Creating the conditions for Western European petroculture: The Marshall Plan, the politics of the OEEC, and the transition from coal to oil
In the postwar years, petroleum products pervaded more and more aspects of Western European life.
Coal
The Smoke of London (William M. Cavert, 2016)
William M. Cavert, The Smoke of London. Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
Making coal sharp: Gendered consumers and users of mineral fuel in the 19th Century United States
At the same time that urban American hearths and kitchens became dependent upon coal, proscriptive accounts of gendered domesticity grew in popularity. Buying coal was a man’s world, full of sharp dealings, underhanded sellers, and cutthroat competition.
The energy transition in the Swedish iron and steel sector, 1800 – 1939
Cet article analyse la transition énergétique du secteur sidérurgique suédois, entre 1800 et 1939.
French energy imperialism in Vietnam and the conquest of Tonkin (1873-1885)
This article posits that the French conquest of Vietnam was undertook notably to appropriate its coal resources for the energy supply of the French Navy, and that French imperialism was in that case an ‘energy imperialism’.
Alternatives to energy imperialism: Energy and rising economies
This paper argues that efforts to gain secure access to and control over energy resources to fuel rapidly growing economies often rely on alternatives to energy imperialism. In the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, rising economies utilized a variety of strategies to supply thei
The impossible transition? The fatality of coal in the United Kingdom
This article seeks to understand the reasons for Victorian fatalism towards coal dependency – which led to in an inability to abandon this energy – in an effort to better understand what an energy transition would actually entail.
Bargaining electric power: Miners, blackouts, and the politics of illumination in the United States, 1965-1979
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.
Epilogue. Field notes from the end of the world: Light, darkness, energy, and endscape in polar night
This personal essay describes light(s) and darkness(es) in Longyearbyen, Svalbard (Norway) during polar night in January 2019.
The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution (Edward Anthony Wrigley, 2016)
Edward Anthony Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016).