Abstract

How might we make sense of the origins of the fossil fuel turn, and how might our understanding of this past inform our present, as we confront the ongoing crisis of climate change? In this talk, Victor Seow will draw upon his recently published Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022) to discuss how modern states of different stripes, from imperial Japan to communist China, came to embrace strikingly similar forms of science-driven, coal-fired developmentalism amid an international order that was being reshaped by the carbon energy transition. What is revealed in this connected and comparative account is the extent to which interstate competition and statist preoccupations around economic growth, national security, and resource autarky have driven the intensification of fossil fuel production and use across political modalities, at great human and environmental cost.

Bio
Victor Seow is a historian of technology, science, and industry, focusing on China and Japan in their global contexts and on histories of energy and work. He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022), a study of the relationship between energy and power in the industrial age. Carbon Technocracy has received several awards, including the Association for Asian Studies’ John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the Chinese Historians in the United States’ Academic Excellence Award, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History. Victor is currently working on a history of industrial psychology in China.

Co-sponsored by the USC East Asian Studies Center