Introduction for Energy's History

INTRODUCTION

Toward a Global Canon

DANIELA RUSS and THOMAS TURNBULL

HISTORY IS ALWAYS WRITTEN from a specific present. Today, when studying the history of energy use, particularly its role in industrialisation and the mid-twentieth-century acceleration of resource use, such irruptions are inescapably overshadowed by the impacts of climate change. The consequential accumulation of innumerable energy historical events in the atmosphere has radically transformed the meaning of these periods and raises related questions of global politics and justice. For nearly three decades, countries have annually met to assess and negotiate global climate politics at a so-called Conference of Parties (COP), a meeting of the signatories of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The original protocol set out a single coordinated emission-reduction plan for all countries—a concerted global energy transition—but this approach failed. Since the Paris Agreement in 2015, each country pledges emission-reduction targets as it sees fit; the meetings serve to review and compare them with the agreed-upon 1.5-degree Celsius global warming limit.¹ The world’s uneven, contradictory energetic predicament is among many reasons for the breakdown of this common plan, and this is at the heart of this volume.

The rewards and costs of past fossil fuel use have been unequally distributed in time and space. Within and between countries, those responsible for producing the most carbon dioxide emissions are not the ones who suffer the most from the consequences of global warming. As such, energy historical legacies are an increasingly pressing present-day concern. To take an example, the Sixth Assessment Report of the COP’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), out in 2022, referred to colonialism for the first time, noting its role as a historic driver of climate change and acknowledging the specific vulnerabilities it has created for the formally colonized.² Moreover, even the dynamics of Earth’s atmospheric circulations convey much of the climate’s increased volatility toward underdeveloped equatorial regions.³ Defiantly, Narendra Modi’s Indian delegation at the COP persistently affirmed that it would not allow the climatic constraints created by the past emissions of Western and former colonial powers to impede the development of his and other nations.⁴ Western and former colonial powers are currently attempting to limit international finance for fossil-fueled development in certain places, such as India, while also outsourcing the material burden of energy transition to formerly colonized places. Accordingly, the term green colonialism is now leveled at such strategies.⁵

At the same time, the West’s historical responsibility, in part created by its fossil-fueled preeminence, does not, in our contemporary multipolar age, translate into the political power to enforce global emissions reductions. Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the BRICS countries) now account for nearly 40 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, and China has by now become the largest greenhouse gas emitter, on a per capita level comparable to Germany.⁶ As we live through and are contributing to a global energy transition, we can see it is a messy one shaped by diverse actors: states, multinational corporations, cartels, state-owned companies, asset managers, banks, and citizens. If we want to understand the specific circumstances under which today’s and the future’s energy history will be made, we must therefore look beyond Western testimonies.

We have entered an age of energy historical pluralism in which concerned historians must pay closer attention to the global and local forces that shaped a diverse set of energy economies. Our disciplinary subfield has moved on from a focus on Western private multinationals to analyze state-owned companies, whose histories often reach back to decolonization, state-building, and the struggle for sovereignty over resources.⁷ Historians have begun to look at the repercussions and meaning of the 1970s oil crises in the East and the South.⁸ To further the development of a more representative understanding of the present situation and inform more environmentally sound and historically cognizant futures, our aim is to showcase the diversity of perspectives that have emerged as a result of the pluralization of energy history.

Energy’s History hopes to both present and then further this emerging wave of pluralistic scholarship. The book is aimed at students and practitioners of energy history who wish to broaden their perspective or find resources and forms of argumentation that further their research. On one level, we hope the pluralization of perspectives this volume points toward gives all concerned with energy, from scholars to policymakers, pause for thought. Too often energy analysis is based on quantitative or systematized abstraction rather than specification. As a result, simple one-size-fits-all energy policies are proffered as solutions to countervailing problems of energy poverty, development, overabundance, scarcity, and anthropogenic climate change. Where this is accepted, dominant nations impose new forms of what has been termed “energy colonialism” on groups of people and in places for whom the iniquities of the first wave of socio-technological domination are still readily apparent.⁹

On another level, we also hope to further encourage a broadening of the scope of energy historical analyses and their evidential basis. We conceive of this book as primarily an exercise in creating a more comprehensive historical understanding and in presenting a more cosmopolitan account of the various concepts, motivations, resistances, and events that have created our planet of energy users, with all the benefits and costs that this has involved.

Akin to other fields of history, in working toward a more cosmopolitan and global discipline, each chapter presents a primary source and commentary essay that is intended to complexify and broaden the scope of energy history from underrepresented geographic and/or cultural perspectives or from perspectives that challenge most widely held conceptions of energy, even in those places that have been otherwise historically well documented.¹⁰

Put simply, this emerging discipline begins from the precept that energy deserves to be considered as an aspect of historical explanation. Early-nineteenth-century political economists and engineers debated whether machines made history.¹³ In the late nineteenth century, they began to focus more specifically on machines that made nature work and the resources used to fuel them. Arguably, the earliest scholars that we might consider “energy historians” sought to explain industrialism, a notable discontinuity in economic history, as a result of a shift in the composition of the energetic inputs of economic growth. It had been Britain’s prodigious use of coal, John Nef argued in his 1932 book, that fundamentally enabled “the ultimate triumph of industrial capitalism”; it allowed the production of goods to exceed the limits of predominantly agrarian forms of industry.¹⁴ Nef stands out for scrutinizing the relationship between energy and economic growth in an empirical manner where others took it for granted. This volume attests to this developmental dynamic in other languages and cultures, some of which we will encounter here.¹⁵

