Before the Great Acceleration: The Anthropocene, the Modern World-System, and the Formalization Debate

This paper renews the argument for the Anthropocene as a formal unit of geological time, by reassessing the so-called Great Acceleration. In March 2024, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy rejected a proposal to formalize the Anthropocene at series/epoch level, with a base in 1952 CE. I show that there is still a strong case for amending the Geological Time Scale to reflect the recent departure of the Earth System from the Holocene envelope of variability. That departure has taken place since the mid-20th century, and has been made up of a cluster of interlinked economic and Earth System transformations: the ‘Great Acceleration.’ The Great Acceleration emerged within a specific long-term historical context. Over the past five centuries, the global economy has increasingly been structured as a single worldwide system, based on a division of production between wealthier ‘core’ and poorer ‘peripheral’ zones. The development of the modern world-system is the larger event that has terminated the Holocene epoch. I analyse the dynamics of the world-system via an assessment of one of its constituent phases: the Industrial Revolution, circa 1760–1830. The Great Acceleration itself is most closely associated with a phase of the modern world-system lasting circa 1945–1973. That broader context clarifies the geopolitical and economic drivers of recent Earth System changes and their stratigraphic signatures.