What does music history have to do with the concept of the Anthropocene, the period of geologic time marked by human impact on the Earth's climate? We begin with the intersections of music and economics, “troubling” our view of 18th century European musical life and its dependence–in part–upon profits from the slave trade. These challenging connections can be heard, in the mind’s historical ear, resonating in spaces from concert halls in Haydn’s London to the dance halls of contemporaneous colonized Jamaica.