However, energy history should mean more than a history of energy use. Historical theorists have tried to derive the movement of history itself from the two laws of thermodynamics. If history is indeed mediated by energetic laws, progress in energy use necessarily had an entropic exhaust.¹⁶ In 1919 North American historian Henry Adams described the laws of energy as the fundamental engine of historical change. Successful energy conversions powered the advancements of human history, but such processes generated entropy. For Adams, this meant the “ash-heap” of history “was constantly increasing in size.”¹⁷ The advancement of historical time was an ambivalent process of increasing efficiency of energy use at the cost of increasing disorder. In the nineteenth-century European scientists had somewhat simultaneously discovered a physical force named energy, but it unavoidably underwent “entropy” over time. In being converted into power, coal becomes ash. Ash cannot become coal. Time’s arrow cannot be reversed. So, while ambivalent, energy and history, as Adams claimed, do move somewhat in step.¹⁸ However, to too simply impose the laws of energy on historical events risks imposing a “scientifically inflected” form of historical analysis that abstracts and veers into ahistoricism rather than remaining true to our discipline’s commitment to historicize and specify.¹⁹

The twentieth century saw oscillations between visions of energetic progress and decay. The equation of energy and historical progress reappeared in the postwar energy-centered cultural anthropology of Leslie White and in Nikolai Kardashev’s categories of planetary civilizations. For White, writing in the 1940s, increased quotients of or efficiencies in energy use were the engine of civilizational progress. While more ambitious still, in 1964 Kardashev argued the most advanced civilization would control and channel the energy of an entire galaxy (a scale that was used in both US and Soviet attempts to discern signals of extraterrestrial life).²⁰ However, such energy determinists were soon drawn to more earthly matters. With stalling economic growth and increasing environmental awareness, in the 1970s new kinds of energy history appeared.²¹ Such perspectives found a new and urgent relevance with the growing if gradual acceptance of humankind’s role in the alteration of Earth’s climate in subsequent decades.

The reassessment of what it meant to tap into irreplaceable stores of fossil fuels has become more pronounced in recent decades. From the 1990s onward, a newer generation of historians repurposed this evidence to argue that human history, particularly industrialism, had been a fateful preamble to a coming age of a radically new and possibly deleterious age of climate change.²² Energy history appears then no longer as a story of intentional progress nor natural decay, but as one of human hubris and shortsightedness. Moreover, decades later historians took heed of Earth Scientists and began to argue that both human and natural history has, in a sense, become a field of energy history.²³ The contested notion of the Anthropocene, where humans have become the primary determinant of a transformed planet, hinges upon the amplified agency afforded by fossil fuel use. One estimate is that humankind, in all our heterogeneity, have collectively used 22 zettajoules of “human-produced energy” since 1950. This is more than has been used since the last Ice Age. Moreover, more than 80 percent of this planet-altering agency has come from fossil fuel use.²⁴ Natural history, science, alone cannot make sense of such an anomalous event. Thermodynamics describes the direction, but it cannot account for the patterns and accelerations we have seen over the last two hundred years.

To understand today’s energetic predicament, we must look to human history as much as planetary physics. As William Jordy, a critical biographer of Adams, argued, the historian should rather be “concerned with the path to entropy rather than the destination of entropy itself.”²⁵ These paths are many and varied, as this book shows. In the following paragraphs, we briefly summarize the state of the art in energy history. From the perspectives of the human and social sciences, the uptake of fossil fuels has been typically explained as a result of demographic factors, family structure, economic growth, technological change, imperial expansion, or national or capitalist competition.²⁶ However, when such conditions are seen as general structures, we risk overabstraction. We can miss what it meant to live through these changes, how people feared, fought, welcomed, and cherished energy—in short, how they made sense of it.

Accordingly, this volume starts from the premise that energy itself must be seen as more than a material or technical condition. Energy is an idea that conveys a certain understanding of nature, work, and historical change. As such, the concept emerged amid industrialization and circulated alongside coal and engines. What Reinhart Koselleck called the history of events—in this case structural changes in energy use—did not coincide with the conceptual history of energy.²⁷ In many ways, the idea of energy precedes energetic historical change: For instance, a high-energy society, abundant and free from toil, was long thought and dreamed about before it was realized in practice. This is the sense in which we would like to think about Energy’s History: as a relationship between the history of energetic thought and the history of energy. So, if the purpose of the volume had to be narrowed down to one argument, it would be that global energy history cannot be understood without reflecting on global intellectual histories of energy.

Rather than adopting energy as a form of abstract historical explanation or zooming out to an undifferentiated species-wide perspective, this book therefore zooms in. Energy’s History focuses on specific concepts, people, ideas, worldviews, arguments, events, and statements that recorded, critiqued, and informed the distinct energy histories that shape our current and manifold energy predicaments. Each chapter examines a different region, perspective, or intellectual position. In presenting these chapters together, our hope is that much-needed alternative energy futures can be pursued in a manner that accounts for the specific circumstances and motivations that shaped our present reality. We point the reader to the “toward” in the book’s title. This qualifier is necessary because we recognize that the creation of a more cosmopolitan and more comprehensive energy history is ongoing.

