Technology and Culture

Carbon Technocracy seeks to recast the story of the shift to coal as the primary source of power in East Asia as concomitant and constructive of a techno-political system grounded in the idealization of extensive fossil fuel extraction. The strength of the book lies in the fact that all of the chapters are well researched, well argued, and informative, while speaking to several distinct fields with equal rigor for each.

It is hard to overestimate just how large the coal from the Fushun mine loomed in Japan’s colonial energy regime; the extractive complex alone provided an estimated sixth of all of Japan’s coal, metropole and home islands together. In 1915, a decade into the mine’s full-scale development, the mine was home to 20,000 workers, or over a tenth of the total number of workers in Japan’s coal mining industry. Seow rightly starts his book with the opening act of Fushun’s transformation into the coal metropolis of Asia and takes us into its fascinating and scary genesis.

Historians of technology will particularly appreciate the account of the inner workings of the machines-and-muscles entanglement in chapter 2. The way successive engineers navigated between energy imperatives and field realities, experimenting with production in baptism-by-fire mode, is highly instructive. While Japanese engineers were no strangers to mining coal, open-pit mining was completely new to Japanese engineers and technocrats alike. The old and the new, as is often the case in history of technology, went hand in hand; traditional subsurface extraction did not cease when Fushun transitioned to open-pit mining but consistently amounted to half of the mine’s output. The chapter models the kind of writing about engineering and mining that combines precision on the tech with an eye on the big picture.

Seow then focuses on the energy conservation and fuel anxiety that underpinned the work of the Japan Fuel Society in the interwar period and much discussion about harnessing energy resources abroad. The energy anxiety and quest for solutions addressed in the third chapter provide instructive context for what continues to be Japan’s energy problem.

In chapter 4, Seow digs deep into the entanglement of the intensification of imperial expansion and coal-fired industrialization in the wake of the Pingdinshan massacre (3,000 dead) on September 16, 1932, and the subsequent setting up of Japan’s client state of Manchukuo in Northeast China, where the Fushun coal mine was located.

Throughout, Carbon Technocracy explores the intertwined challenges of machines and muscle, compounded by the political asymmetries of the interwar period and ambiguous continuities in the post-1948 working of the mine. Historians of engineering are likely to find of interest the account [End Page 1056] of Japanese engineers and technicians who stayed behind and enabled the restarting of Fushun’s extractive capacity post–World War II (ch. 5) and the ambiguous status of those who worked at Fushun long after the Communist seizure of the mine (ch. 6). Even if the episode gets a shorter shrift than it may deserve, the account stays with the trouble of uncertainty of the status of these “retained engineers”: prisoners of war or willing maintainers of the Fushun extractive muscle?

Histories of coal are represented in this book by references to the work of Thomas G. Andrews and Chris F. Jones, while history of technology is represented by references to scholars such as Dagmar Schafer, Francesca Bray, and David Edgerton. However, some omissions are also of note, such as Thomas Hughes on power systems and Ann Johnson on engineers and engineering.

Carbon Technocracy redefines the contours of the field of energy history in East Asia. Seow hits the right spot on how to write about burning issues with urgency and clarity but without pathos. While it is too early to tell if the concept of “carbon technocracy” as a shorthand for the alternative account of state formation in East Asia will stick, the book sheds much...