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Energy history is an approach to understanding the past that takes changes in the human exploitation of Earth's energies as its object of inquiry. This interdisciplinary field documents and analyzes how humans have thought about, harnessed, stored, and exploited stocks and flows of energy. In recent decades, in response to evidence of the effect of fossil fuel use in our climatic system and coinciding with an energy turn across the humanities, a new urgency and purpose has been ascribed to such work. Energy's History challenges abstract and universalizing conceptions of energy's history-making capacities. Each of the twelve essays in this collection presents, analyzes, and contextualizes a primary source. The contributors focus on ideas, events, and statements that recorded and critiqued the distinct historical paths of energy, thereby broadening the scope of where and what constitutes energy history.
As energy's world-making has enmeshed ever more of the planet into a dangerous compact with fossil fuels, energy histories must be revised within this new energy-historical reality. This volume both presents persuasive visions of energy-driven development beyond the Western capitalist model and provides an expansive and critical account of the ways in which energy histories have shaped the past and impact the present.
"Methodologically innovative and eminently teachable, Energy's History highlights the most exciting research in the field. At a moment when climate pessimism abounds, it reminds us that our fossil-fueled world was not inevitable—a powerful lesson as we collectively envision what a more democratic and equitable energy system might look like." —Leah Aronowsky, Columbia University
"In the shadow of the planetary emergency, a frantic effort is underway to understand the historical causes of environmental change. This scintillating primer rejects a one-size-fits-all explanation, takes seriously the multiple pathways of energy-rich societies, and insists on the crucial role of ideas and culture in the making of energy regimes. This book marks a major step towards a new planetary history." —Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, University of Chicago
"Energy's History is a valuable addition to the literature and discourses on energy history and societal progress, problems, and prospects. We need more studies of this sort." —Rasoul Sorkhabi, Science
"These fascinating analyses of primary sources make up a many-faceted view of how energy has been conceptualized over time in different contexts. The fact that some of these texts have been translated to reach a larger audience is laudable in itself, and the historic contextualization accompanied by reflections on today's energy debates indeed makes this volume an important contribution to a more global and pluralistic energy history canon." —Anna Åberg, Technology and Culture
Introduction: Toward a Global Canon
—Daniela Russ and Thomas Turnbull
1. "The Largest and Most Important Renewable Energy Project in the World": Maurilio Biagi Filho and the Brazilian Sugar Ethanol Industry
—Jennifer Eaglin
2. "Coal Will Be the Primary Fuel of the Future": Yoshimura Manji on the "Fuel Question"
—Victor Seow
3. The Fear of Being "Left Behind in the Dust": The Rise and Potential Fall of Coal in China
—Shellen X. Wu
4. Frederick Tryon and the Decoupling of Energy and Economic Growth in the 1920s
—Antoine Missemer
5. The Colony and the World Energy Revolution: Meghnad Saha's Energetic Developmentalism
—Elizabeth Chatterjee
6. The Red Thread to Socialism: Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii's "Energetics and Socialist Reconstruction"
—Daniela Russ
7. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo and the Invention of Anticolonial Democratic Oil Conservation
—Michael Dobson and Giuliano Garavini
8. Privatizing a Colonial Electricity Undertaking: F. W. Dove's "What People Think of Our Electric Light"
—Damilola Adebayo
9. Gender, Food, and Vernacular Energy in Moussa Travélé's "Three Rapid People"
—Laura Ann Twagira
10. Uncertain Energy Epistemologies: William James and the Case of Mental and Moral Energy
—Rebecca Wright
11. Laura Nader's Third-Wave Energy Anthropology
—Thomas Turnbull
12. The Master Resource: Energy, Inter-Planetary Capitalism, and Neoliberal Cornucopianism
—Troy Vettese
Conclusion: Pluralistic Energy History in a Contested Epoch
—Daniela Russ and Thomas Turnbull
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index