Moreover, the qualification “toward” also acknowledges that our collective book could not hope to cover all perspectives, places, nor time periods. Here, the focus is on the twentieth century, the period most marked by the global spread of fossil fuel use. Moreover, although we sought cosmopolitanism, three of the book’s twelve chapters focus on North America. Among other things, this overrepresentation reflects the contingencies of such a collective endeavor, but we believe this focus can be defended because twentieth-century North America was the greatest energy-consuming nation in this period. That said, this volume should be taken as a start, an incomplete and in-progress task—an invitation to further widen and pluralize our nascent field.

The conventional energy historical story is that the Earth-changing power of fossil fuels was first unleashed in the water-logged tin mines of Cornwall, Southern England. Around 1702, coal was burnt in engines called the “Miner’s friend”; with an almost absurd inefficiency these steam-driven pumps raised groundwater from mine shafts.³² Though inefficient, a feedback loop between Britain’s abundant coal, a controlled means of combustion, and the accumulation of capital from producing and consuming energy had emerged.³³ The first patented rotary steam engine, which increased the efficiency and regularity of their power, was presented by James Watt in 1784. Fifty years later, around five hundred such engines were in operation.³⁴ In using coal, subterranean stocks of fossilized carbon hundreds of millions of years old, rather than wood or charcoal, engines freed industrial growth from the areal limits of solar energy, a quotient limited by the land surface on which sunlight fell and was transformed into plant matter.³⁵

Britain’s coal-using practices also spread to continental Europe. There, the fuel’s combustion first mapped on to the geology of coal seams, residues of once vast forests.³⁶ However, soon canals, railways, and coal-powered ships used this fossilized carbon to propel coal over land and seas using the mineral’s own inherent energy.³⁷ In 1830, the British East India Company converted its ships from sail to steam power and so powered their contraflow access to the rivers of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In the 1840s, the British Navy’s steam-powered gunboats then traveled up China’s inland rivers, contributing to its victory in the first Opium War (1839–1842) and expediting the extraction of goods outward.³⁸ While on land, steam-powered railways allowed further incursions inward by fossil-fueled nations.³⁹ In these ways, coal power transformed time and space on both sea and land, and the expropriation of goods ranging from wood, coal, palm oil, cotton, sugar, rum, became industrialized processes.⁴⁰

That said, archival evidence has long challenged this origin story. Early economic histories of the Industrial Revolution affirmed England as the birthplace of coal-powered industrialism, this was in part because historian John Nef had scoured Western European archives for every trace of this fossil-fueled nation’s rise to power.⁴¹ However in the 1960s, one of Nef’s students, sinologist Robert Hartwell, uncovered archival evidence that the use of coal and iron on an industrial scale had occurred far earlier, around 1100 BCE, in northeastern China.⁴² Comparing records of Chinese coal production to those of Britain, Hartwell showed that far earlier, Kaifeng, the capital city of the Song Dynasty, had established a coal trade considerably larger than that of seventeenth-century London.⁴³ Nef’s British “early industrial revolution” paled in comparison to earlier Chinese industrialism.⁴⁴

Hartwell’s evidence overcame the occidental delusion that China had been an inert energetic substrate awaiting the arrival of Western fossil capitalists.⁴⁵ With it, the myth of Western coal-powered exceptionalism faltered. Economic historians began the grand task of documenting a longer and far more global history of fossil-fueled industrialism: revisionist highlights included Kenneth Pomeranz’s “coal and colonies” explanation for the “great divergence” between the West and the East, and Prasannan Parthasarathi’s argument that coal use had a long history in China but that the distance of reserves from the prosperous Yangzi Delta had meant nascent industry failed to catalyze into a system of wider economic feedbacks as it later did in Britain.⁴⁶

Scrutinized more closely, the history of oil poses similar questions. Sujit Sivasundaram has looked to Burma’s indigenous oil industry. During the 1824–26 war with Britain, the British were puzzled by the Burmese peoples’ use of “Earth oil” as an illuminant, while Britain waged war with coal-driven steamships. Rather than the imposition of Western European concepts and technologies, knowledge about fossil energy had “flowed in both directions,” Sivasundaram notes. Why then have historians privileged certain stories over others? What has been lost in most historians anointing North America the birthplace of the oil age, as Daniel Yergin’s influential though Anglocentric history of oil did, rather than considering this birth as something that occurred amid the hand-dug artisanal oil wells of pre-colonial Burma?⁴⁷

Amid a wider reckoning with colonial legacies, once-marginalized economic historians are being rightfully reconsidered by energy historians. Long before others, Trinidadian historian Eric Williams explained Britain’s outsized industrial productivity not solely as a result of its prodigious coal use but because of the advantages created by combining coal power with the labor of enslaved people. Moreover, Williams pointed out that Matthew Boulton and James Watt’s influential steam engine company had been financed by profits from the West Indian sugar trade and that Jamaican plantation owners had been among the first to realize the technology’s usefulness as an adjunct to human toil.⁴⁸ As Williams put it, the profits of slavery “fertilized the entire productive system” of Britain’s Empire.⁴⁹ The exploitation of coal and the industry and capital it wrought were founded on the racialized exploitation of labor.

As historian On Barak observed, the “complexities of imperialism are integral to the global fossil economy.”⁵⁰ Beginning in the port of Aden in 1839, British trading companies built coaling stations across the Middle East to fuel steamships on their way to India and China. The British Navy greatly expanded this worldwide network of naval coal supplies.⁵¹ As such, Britain’s industrial revolution was “offshored,” creating fossil-fueled colonies in Central America, the Ottoman Empire, India, and British-owned territories in East Asia. The mining, rail, and shipping infrastructure that had been built was used to transmit the productive power of British coal outward and to bring the resources that resulted from this application of power inward, back to this increasingly rich nation.

