What is the relationship between energy and power in the industrial age?

In this talk, historian Victor Seow explores this question through his recently published book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago, 2021). This book uses the history of China’s onetime coal capital, Fushun, to examine how the Chinese and Japanese states that had jostled for control of this site in the first half of the twentieth century came to embrace fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and mobilized various technologies of production to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality. Following the work of bureaucrats and planners, geologists and mining engineers, and labor contractors and miners, the book traces the deep links between the raw materiality of the coal face and the corridors of power in Tokyo, Nanjing, Beijing, and beyond.

Victor Seow is a historian of technology, science, and industry, specializing in China and Japan and in histories of energy and work. He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Chicago, 2021). At present, he is working on a new book on industrial psychology as a science of work and technology of production in China from the 1930s to the present.

This event is hosted by the Department of History of Science, Medicine, and Technology and co-sponsored by the Program in East Asian Studies.