People usually treat as starting simultaneously with the industrial era. A better date range puts it earlier:
That’s an important and. Situating coal’s epoch-making capacities within class and
colonial relations predating steampower’s dominance yields an alternative periodization.
British-led industrialization unfolded through the linked processes of agricultural revolu-
tion at home and abroad – providing the labor-power for industry by expelling labor
from domestic agriculture and, in the case of the West Indian sugar colonies, channeling
capital surpluses into industrial development (Brenner 1976; Blackburn 1998). The possi-
bilities for the ‘prodigious development of the productive forces’ flowed through the
relations of power, capital and nature forged in early capitalism.
[…]
The erasure of capitalism’s early-modern origins, and its extraordinary reshaping of global
natures long before the steam engine, is therefore significant in our work to develop an
effective radical politics around global warming … and far more than global warming
alone! Ask any historian and she will tell you: how one periodizes history powerfully
shapes the interpretation of events, and one’s choice of strategic relations. Start the clock
in 1784, with James Watt’s rotary steam engine (Crutzen 2002a), and we have a very differ-
ent view of history – and a very different view of modernity – than we do if we begin with
the English and Dutch agricultural revolutions, with Columbus and the conquest of the
Americas, with the first signs of an epochal transition in landscape transformation after 1450.
People usually treat as starting simultaneously with the industrial era. A better date range puts it earlier:
(middle of the 15th century)