In the nineteenth century, western European travellers regarded the Basque country as a testing ground for ideas of ‘civilisation’, progress and decline. The region, with its ‘noble’ yet ‘savage’ people and its ‘modern’ yet ‘corrupted’ tourist industry, represented perfectly the tensions that littérateurs felt between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism’ and progress and decline. On the one hand, writers elevated the ‘primitiveness’ of the Basques to an expression of ancient virtue and morality, which they contrasted with the dissolution of morals of contemporary commercial society, as they witnessed it on the beaches of Biarritz and the spa towns of the Basses-Pyrénées. On the other, they condemned the Basques’ same ‘primitiveness’ by associating it with notions of barbarism, anti-historicism and anti-patriotism. The imagology that derived from travel writing popularised a series of exaggerated stereotypes that came to characterise both the way in which Europeans perceived the Basque country and the manner in which, to an extent, the Basques presented themselves to outsiders.

Carbon emissions are the greatest environmental threat facing the planet and have been subject to ever more stringent regulation in recent decades. The UK, EU, and even the notoriously lagging US have made significant strides in changing the direction of their emissions, apparently bending down curves that had strained ever upwards for centuries. Yet the majority of these gains are a fallacy: a product of richer nations diminishing their share of global industry and ‘outsourcing’ carbon-intensive processes to the global South. These outsourced emissions now account for a quarter of global CO2 emissions, a figure that highlights the scale of wealthy nations’ ability to move emissions off their environmental books. There is even a name for this practice. The ability to effectively outsource emissions from richer to poorer nations has been described as ‘carbon colonialism’. Wealthier countries, overwhelmingly responsible for climate change both historically and currently, have set the terms of carbon mitigation at the negotiating table. Naturally, these terms favour the biggest emitters, allowing larger economies to offshore production processes to smaller ones, whilst maintaining the economic fruits of that production. In an era of global climate breakdown, this is as avoidable as it is pointless, yet the persistence of this line of thinking speaks to a centuries-old mindset. In a globalised system of unequal power, it is sufficient simply to outsource environmental problems like carbon. Bring in what is necessary and out, across the border goes (or stays) the rest.

The French Revolution turned Euskara into an obstacle to national unity by associating French with the language of the Enlightenment, the Rights of Man and the mission civilisatrice, and regional languages with clericalism, superstition and backwardness. Such Revolutionaries as the abbé Grégoire and Bertrand Barère were the first to equate Basque identity with religious fanaticism, a connection that had short- and long-term consequences. In the short term, accusations of fanaticism prompted the représentants en mission to develop a paranoid fear of the counterrevolutionary potential of the Basque clergy, leading them to commit terrorist acts of retaliation against both non-juror priests and the lay population. In the long term, radical republicans at the turn of the twentieth century, seeing themselves as the heirs of the First Republic, associated clericalism and multilingualism with national division and targeted the influence of the Church on education as a major impediment to national unity and patriotism. While from Thermidor to the 1880s the relationship between the clergy and the French state was mostly peaceful, at the beginning of the Third Republic Basque conservatives responded to the perceived war on religion by turning Euskara into the ultimate defender of their Catholic faith and their ancestral traditions against the République sans Dieu.

We are used to the idea that climate vulnerability depends on geography, that certain parts of the world are more exposed to floods, droughts, or sea-level rise, and their populations are more exposed as a result. Yet, in reality, geography is only a part of the story. Within any given place, whether it be London or the Sri Lankan highlands, our experience of the climate is far from universal. Monsoon rains, even landslides, mean something quite different to someone surrounded by sturdy walls than they do to a person whose ceiling is in danger of collapsing. Economic inequality, the result of a long history of unequal accumulation, is the single biggest determinant of how climate change impacts the world’s populations. The poorer you are, the more vulnerable to climate change you are. If your livelihood is precarious, then you are climate precarious. Whether shivering in the safety of a London flat or braving the frontline of the climate crisis in the monsoon-lashed highlands of Sri Lanka, the environment we experience depends upon who we are and what we have.

All of us now depend on a globalised system of production that connects people and environments across thousands of miles. Clothing worn in Europe and the US is made in Bangladesh, Cambodia, or China. Raw materials are mined in one country, refined in another, and manufactured in a third. This is the global factory: a system of international production that has exploded in size and complexity in the last five decades, boosted by logistical innovation. Yet, despite its newfound interconnectedness, the roots of this system can be traced far further back in time, to the systems of unequal resource extraction set in place during the colonial era and which still dominate the power dynamics of global trade. This chapter will show how the rise of the global factory, in its colonial and post-colonial incarnations, is not, as it is often presented, a question of building up, but of breaking down: of people from nature, nature from itself, and of natural value from culture. The slow death of nature this instigates makes the labour force staffing the global factory self-sustaining, as the deepening pressures on rural livelihoods swell the crowds outside the factory gates a little more. Each flood, each drought, each unpredictable period of rainfall increases the pressure still further on workers in the global South, who have little choice but to accept the terms and conditions they are offered.

