Alf Hornborg

The concept of ‘industrial society’ is generally used for a type of social organization based on mass production of commodities. This type of societies began to dominate Western Europe toward the end of the eighteenth century, reflecting a strategy to expand export production in order to appropriate embodied labor and resources from elsewhere in the world-system. Perceived as progress and ‘development,’ this transition has shaped hegemonic worldviews and visions of a desirable future for all humankind, but current concerns with inequalities, resource depletion, and climate change suggest that such aspirations are not globally sustainable. Industrialization and urbanization tend to fundamentally transform sociocultural conditions and human–environmental relations. Anthropological perspectives can illuminate how the cultural inclinations and self-representations of industrial societies are geared to global political economy, sociology, and ecology.