Driscoll, in contrast, dwells at length upon and thickly describes incidents of extralegal violence meted out by Euro-Americans in nineteenth-century China and Japan. He characterizes treaty ports as zones of "enclosure" wherein single-minded invaders dominate and terrorize local populations (pp. 37–38, 66, 86–88). As Driscoll explains, "individualistic Euro-whites who trafficked contraband drugs and weapons to China exhibited a paranoid fear of everyone involved with the business, combined with a homicidal amorality" (p. 11). According to the eco-Marxist viewpoint championed by Driscoll, "primitive accumulation both severs humans from nature and rips them from the land where they could reproduce themselves sustainably and … delivers them into unsustainable worlds where they are dependent on the owners of capital for their livelihoods" (p. 14). The upshot, in world-historical terms, was that "Chinese and Japanese elites were compelled to intensify their [End Page 252] own endogenous practices of extraction and mimic Euro-white templates" (p. 16). The effects on the planet have been devasting. With an eye toward understanding the origins of today's extractive capitalism in the form of mountain-top removal for coal, hydraulic fracturing for gas, and deep-water drilling for oil, I will show how the agents of Climate Caucasianism in Asia in the nineteenth-century … were fixated on what they could expropriate from a specific environment, with no consideration for giving back or replenishing. (p.16) The East Asian "endogenous practices" that were transformed by the white invasion are characterized as "eco-ontologies," which...