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Coal Capital and the Contradictions of Carbon
Victor Seow
Harvard University
Assistant Professor of the History of Science
Wednesday, February 22, 4 pm
HG 1341
In this talk, historian Victor Seow introduces his recently published book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2021). Through a history of China’s onetime “coal capital” (煤都), Fushun, the book explores 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. Through Fushun’s history, one confronts hubristic attempts to tame and transform nature through technology, the misplaced valorization of machines over human beings, and productivist pursuits that have strained both the environment from which coal is extracted and the many workers on whom that extractive process so deeply depends. These are, the book contends, defining features of the energy regime of carbon technocracy and the wider industrial modern world that it has helped create.