Seow, Victor Kian Giap (Author)
Elliott, Mark C
Perry, Elizabeth J
Harvard University
Gordon, Andrew
Miller, Ian J.
Perry, Elizabeth J
Gordon, Andrew
Miller, Ian J.
Edition Details: Advisor: Elliott, Mark C; Committee Members: Gordon, Andrew, Miller, Ian J., Perry, Elizabeth J.
Physical Details: 302 pp.
Language: English
Carbon Technocracy argues for the centrality of fossil fuel energy to the making of global industrial modernity and to the emergence of East Asian technocratic imaginaries in the first half of the twentieth century. It advances the premise that coal and later oil enabled not only the transformation of human society's material foundations, but also allowed for new kinds of publics and politics. This dissertation is grounded in Fushun, the "Coal Capital" of Manchuria that once boasted East Asia's largest coal mining operations. Through the history of the Fushun Colliery, it examines how various Chinese and Japanese states and their subsidiaries, which had at different times extended control over this site, were participant in the co-production of calorific and political power. A key contention is that for all their ideological and institutional divergences, the Japanese imperial, Chinese Nationalist, and Chinese Communist regimes shared a markedly technocratic bent that was reflected and reproduced in their management of the coal mining industry. The materiality of coal features prominently in this inquiry. The study traces the ways in which this resource was mined, transported, and burned. At the same time, it is attentive to more discursive inflections, from the meanings and importance ascribed to energy as a factor of production and a necessity for modern life to shared ideals of securing access to cheap and endless supplies of carbon. To numerous Chinese and Japanese businessmen, engineers, scientists, military officials, politicians, and technocrats, Manchuria promised a solution to the energy crises of their times, and there they experimented with new extractive technologies of scale and scope, most notably open-pit mining. At the broadest level, this narrative, which draws from a range of Chinese, Japanese, and English sources, is a retelling of East Asia's recent past from the standpoint of energy. In so doing, it seeks not only to provide a mostly unexplored East Asian perspective to the history of energy--a field that has been largely defined by the research of scholars of North America and Europe--but also to show how considerations of carbon are central to writing histories of modernity in general.
...MoreDescription Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 75/10(E), Apr 2015. Proquest Document ID: 1558183893.
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