The completion of the Suez Canal in 1869 connected the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, creating a new and consequential conduit between West and East. Around 20,000 laborers, 3,000 camels, and 10,000 horsepower of steam-powered dredges, paddle-wheels, and excavators—reportedly the greatest concentration of fossil energy assembled on Earth at the time—cleaved a conduit through Egypt. The canal reduced journey times between East and West, and ships carried around 10 million tons of goods a year via it, much of it British coal.⁵² Fatefully, in 1892, the Murex, a shipping tanker, carried a first cargo of crude oil from Persia to Europe. Fifty years later, around 65 million tons of oil would travel from the global South to North by this canal each year, creating a new and consequential dependency that increasingly assertive oil-producing states would come to exploit in the latter half of the twentieth century.⁵³

A global system of fossil fuel extraction and use had been fashioned. Steamships tracked back and forth, fueled and often ballasted with coal, creating a regularized and global energy geography with Britain at its heart.⁵⁴ Diesel engines, invented in the 1890s and fueled by distillate oil, increased the efficiency and reach of ocean shipping.⁵⁵ The network of coaling stations were the infrastructure upon which later petroleum-driven ocean trade grew, today 90 percent of the world’s goods travel by ship, and crude oil constitutes nearly 30 percent of all maritime cargo.⁵⁶ As historian Jürgen Osterhammel argued, it is clear that the fossil-fueled age “not only made possible the production of goods on an unprecedented scale but also greatly boosted the formation of networks, speed, national integration, and imperial control.”⁵⁷

In the early twentieth century, as industrialism spread, electromagnetic turbines and internal combustion engines became the technologies of a more far-reaching and larger-scale Second Industrial Revolution.⁵⁸ As a result inequality among countries’ energy use reached its peak in 1913, when Western Europe and North America, with only 20 percent of the world’s total population, consumed 60 percent of society’s energy.⁵⁹ As such, alongside the crimes of colonialism, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argue that the “responsibility for climate change of the two hegemonic powers of the nineteenth (Great Britain) and twentieth (United States) attests to the fundamental link between climate change and projects of world domination.”⁶⁰ Of course, China, India, Brazil, Nigeria, and South Africa, among other nations, similarly pursuing development while at times also seeking to oppose colonialism or dominate others, have since developed means of energy-powered development and have ramped up their rates of energy consumption. Accordingly, understanding the motivations behind both fossil-fueled colonialism and its opposition, fossil-fueled and otherwise, is vital if we are to achieve a more cosmopolitan kind of energy history.

A new school has begun the mammoth task of documenting the planetwide and differential reception of energy and its attendant technologies, iniquities, and modes of exploitation. Moreover, the precepts of energy historical inquiry are being widened by area specialists. In showcasing the complexity and diversity of energy historical sources, Energy’s History hopes to challenge an overly simplified center-periphery conception of the spread of energy history. The contributions in this book are organized into three distinct thematic sections. The first concerns the relationship between energy and development. The second section addresses the emancipatory potential of energetic development in colonized, anti-colonial, and communist contexts, while the third focuses upon contested intellectual histories of energy.

Capitalist, communist, or other, energy has long been enrolled in developmental nation-building projects. In his book Carbon Technocracy Victor Seow took a coal mine in Fushun (today Northeast China) as a specific site from which to explore energy history amid distinct and shifting political regimes: Chinese nationalist government, Japanese Manchurian rule, and then Maoist communism. All three regimes enacted a kind of planning-intensive carbon-exploiting “technocracy,” which lends the book its title and challenges any simple relation between fossil fuel use and liberal capitalism.⁶³ Drawing on this work, in chapter 2 of this volume, Seow presents an essay by Yoshimura Manji, founder of the Japanese Fuel Society. The source is a foundational text on state coal use. Manji set out a developmental “fuel question.” Could Japan imitate European and U.S. conservation and scientific management efforts or even surpass them? In presenting the developmental vision of a latecomer to coal use, Seow shows that fossil fuel use was seen as offering a means of resistance to dominant global powers as much as a means of ensuring those same powers’ growth.

With similar care, Shellen Wu’s Empires of Coal (2015) documents China’s turn to coal, a process that involved the reappropriation of European geological knowledge in the early 1900s.⁶⁴ In chapter 3 here, Wu provides a foundational text by state minister Tian Wenlie, who used his preface in China’s inaugural Bulletin of the Geological Society (1919) to argue that the late Qing dynasty should fully exploit China’s coal seams and not cede this fuel to Europeans. A foreword from Ding Wenjiang, who directed a survey of China’s coal reserves, is presented alongside the preface. In both sources we see the roots of the state’s justifications for China’s current coal-powered economic strength and geopolitical authority. However, Wu argues that in an age of global heating, the sustainability of this arrangement has begun to falter. The state now hopes to become an alternative energy superpower while still retaining the political power that coal afforded.

Yet, despite the pursuit of energy-driven development, the relation between energy and development remains uncertain. In exploring this in chapter 4, historian Antoine Missemer presents the work of forgotten North American energy economist Fredrick Tryon, which showed how decoupling, the belief that energy consumption can be separated from economic growth by market forces or political interventions, was not an idea fashioned amid the post-1980s sustainability agenda but in the Progressive Era United States. Missemer argues that the mechanism of decoupling was an outcome of straitened circumstances and conservation measures implemented by the United States during the First World War. Today, given that the IPCC puts great faith in the potential decoupling of energy from growth, the idea that energy may be less strongly coupled to economic development than previously thought should draw upon such historical precedents in helping to formulate policies for reducing energy use.

