The States of the Earth

How did disenchantment lead to climate change? The States of the Earth argues that European empires became secular as they entered the age of coal, using Orientalism as a means of racialising the Other.

While industrial states began colonising parts of Asia and Africa in the aftermath of the French Revolution, the massive conversion of natives to Christianity waned in favour of the civilising mission. The critique of Heaven has thus overturned the Earth through empire and racial capitalism.

Our globalised civilisation has not been able to rid itself of Heaven but has decided to search for it on Earth by accumulating growth through the devastation of nature. The secular age is therefore a fossil age and the Anthropocene, a Secularocene.

Far from defending religion against a disenchanted modernity, this book suggests that phenomena such as evangelism or political Islam should be seen as products of empire and secularisation. Religions themselves have adapted to a world in which steam and railways were considered divine.