The workshop engaged with the novel concept of the Long Acceleration. The Great Acceleration has become a standard framing model to understand the sharp increase in human planetary impacts after 1950. The Great Acceleration hypothesis is backed up by significant scientific data modeling, captured in iconic charts on socio-economic and Earth system trends. In this workshop, we put our focus on the deeper causes and antecedents of the post-1950 takeoff. We wanted to be diagnostic rather than descriptive by asking: What accelerated during the Great Acceleration, by whom, how and why? How can we explain its origins and roots? Understanding the conditions of possibility for the Great Acceleration requires systematically studying the antecedents and drivers of earlier trends, considering combined environmental, technological, political, economic, cultural, and intellectual causes in what Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and Moritz von Brescius call the "Long Acceleration". This complimentary model posits that the catalysts behind the Great Acceleration emerged during the extended period between the Sugar Revolution of the 1640s and the Second World War, and in particular from around the 1870s onward. This promises significant intellectual reward, as important historical turning points and antecedents took place in earlier periods—a fact many proponents of the Great Acceleration acknowledge but rarely investigate. As early as the late 19th century, the workshop showed, observers became increasingly aware of economic acceleration, including concomitant biophysical disturbances, as technological breakthroughs made it possible to imagine radically different futures beyond the limits of organic societies, thus fostering cornucopian ideologies of perpetual growth and rising living standards and setting industrial societies on a destructive/unsustainable trajectory, whose intellectual and material legacies continue to shape global environmental, economic and political predicaments today.

Moritz von Brescius is a global historian of Europe and Asia from the late eighteenth century to the present, focusing on resource and environmental history, economic history, and science and empire studies in global and comparative perspective. He has received an SNSF Consolidator Grant for the project “The Battle of Materials: Commodity ‘Research and Propaganda’ and the Road to Immoderate Consumption, 1900–1980.”