Even before the formation of OPEC, as historian Elizabeth Chatterjee has argued, non-Western nations were never simply passive receptacles for the supposedly innate logic of fossil-fueled growth. Many nations proposed alternative trajectories in the early twentieth century, a process she characterizes as “fossil developmentalism.”⁶⁸ As such, her work suggests energy history was less a shockwave that spread from Western Europe than a set of behaviors that now rippled back and forth and encouraged counter-hegemonic visions of energy-powered development. In chapter 5, Chatterjee recounts the vision of the Dalit anti-colonial physicist Meghnad Saha, who in 1944 put forward the idea that India’s rivers and potential atomic power could achieve a distinct energy-intensive modernity of a kind that had been denied under British colonial rule. Saha’s plan subtly reflected Indian perspectives regarding caste, labor, and anti-colonialism. Moreover, in asserting India’s right to energy-driven development, in contrast to a Gandhian low-energy vision, Saha presaged later discussions about the right of formerly colonized nations to emit carbon dioxide and other emissions just as their oppressors had.

In a sense, the Soviet Union can be seen as a large-scale experiment in energy-driven anti-hegemony. In chapter 6, historical sociologist Daniela Russ presents the forgotten work of Soviet electrical engineer Gleb Krzhizhanovskii, who was convinced a prosperous socialist state could be achieved only by placing energy, particularly electrification, at the center of economic planning. As head of the state planning commission, in 1929 Krzhizhanovskii published a vision of the Soviet’s energy future in which labor, thermal, and electric technologies would harmoniously ennoble “man” and his environment. Unlike capitalism, socialism could be planned according to energetic considerations and evolve more efficiently. However, Krzhizhanovskii was sidelined by Stalin. The fossil-fuel-intensive Soviet rule that followed provided a prehistory of the region’s present environmentally and geopolitically disruptive energy politics and the centralized regime it supports. Dreamed-of energy futures are not always realized, but such visions help coordinate action in the present.

This thematic section also includes a chapter by Michael Dobson and Giuliano Garavini on the highly influential anti-colonial approach to oil conservation formulated by OPEC founder and Venezuelan oil expert Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo. Minister for Petroleum between 1959 and 1963, Pérez Alfonzo witnessed how his and other developing nations were becoming the world’s predominant oil suppliers and realized that this was an opportunity to redress iniquitous colonial relations. We were able to secure the right to reproduce extracts of his key text El Pentágono Petrolero (1967) in chapter 7. This manifesto sets out strategies for regaining self-determination over oil, a suite of policies for its taxation, conservation, and nationalization that was intended to fight the exploitative concessionary agreements oil-rich countries had been coerced into in the early twentieth century. Dobson and Garavini describe how Pérez Alfonzo had recognized the risks that oil posed—the inequality, corruption, and environmental damage—but he also saw oil’s potential as a liberatory resource, a pragmatic means for assuring independence. The conflict between development and the damage this entails for others remains central to energy history.

However, not all anti-colonial fossil-energy projects have advocated for state control. In chapter 8, historian Damilola Adebayo takes us to colonial Nigeria. There in 1909, elite West African barrister Frederick William Dove hoped Lagos’s citizens could benefit from electrification, but he argued that the private sector rather than the state should lead development. Dove’s call for privatized electricity supply, Adebayo argues, constitutes the first documented call for the privatization of electrical infrastructure in Africa. This call provided a prehistory to twenty-first century debates in Nigeria (and elsewhere) about the right way to provide electricity. Adebayo notes that in a sense, Dove presaged later critics of state-run energy industries and their supposed tendency toward inefficiency and waste. Today, continued underinvestment in Nigeria’s state-funded electrical infrastructure suggests Dove’s call for private funds may have been prescient, in this context at least.

In chapter 9, Laura Ann Twagira provides an example of such kinds of vernacular thermodynamics by recounting a Bambara folk tale “Three Rapid People” from the Soudan region (today Mali). The story concerns nyama, a Mandé term for a variety of forces that can be harnessed by humans, which might be thought of as a vernacular energy concept. Recorded by interpreter Moussa Travélé, the story describes how nyama affected imagined acts of harvesting and cooking millet and hunting, at speeds that defied belief. In describing a supernatural force that could alleviate human labor, the Bambara tale is part of a seemingly global genre, that of “power fantasy,” imagined situations in which energetic limits and entropy no longer apply.⁷² However, the story focuses on traditional labor at a time when fossil-fueled French colonialism had begun to alter long-standing rhythms of Soudanese domesticity. Colonialists’ own power fantasy was that the diet of their local workforce could be optimized via measurement and control of their calorific intake. In Twagira’s energy-historical reading, “Three Rapid People” reflects a long-standing and universal desire for plentiful and labor-saving forms of nutritive energy.

In Rebecca Wright’s contribution, chapter 10, we learn that in the West, where energy was influentially defined by natural scientists, aspects of the concept still remained unexplained. In 1909 North American philosopher William James, Wright explains, published a philosophical paper on the notion of “mental energy,” an individual’s perceived sense of motivation. We are all familiar with this sense of willpower, a kind of “imperfect vitality” that escapes precise definition and measurement. James considered mental energy a precondition of all human action and the means by which conventional stocks of energy were actualized and put to work. For James, the riddle of mental energy put paid to Henry Adams’s idea that there was a clear and progressive relation between energy use and history, as not only was mental energy an imprecise variable, but it was one that, without moral guidance, could result in destructive outcomes. This prophecy about the misuse of energy resources would soon to unfold on the mechanized and fossil-fueled battlefields of World War I. As Wright argues, James emphasized the uncertainties that still surrounded the energy concept and challenged its use as a meter of social progress.

