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Title details for Carbon Technocracy by Victor Seow - Available

Carbon Technocracy

Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia

by Victor Seow
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A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia's largest coal mine.

The coal-mining town of Fushun in China's Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun's purportedly "inexhaustible" carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.

In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel–driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth.

Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.

  • Creators

  • Series

    Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 8, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780226812601

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780226812601
      • File size: 18598 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      Starred review from June 15, 2022
      An exploration of the effects of intensive coal mining on the evolution of East Asian energy systems. In his debut book, Seow, a historian and assistant professor at Harvard University, examines the effects of fossil fuel energy on global Chinese and Japanese markets in the early to mid-20th century. His analysis of Japan's modern industrialization centers specifically on a "colossal open pit" in Fushun, China--a locale the author repeatedly visited, which was the former site of East Asia's largest coal-mining operation. His extensive research probes the rise of fossil fuel use in East Asia and globally, showing how it was used to realize industrialization goals; he also argues that it was used as a means to strengthen socialist states. Seow sees the steep increase in coal-mining operations as related to a trio of modern industrialization objectives: the technological taming of nature, the mechanization of labor, and the voracious pursuit of production. He also assesses why the fossil fuel transition occurred and how our increasing dependency on this type of energy comes with numerous societal and environmental ramifications, including regional ecological deterioration and terrible labor conditions. Seow builds his thesis with extensive source materials, including illustrations, travelogues, coal miners' oral histories, mining engineers' testimonials, and company records. Impressive in scope, the book begins in 1927 and concludes with Seow's analysis in the 1960s at the height of Communist China's Great Leap Forward, in which industrial and economic stimulation came at the expense of the health, safety, and longevity of citizens. Overall, Seow's prose is accessible and his research soundly delivered. However, the book is not a casual read; although it's immensely informative and comprehensive, it's essentially an academic text, dense with statistical data, cultural and geopolitical analysis, historical examination, and industry analysis. Still, the book is not only an erudite history, but also--perhaps most critically--an urgent call for environmental intervention, as when Seow laments that "unless radical transformations take place," his offspring's generation will inherit the "world that carbon made, so deeply despoiled and unjust." An ambitious, scholarly study of the societal complications of energy extraction.

      COPYRIGHT(2022) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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