When it comes to climate change, the phrase ‘we’re all in it together’ is as widespread as it is misleading. Despite the language of inclusion, the ability to meaningfully participate in the direction of global climate governance is tightly controlled and grossly unequal. The global North dominates climate scholarship and advocacy, admitting only an elite few to participate. When it comes to the environment, this infrastructure of knowledge keeps the world moving on its current track, amplifying the voices of the status quo whilst denying alternative pathways a platform. And it is tremendously powerful. The rich world has no need to use force when it retains the capacity to set values. The dominance of rich nations’ environmental agendas not only shapes policy, but also sets the boundaries of what is possible in environmentalism. The terms of engagement with nature are set elsewhere and access to the environmental conversation often tightly constrained by economic circumstances. Long before the environment can be spoken for, the question of who gets to speak has already been decided. This chapter examines the voices that are excluded, what they have to say, and how climate policy might be different if we listened.

The global factory is consuming the planet. On the one hand, a vast increase in the rate of globalisation has seen once-domestic manufacturing processes extended across vast tracts of space, with multiple nations now involved in the production of a single product. Making room for all this production – and the consumption to which it is linked – has seen huge tracts of land repurposed for industry and agriculture: a process of global ecological destruction which has seen a 70 per cent decline in the global population of species since 1970. The result of all this is rising temperatures and the enhanced risk of natural hazards this brings. Yet, as fast as these processes accelerate, narratives of sustainability progress proliferate still faster: comforting myths that hide the dirtiest parts of the global factory from the eyes of the many people who would be horrified to know the truth. These myths are so widespread that they can feel inescapable. They are like mile-high walls around genuine change and meaningful action. Yet it doesn’t have to be this way. The way we view the world is a political choice, and like any political choice it can be unmade, if it can first be identified. Building on the lessons of the book so far, this final chapter presents six underlying myths that shape public and policy understanding of climate change. By shedding a new light on key axioms of climate thinking, these six myths are intended to unsettle our certainties, and reveal the blind spots in our understanding of environmental breakdown and the enormous injustices that lurk within them.

The French Revolution transformed the notion of ‘Basqueness’ from an economic to a cultural feature. Under the ancien régime, local Basque elites defined the exceptionalism of their respective pays on the basis of such distinctive attributes as their ancient history, their peculiar language and their mœurs, which came to form the basis of Basque cultural identity after 1789. Nevertheless, when facing the French state before the Revolution, they employed such tropes of identity almost exclusively to defend local privileges, in particular fiscal exemption, from the increasing centralisation of the French state. The reforms of the early phase of the Revolution, especially the abolition of privileges and the reconfiguration of administrative France into départements, prompted Basque elites to reimagine the position of the old Basque pays within the new model of nation-state. The result was a transformation of the meaning of Basque exceptionalism from an economic feature within the ancien-régime French state to a separate linguistic and cultural entity within the emerging order founded upon notions of citizenship and nationhood.

One of the central myths of our global economy is the idea of leading economies such as the UK having advanced beyond the dark and polluting days of industrial production. This is an idea promoted in both scholarship and culture, with post-industrial aesthetics celebrating the repurposing of former industrial spaces as sites of leisure and creativity. Yet, as this chapter shows, much of what appears to be progress is in reality a sideways movement, with the majority of industrial manufacturing sites in the global North remaining necessary, but having shifted to the global South. This hidden world of global production is the new frontier of the fight against climate breakdown. Not only does it undermine our ability to tackle global emissions, but smaller-scale impacts, too, are hidden amidst the complex logistics of our global production networks. In effect, climate change impacts, including the slow-burn disasters of droughts and floods, are outsourced by rich countries to producer countries in the global South. This introductory chapter will outline the disconnect between global narratives emphasising progress on sustainability and the dirty realities of contemporary production. As it explains, the global economy is not becoming greener, but better at hiding its impacts, channelling the worst effects of pollution and carbon emissions into complex international supply chains that are beyond the reach of regulators.

By means of archival documents, newspapers and a variety of printed sources, this book studies the French Basque country’s process of acquisition of a folkloric regional identity in the long nineteenth century. It maintains that, albeit originating in pre-‘modern’ customs, such stereotypical identity was not the product of ancestral tradition. It was invented in the nineteenth century as part of France’s process of nation-building. The book analyses the role of local and European intellectuals, state authorities and the Basque population in the creation of a ‘modern’ Basque regional identity in the nineteenth century. It identifies the turning point in the French Revolution of 1789. The replacement of privilege with language as the marker of identity in provincial France prompted the local notability to develop a new interest in local culture. Such transition influenced scholars’ approach to Basque literature and philology, as well as Franco-Basque relations in the army, in education and in the tourist industry. The book contributes to a growing body of historiography that regards Europe’s regional identities as both a product of the age of nationalism and an inherent aspect of nation-building. The relationship between the region and the nation, though, was complicated. On the one hand, regional culture favoured the integration of the French Basque provinces into the French nation-state. On the other, it strengthened local pride and French Basques’ relations with their Spanish Basque neighbours. Since 1789, then, it has created tensions that expose the strengths and weaknesses of the unitary model of French nationhood.

The Basque phase of the First Carlist War (1833–40) popularised a representation of the Basque country as the cradle of such conservative values as collective liberty, religion and tradition. In France, two main figures associated Carlism with the Basques. The first group were the legitimists, who had been ousted from power in 1830 and regarded the Basque country’s pro-Carlist position as their new hope for the restoration of absolutism in Europe. The other, at a local level, was the French Basque political intellectual Augustin Chaho, who supported Carlism as a way of protecting the Basque country from centralisation. Although legitimists and Chaho operated with different goals in mind, they produced a similar characterisation of the Basque country as a land of liberty, faith and tradition, aspects which became key to Basque political identity in the second half of the nineteenth century.