What is the relationship between energy and power in the industrial age? In this talk, historian Victor Seow explores this and related questions, drawing from his recently published book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022). Centered on the history of China’s onetime coal capital, Fushun, this book traces 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. It is a history that foregrounds how energy shaped the region and, more generally, the wider industrial modern world of which it is inextricably a part.

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 (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is currently writing a book about the history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to the present. From 2014 to 2017, he was a proud member of the Cornell history department.