Narrating the Capitalocene: Capitalism and Environmental Crisis in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Abstract

Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) is examined by Jason W. Moore’s concept of the Capitalocene, which is an understanding of capitalism not as a system that consumes nature but as a “world-ecology” that thrives by identifying available natural resources that are cheap and shared, and turning them into commodities that can be priced. The paper concentrates on the novel's bottled-water plot that sees the unnamed protagonist amassing wealth by boiling and bottling the same water used by the poorer parts of the community, and then selling it back to the paying ones. Drawing on the methods of close textual analysis, this paper demonstrates how Hamid's own sentences—the “neglected pipes,” the “fraudulent product,” and the “cooler-replenishment contracts”—stage the passage of water from a past commodity for all to use to a branded product sold on a margin. The paper claims that the novel's bottled-water imagery can be interpreted as Moore's Capitalocene made visible at the level of a single business enterprise, that is, the novel uncovers new value from a common resource that has been made to fail. What the paper offers is a reading of this one, sustained, image (the bottle itself) as the novel's most overt expression of Moore's theory, in opposition to reading it as one environmental detail of many.

Keywords: Capitalocene; Jason W. Moore; world-ecology; cheap nature; Mohsin Hamid; bottled water; commodification