Energy's history : toward a global canon / edited by Daniela Russ and Thomas Turnbull.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Russ, Daniela, 1987- editor.

Turnbull, Thomas, 1986- editor.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Power resources--History--20th century.

Power resources.

Energy development--History--20th century.

Energy development.

Physical Description:

viii, 283 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2025]

Summary:

"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 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. This collection contains twelve chapters that present, analyze, and contextualize 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"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

"The largest and most important renewable energy project in the world" : Maurilio Biagi Filho and the Brazilian sugar ethanol industry / Jennifer Eaglin

"Coal will be the primary fuel of the future" : Yoshimura Manji On the "fuel question" / Victor Seow

The fear of being "left behind in the dust" : the rise and potential fall of coal in China / Shellen Wu

Frederick Tryon and the decoupling of energy and economic growth in the 1920s / Antoine Missemer

The colony and the world energy revolution : Meghnad Saha's energetic developmentalism / Elizabeth Chatterjee

The red thread to socialism : Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii's "Energetics and socialist reconstruction" / Daniela Russ

Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo and the invention of anticolonial democratic oil conservation / Michael Dobson and Giuliano Garavini

Privatizing a colonial electricity undertaking : F. W. Dove's "What people think of our electric light" / Damilola Adebayo

Gender, food, and vernacular energy in Moussa Travélé's "Three rapid people" / Laura Ann Twagira

Uncertain energy epistemologies : William James and the case of mental and moral energy / Rebecca Wright

Laura nader's third-wave energy anthropology / Thomas Turnbull

The master resource : energy, inter-planetary capitalism, and neoliberal cornucopianism / Troy Vettese.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Energy's history

ISBN:

9781503640863

1503640868

9781503641501

1503641503

OCLC:

1423039616