Energy's History

Toward a Global Canon

Daniela Russ, Thomas Turnbull

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9781503641501, 9781503640863
• eBook ISBN: 9781503641518
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Toward a Global Canon
• 1. “The Largest and Most Important Renewable Energy Project in the World”: Maurilio Biagi Filho and the Brazilian Sugar Ethanol Industry
• 2. “Coal Will Be the Primary Fuel of the Future”: Yoshimura Manji on the “Fuel Question”
• 3. The Fear of Being “Left Behind in the Dust”: The Rise and Potential Fall of Coal in China
• 4. Frederick Tryon and the Decoupling of Energy and Economic Growth in the 1920s
• 5. The Colony and the World Energy Revolution: Meghnad Saha’s Energetic Developmentalism
• 6. The Red Thread to Socialism: Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii’s “Energetics and Socialist Reconstruction”
• 7. Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo and the Invention of Anticolonial Democratic Oil Conservation
• 8. Privatizing a Colonial Electricity Undertaking: F. W. Dove’s “What People Think of Our Electric Light”
• 9. Gender, Food, and Vernacular Energy in Moussa Travélé’s “Three Rapid People”
• 10. Uncertain Energy Epistemologies: William James and the Case of Mental and Moral Energy
• 11. Laura Nader’s Third-Wave Energy Anthropology
• 12. The Master Resource: Energy, Inter-Planetary Capitalism, and Neoliberal Cornucopianism
• Conclusion: Pluralistic Energy History in a Contested Epoch
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index