List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors 1. Introduction, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, John Brewer, Neil Fromer and Frank Trentmann Part 1 Making Scarcity 2. Scarcity: Language and Politics, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal 3. Untangling Scarcity, Amber Huff and Lyla Mehta 4. Rethinking the Relationships between Scarcity, Poverty and Hunger: An Anthropological Perspective, Richard Wilk 5. Renewable Energy: A Story of Abundance and Scarcity, Neil Fromer Part 2 The Power of Projection 6. Growth in the Anthropocene, Fredrik Albritton Jonsson 7. The Great Resources Myth, David Rutledge 8. Escapology, or How to Escape Malthusian Traps, Jörg Friedrichs Part 3 Coping, Managing, Innovating at Different Scales 9. U.S. Mobilization during the Second World War as a Model for Coping with Climate Change, Hugh Rockoff 10. Scarcity and Innovation: Lessons from the British Economy during the U.S. Civil War, W. Walker Hanlon 11. China’s Great Leap Famine: Malthus, Marx, Mao and Material Scarcity, Sigrid Schmalzer 12. Encounters with Scarcity at a Micro-Scale: Householders’ Responses to Drought as a Continuum of Normal Practice, Heather Chappells Part 4 Dynamics of Distribution 13. A Climate of Scarcity: Electricity in India, 1899–2016, Elizabeth Chatterjee 14. Lagos ‘Scarce-City’: Investigating the Roots of Urban Modernity in a Colonial Capital, 1900–1928, David Lamoureux 15. Energy Shortages and the Politics of Time: Resilience, Redistribution and ‘Normality’ in Japan and East Germany, 1940s–1970s, Hiroki Shin and Frank Trentmann 16. Food Shortages: The Role and Limitations of Markets in Resolving Food Crises during the 2012 Famine in the Sahel, Emma C. Stephens Acknowledgements Index

Scarcity is no longer just an axiom that governs the narrow world of modern economics; Scarcity in the Modern World reveals a socially, politically, and economically constructed condition in constant tension with the biophysical world. As the mantra of infinite growth in a finite world governs modern capitalism, scarcity threatens to have profound, if not devastating, effects on human life. Spanning cultures, continents, and academic disciplines, this timely anthology richly historicizes climate change and resource exhaustion, as well as proposes creative ways to conceptualize future solutions. This book serves as model for how interdisciplinary scholarship can productively address critical challenges facing humanity.