Carbon technocracy: Energy regimes in modern East Asia.VictorSeow, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. pp. 376. 25 figs. ISBN: 9780226826554. Pbk. $27.50)
Year: 2024
Type: book-review
Abstract: In the present century, historians are confronted with the challenging task of crafting an alternative narrative of energy history in our era of global decarbonization.Departing from the conventional celebratory account of fossil energy resources as having enabled innovation and economic growth, this new energy narrative will no longer describe the intensification of energy extraction merely as a positive force in human history, but equally as a marker of the accelerated deterioration of the Earth's ecosystem through human actions.Victor Seow admirably meets this challenge of writing a history of energy that befits our troubled age of climate crisis in his Carbon technocracy.In this work, Seow addresses what he terms the 'carbon technocracy', a regime built upon technological expertise and resource extraction, highlighting its dynamic relations with modern state formation in East Asia.Seow describes how this regime formed through the strong belief in technical progress coupled with the intensifying use of fossil fuel.In his account of carbon's political economy, various historical actors took part in 'the uncoordinated but collective enterprise' of establishing this modern energy regime (p.12).The book's narrative centres on Manchuria's Fushun coal mine, which was subject to military and political turmoil in the twentieth century as it was successively run by China, Russia, and Japan.Chronologically, the book spans from the beginning of Fushun's modern coal mining at the turn of the twentieth century to China's Great Leap Forward in the 1960s.Through his skilful storytelling, Seow navigates the entangled tale of human labour, technology, and underground fossilized resources, which conditioned -and was conditioned by -human struggles over power.Up to the end of Second World War, Japan's technocratic imperialism played a central role in affecting Manchuria's carbon extraction.Following its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, Japan ruled Manchuria's carbon wealth, to which it applied scientific techniques in mining and labour control.Seow describes how vertical social relations, involving both order and resistance, formed between Japanese technocrats and Chinese workers (chapter 1).Far from gaining political agency as providers of essential extractive labour in a carbon-dependent Econ.
Source: The Economic History Review
DOI: 10.1111/ehr.13380
Author: Hiroki Shin
Institution: Queen's University Belfast
Language: English
Subfield: History and Philosophy of Science
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4402069213