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In the present century, historians are confronted with the challenging task of crafting an alternative narrative of energy history in our era of global decarbonization. Departing from the conventional celebratory account of fossil energy resources as having enabled innovation and economic growth, this new energy narrative will no longer describe the intensification of energy extraction merely as a positive force in human history, but equally as a marker of the accelerated deterioration of the Earth's ecosystem through human actions. Victor Seow admirably meets this challenge of writing a history of energy that befits our troubled age of climate crisis in his Carbon technocracy. In this work, Seow addresses what he terms the 'carbon technocracy', a regime built upon technological expertise and resource extraction, highlighting its dynamic relations with modern state formation in East Asia. Seow describes how this regime formed through the strong belief in technical progress coupled with the intensifying use of fossil fuel. In his account of carbon's political economy, various historical actors took part in 'the uncoordinated but collective enterprise' of establishing this modern energy regime (p. 12). The book's narrative centres on Manchuria's Fushun coal mine, which was subject to military and political turmoil in the twentieth century as it was successively run by China, Russia, and Japan. Chronologically, the book spans from the beginning of Fushun's modern coal mining at the turn of the twentieth century to China's Great Leap Forward in the 1960s. Through his skilful storytelling, Seow navigates the entangled tale of human labour, technology, and underground fossilized resources, which conditioned – and was conditioned by – human struggles over power. Up to the end of Second World War, Japan's technocratic imperialism played a central role in affecting Manchuria's carbon extraction. Following its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, Japan ruled Manchuria's carbon wealth, to which it applied scientific techniques in mining and labour control. Seow describes how vertical social relations, involving both order and resistance, formed between Japanese technocrats and Chinese workers (chapter 1). Far from gaining political agency as providers of essential extractive labour in a carbon-dependent economy – as Timothy Mitchell famously argued in his influential book Carbon democracy (2013) – these coal miners were subject to autocratic rule in Fushun's open coal mines, under a regime of carbon technocracy (chapter 2). As described in chapter 3, Japan's aggressive pursuit of overseas mineral resources in the 1930s was driven equally by technocratic optimism and growing anxieties about the nation's lack of carbon resources, especially hydrocarbons. In the run-up to the Pacific War, Japan's carbon technocracy mutated into a desperate plundering of fossil fuels to power the nation's war machine, leading to reckless physical violence in what Seow calls the 'warscape of intensification', at the heart of which was Manchuria's coal. Japan's 'empire of energy' (p. 182) culminated in a war demand for resources that surpassed the carbon technocracy's capacity to supply them, illustrating the inherent tendency of a carbon technocracy to amplify the desire for carbon resources by presenting a false vision of unlimited carbon wealth. Chapter 4 depicts Manchuria's early-twentieth-century carbon economy from the Chinese perspective, starting with China's rearguard battle against Japanese territorial expansion in the 1920s. At this time, China's retreat from the carbon capital of Manchuria had the effect of consolidating expertise around the Nationalist government, thus establishing China's early planned economy based on a highly developed technocratic governance of resources. Similarly, the post-Second World War reconstruction of Manchuria's coal production boosted the importance of technical expertise, setting the tone for the later developmental pattern. The reconfiguration of the carbon technocracy's rule under the post-1948 communist government mobilized machines, labour, and expertise, including Soviet and Japanese engineers who stayed to oversee the new era of China's carbon economy (chapter 5). Under the communist government, and its state-operated coal enterprise, the carbon technocracy continued to present a curious mixture of technocrats' undemocratic rule and the democratizing potential of coal miners' on-the-ground technical knowledge. In the epilogue, Seow addresses the historical legacy and contemporary relevance of the carbon technocracy, by way of cautioning against holding excessive hopes of finding technocratic solutions to the climate crisis. Just as 1920s fuel concerns led Japanese technocrats to seek unsustainable imperialistic solutions, the twenty-first-century advocates of technical fixes may bring us to another energy impasse as we are lured by a false vision of achieving energy affluence. In a bid to avoid this, Seow directs our attention to the contradictory postcolonial legacy of resource extraction, which often reproduces and exacerbates economic inequality and environmental destruction in formerly colonized nations through deeply entrenched technocratic traditions. As Seow rightly states, by identifying the negative outcomes of carbon-driven economic development, we can assess more plausibly the consequences of imperialistic technocracy 'without celebrating it' (p. 294). This is an excellent work representing the new direction in energy history, which does not shy away from engaging with present and future energy challenges. Nonetheless, while it is admirable, the epilogue's discussion of the global climate crisis feels somewhat disjointed from the previous chapter's discussion of pre-1960s Chinese energy development. The gaps in the historical narrative include the low-carbon technocracy that dominated Japan's nuclear power industry, which created a techno-optimism that led to this century's most severe nuclear disaster. Furthermore, Seow's use of the term 'East Asia', such as in the subtitle, would have benefitted from further clarification, as the book is predominantly about China and Japan, with broader economic and techno-political connections in East Asia and Southeast Asia, which constituted the regional energy market, mostly absent. With that said, some narrative gaps may be unavoidable when undertaking such an ambitious discussion, and our knowledge about the broader East Asian scene is being filled in by emerging work on the new energy history. In the expanding historiography of this exciting field, Carbon technocracy will remain a benchmark study of critical excellence in its historical investigation.
Hiroki Shin (Thu,) studied this question.