Thomas Turnbull’s chapter, 11, returns to the long-standing idea of energy determinism, the idea that energy is the ultimate determinant of historical change. He discusses a 1981 lecture from the Berkeley-based anthropologist Laura Nader. The text was an outcome of ethnographic observation of U.S. energy policymakers in the 1970s. Nader had documented how a prejudicial gendering of energy technologies by predominantly male energy analysts acted as a barrier to deploying new and alternative energy technologies. Moreover, Nader’s anthropological experience fed into her argument that there was no evidence that increased energy use was correlated with increased quality of life. Instead, she made the case for a value-driven energy policy based on desired lifestyles, decentralization, and alternative technologies. Having done so, Nader resolutely challenged an anthropological legacy of energy-based social evolutionary thought, of the kind put forward by Leslie White and others, in which imagined social hierarchies found credibility through recourse to differences in energy consumption.

In the book’s final chapter, 12, Troy Vettese addresses the idea that our energy supply is essentially unlimited, so the extraction and use of energy should not face any constraint. This power fantasy is part of a distinct neoliberal conception of human-energy relations. Vettese presents this idea as a facet of US economist Julian Simon’s wider philosophy of “resourceship,” which he promoted in that tumultuous decade for energy history, the 1970s. Simon argued that if market forces were allowed to act in an unimpeded manner, the laws of energy place no real limit on human flourishing: the true catalytic potential of human ingenuity and the physical potential of our and even other planets’ resources could be fully realized. Today, such cornucopian thinking is taken as gospel by many. As demand increases, new forms of unconventional fossil energy are found, and the continued availability of new energy resources is, for now, not in doubt. However, the ultimate limit now appears to be our planet and the boundaries that are imposed by its various environmental parameters.

Not every author from this increasingly cosmopolitan energy-historical turn is featured in this volume. Readers must look elsewhere for recent accounts of Mexico’s adoption of oil or its electrification.⁷³ Historians have documented the electrification of Late Imperial and Early Communist Russia, Revolutionary China, and Israel-Palestine, and still others have told of the imposition of Anglo-American fossil-fueled capitalism in East Asia, the Soviet-influenced Ghanaian nuclear power industry, the effects of the OPEC oil embargo in Tanzania, and the development of oil infrastructure in Iran.⁷⁴ Abigail Harrison Moore and Ruth Sandwell have affirmed women’s centrality to energy history.⁷⁵ The field is becoming more geographically and socially representative, a development we hope our collective efforts can contribute toward.

The perspectives this volume presents are incomplete and are no doubt a reflection of existing networks, circumstance, our own specializations, and—admittedly—biases. However, together, they are nonetheless intended to give readers a sense of the possible scope of energy history if it is approached from a more pluralistic perspective. Energy historians should be more ambitious in delineating the scope of our nascent discipline and more imaginative in deciding what are appropriate sources for energy historical inquiry. Rather than being against energy, we argue that we should begin to think with it anew.

That said, to those who assign too much explanatory power to energy, we counter that while it is emphatically an aspect of historical explanation and one likely to become increasingly apparent it is not an agent of history in and of itself. Energy does not explain history, but the innumerable events its exploitation has resulted in demand modes of explanation that are rightly inflected by the strictures of energetic laws and the thoughts and actions that have developed around them and as a result of their use. We hope these essays and accompanying sources provide one starting point for a more expansive, cosmopolitan, and globally representative energy historical canon. Unlike those of the past, this canon is imagined as a dynamic repository of major and minor texts, a library without hierarchy, whose cataloguing system is perpetually contested and incessantly reshaped as the ever-advancing present imposes new demands upon our shared historical understanding.

Notes

1. Béatrice Cointe and Héléne Guillemot, “A History of the 1.5°C Target,” WIREs Climate Change 14, no. 3 (2023): 1–11.

2. Gurminder Bhambra and Peter Newell, “More Than a Metaphor: ‘Climate Colonialism’ in Perspective,” Global Social Challenges Journal 2, no. 2 (2023): 179–87.

3. Adrian Lahoud, “Floating Bodies,” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, eds. Eyal Weizman and Anselm Franke (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 508.

4. Vyoma Jha, “India and Climate Change: Old Traditions, New Strategies,” India Quarterly, 78, no. 2 (2022): 280–96.

5. Vijaya Ramachandran, “Rich Countries’ Climate Policies Are Colonialism in Green,” Foreign Policy, November 3, 2021, https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/11/03/cop26-climate-colonialism-africa-n…; Hamza Hamouchene, Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region (London: Pluto Press, 2023); for a study that analyzes the emergent inequalities without calling them “green colonialism,” see Daniela Gabor und Ndongo Samba Sylla, “Derisking Developmentalism: A Tale of Green Hydrogen,” Development and Change 54, no. 5 (2023): 1169–96.

6. Zhiwei Wang und Yongjun Huang, “Natural Resources and Trade-Adjusted Carbon Emissions in the BRICS: The Role of Clean Energy,” Resources Policy 86 (2023): 104093.

