While energy use has appeared historically consequent for most of human history, it now seems energy non-use may determine our future. It is clear that the worst effects of climate change can only be averted if vast quantities of fossil fuels go unburnt.
This paper traces the history of oil being reined in by the British Raj, from the 1870s to the early 20th C. I argue that oil is not a self-evident object, but a category built by regimes of thought.
This paper presents the World Energy Council (WEC) as an archive for research on the history of energy.
This article examines how the perils conjured by blackouts in American cities after 1965 became interpreted as a key point of political and bargaining leverage for the nation’s coal miners.
Katayoun Shafiee, Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).
Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011)