THERE ARE AT LEAST two things a historian should do in a book billed as an environmental history of capitalism: Center the environment, and demonstrate an understanding of capitalism. In his new book, Profit: An Environmental History, Mark Stoll does neither.
The text is massive in scope. It begins with the earliest genus of and ends aboard Jeff Bezos’ private spacecraft, progressing through a series of vignettes of the merchants, inventors and entrepreneurs Stoll writes represent “the opening of … significant new stage(s) of capitalism.” However, the figures he chooses