7. Gregory Brew, Petroleum and Progress in Iran: Oil, Development, and the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022); Elizabeth Chatterjee, “Reinventing State Capitalism in India: A View from the Energy Sector,” Contemporary South Asia 25, no. 1 (2017): 85–100; Elizabeth Chatterjee, “The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism,” The Journal of Asian Studies 79, no. 1 (2020): 3–24; Antoine Acker, “A Different Story in the Anthropocene: Brazil’s Post-Colonial Quest for Oil (1930–1975),” Past & Present 249, no. 1 (2020): 167–211.

8. Jeronim Perović, ed., Cold War Energy: A Transnational History of Soviet Oil and Gas (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market: Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964–1971 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Giuliano Garavini, “Completing Decolonization: The 1973 ‘Oil Shock’ and the Struggle for Economic Rights,” The International History Review 33, no. 3 (2011): 473–87.

9. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga and Helmuth Trischler, “Energy (and) Colonialism, Energy (In)Dependence: Africa, Europe, Greenland, North America,” RCC Perspectives, no. 5 (2014), https://doi.org/10.5282/rcc/6554.

10. See, for instance, the format of Libby Robin, Sverker Sorlin, and Paul Warde, eds., The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013); or more recently, in terms of their pursuit of cosmopolitanism, Alison Bashford, Emily Kern, and Adam Bobbette, eds., New Earth Histories: Geo-Cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023).

11. The classic reference is Thomas Kuhn “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery,” in Critical Problems in the History of Science: Proceedings of the Institute for the History of Science, ed. Marshall Clagett (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 321–56; for a more contextual history, see Crosbie Smith, The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); and on religion and energy, see Helge Kragh, Entropic Creation: Religious Contexts of Thermodynamics and Cosmology (Ashgate: Routledge, 2008).

12. Caleb Wellum, “The Use of Energy History,” Modern American History 6, no. 2 (2023): 201–19.

13. Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

14. John Nef, Rise of the British Coal Industry, vol. 2 (London: George Routledge, 1932), 330.

15. For an overview (that is somewhat Western-centered), see Eugene A. Rosa und Gary E. Machlis, “Energetic Theories of Society: An Evaluative Review,” Sociological Inquiry 53, nos. 2–3 (1983): 152–78.

16. Felix Auerbach, Die Weltherrin und ihr Schatten: Ein Vortrag über Energie und Entropie (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1913).

17. Henry Adams, The Tendency of History (New York: Book League of America, 1919), 5.

18. Keith Burich, “Henry Adams, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the Course of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 3 (1987): 467–82.

19. Sebastian Felten and Renée Raphael, “Early Modern Resources: An Introduction,” Isis, 114, no. 3 (2023): 599–603.

20. Turnbull, ch. 11, this book; and Nikolai Kardashev, “Transmission of Information by Extraterrestrial Civilizations,” Soviet Astronomy 8, no. 2 (1964): 217–21.

21. Thomas Turnbull, “Energy, History, and the Humanities: Against a New Determinism,” History and Technology 37, no. 2 (2021): 247–92.

22. Richard Hirsch and Christopher Jones, “History’s Contributions to Energy Research and Policy,” Energy Research and Social Science 1 (2014): 106–11; Paul Sabin, “‘The Ultimate Environmental Dilemma’: Making a Place for Historians in the Climate Change and Energy Debates,” Environmental History 15, no. 1 (2010): 76–93.

23. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222.

24. A zettajoule is 1021 joules. Jaia Syvitski et al., “Extraordinary Human Energy Consumption and Resultant Geological Impacts beginning around 1950 CE Initiated the Proposed Anthropocene Epoch,” Communications Earth and Environment 1 (2021): 1–13.

25. William Jordy, Henry Adams: Scientific Historian (Hamden: Archon Books, 1970), 206.

26. Edward Anthony Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016).

27. Reinhart Koselleck, “Social History and Conceptual History,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 2, 3 (1989): 308–25.

28. Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution, trans. Michael P. Osmann (Winwick: White Horse Press, 2010); Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution.

29. Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

30. Malm, Fossil Capital.

31. While this volume focuses mainly on twentieth-century societies on the brink of or amid industrialization, energy history can look back to analyze organic energy systems. See Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands,” The William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2010): 173–208; John Cropper, “The Sparrow Loves Millet, but Labors Not”: Energy Use and Infrastructure in the Senegal Valley, 1450–1760,” History and Technology 39, no. 1 (2023): 42–64, as starting points.

32. William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines (London: Macmillan, 1866), 146; Simon Pirani, Burning Up: A Global History of Fossil Fuel Consumption (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 12.

33. John Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, vol. 1. (London: George Routledge, 1932), 243; Elmar Altvater, “The Social and Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism,” Socialist Register 42 (2007): 37–59; Malm, Fossil Capital, 321–22.

34. Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 134.

35. Among others, Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest.

36. Edward Wrigley, Industrial Growth and Population Change: A Regional Study of the Coalfield Areas of North-West Europe in the Later Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 31.

37. Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 637–67.

38. Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York-Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1981), 17–21; Adas, Machines, 203.

39. Bruce Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts: Fostering Sustainability in a Turbulent Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 29; Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 62; Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (London: Verso, 2020), 22.

