The Ends of the World-System: Resource Scarcity and Population Panics from Chesney to London

This dissertation seeks to understand the conditions of hegemonic transfer, in the case of world-historical cycles of accumulation, through investigating the cultural production of the period. I examine turn of the century British and American science fiction to more fully comprehend the historical situation of imperial decline, and find that a concern with the possibility of resource depletion and imminent future “overpopulation” of racialized people, specifically Chinese people, lie at the heart of cultural understandings of the turmoil which the British-led world economic, social, and political system had entered. I thus study its science fictional imaginations of the future, mainly constellated around the threat of social collapse occasioned by future war, invasion, or resource scarcity, then emergent in order to elucidate how cultural production narrates the historical tendencies of intensifying industrialization, the formation of the military-industrial complex, economic stagnation, and increasing imperial instability. Given that the US-led world-system has itself has seemingly entered protracted decline, and as “overpopulation” once more emerges as a prominent social problem, especially as imbricated within global climate collapse, this dissertation contributes to a more thorough understanding of the present through comparison with a historically analogous cultural instance.