40. For a selection, see Martin Lynn, “From Sail to Steam: The Impact of the Steamship Services on the British Palm Oil Trade with West Africa, 1850–1890,” Journal of African History 30, no. 2 (1989): 227–45; Heidi Zogbaum, “The Steam Engine in Cuba’s Sugar Industry, 1794–1860,” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 8, no. 2 (2002): 37–60; Jennifer Tann, “Steam and Sugar: The Diffusion of the Stationary Steam Engine to the Caribbean Sugar Industry, 1770–1849,” History of Technology 19 (1997): 63–84. Of course, Western energy technologies did not always replace indigenous ones; see Clive Dewey, Steamboats on the Indus: The Limits of Western Technological Superiority in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).

41. Turnbull, “Energy, History, and the Humanities.”

42. Robert Hartwell, “A Cycle of Economic Change in Imperial China: Coal and Iron in Northeast China, 750–1350,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 10, no. 1 (1967): 140.

43. Hartwell, “A Cycle.” The value of Kaifeng trade at the end of the eleventh century was equivalent to well over 12,400,000 pounds (in 1702 values) whereas the imports and exports of London in 1711 were worth no more than 8,450,000 pounds (Hartwell, 144).

44. Hartwell, “A Cycle,” 151–52.

45. Tim Wright, “An Economic Cycle in Imperial China? Revisiting Robert Hartwell on Iron and Coal,” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, no. 4 (2007): 398–423.

46. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 65; Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 159–60.

47. Sujit Sivasundaram, “The Oils of Empire,” in Worlds of Natural History, eds. Helen Curry, Nick Jardine, James Secord and Emma Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 379–98; Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991).

48. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Penguin, 2022).

49. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 81–84; on Williams’ marginalisation, see Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Polity, 2023), 37–41.

50. On Barak, Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020), 157; Crosbie Smith, Coal, Steam and Ships: Engineering, Enterprise and Empire on the Nineteenth-Century Seas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

51. Steven Gray, Steam Power and Sea Power: Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

52. Headrick, Tools, 154–55; Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011), 37.

53. Hubert Bonin, History of the Suez Canal Company, 1858–1960: Between Controversy and Utility (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2010), 119; OEEC, Europe’s Need for Oil: Implications and Lessons for the Suez Crisis (Paris: Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, 1958).

54. On Barak, “Outsourcing: Energy and Empire in the Age of Coal, 1820–1911,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 47, no. 3 (2015): 427.

55. Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 713.

56. Peter Shulman, Coal and Empire: The Birth of Energy Security in Industrial America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015); Smith, Coal, Steam and Ships; Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade, 1.

57. Osterhammel, Transformation of the World, 62.

58. Podobnik, Global Energy Shifts, 14–15; Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Jonathan Coopersmith, The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).

59. Paolo Malanima, “The Limiting Factor: Energy, Growth, and Divergence, 1820–1913,” The Economic History Review 73, no. 2 (2020): 501–2.

60. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2017), 241–42.

61. Daniela Russ, “‘Socialism Is Not Just Built for a Hundred Years’: Renewable Energy and Planetary Thought in the Early Soviet Union (1917–1945),” Contemporary European History, 31, no. 4 (2022): 491–508; Ariel Ron, “When Hay Was King: Energy History and Economic Nationalism in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” The American Historical Review 128, no. 1 (2023): 117–213; Elizabeth Chatterjee, “The Poor Woman’s Energy: Low-Modernist Solar Technologies and International Development, 1878–1966,” Journal of Global History 13, no. 3 (2023): 439–60.

62. Jennifer Eaglin, Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), Appendices.

63. Victor Seow, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

64. Shellen Wu, Empires of Coal: China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).

65. Barak, “Outsourcing,” 428; Hsien-Chun Wang, “Discovering Steam Power in China, 1840s-1860s,” Technology and Culture 51, no. 1 (2010): 31–54.

66. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 158.

67. Giuliano Garavini, The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2019), 8.

68. Elizabeth Chatterjee, “The Asian Anthropocene.”

69. Cara New Daggett, The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work, Elements (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019), 19; Daan Oostveen, “On the Concept of ‘Energy’ from a Transcultural Perspective,” in Energy Justice across Borders, eds. Gunter Bombaerts et al. (Cham: Springer, 2020). Philosopher Yuk Hui points out that qì can also be translated as “gas,” bringing the term back into the ambit of energy; Yuk Hui, The Question concerning Technology in China: An Essay in Cosmotechnics (Falmouth: Urbanomic Media, 2016), 61.

70. Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, “Qi Transformation and the Steam Engine: The Incorporation of Western Anatomy and Re-conceptualisation of the Body in Nineteenth Century Chinese Medicine,” Asian Medicine 7 (2012): 319–57.

71. On Barak, “Three Watersheds in the History of Energy,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, no. 3 (2014): 440–53.

72. On power fantasies, see Dolores Greenberg, “Energy, Power, and Perceptions of Social Change in the Early Nineteenth Century,” The American Historical Review 95, no. 3 (1990): 693–714. On twelfth-century Indian beliefs about perpetual motion, see Lynn White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), 130–34.

73. Germán Vergara, Fueling Mexico: Energy and the Environment, 1850–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Diana Montaño, Electrifying Mexico: Technology and the Transformation of a Modern City (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021).

74. Fredrik Meiton, Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Mark Driscoll, The Whites Are the Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Ying Ja Tan, Recharging China in War and Revolution, 1882–1955 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2021); Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, Atomic Junction: Nuclear Power in Africa after Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Emily Brownell, “Reterritorializing the Future: Writing Environmental Histories of the Oil Crisis from Tanzania,” Environmental History 27, no. 3 (2022): 747–71; Katayoun Shafiee, Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023), inter alia.

75. Abigail Harrison Moore and Ruth Sandwell, In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2021).