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Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia

With felicitous prose and powerful images, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia by Victor Seow, assistant professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, tells an expansive story of fossil fuel energy regimes, centering around, but not limited to, what was once East Asia’s largest coal and shale oil mine, in Fushun, Manchuria. Palpably paying tribute to Timothy Mitchell’s seminal work, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011), Seow proposes the concept of “carbon technocracy” to make sense of the continuity of the colliery’s management, often motivated by developmentalist and autarkic aspirations amidst fears for energy scarcity, under the Japanese Empire, Chinese Nationalists, and then Chinese Communists, against a global backdrop. Mitchell argues that the British democratic system was an ineluctable consequence of the materiality of coal. Each step in the production of British coal, then the primary source of energy for Britain, called for localized and organized labor and was thus particularly susceptible to sabotage. To Mitchell, the democratic spirit was not fostered in scholar’s studies but in grim and dangerous coal mines where labor activists successfully campaigned for better pay and working conditions; democracy was neither proposed nor realized by city elites but by lowly miners. It was this feature of coal production that prompted the major industrial states to shift their main energy source from coal to oil, a liquid that required complex processing before human use, and democracy has been deteriorating accordingly ever since. Seow proposes an alternative argument. After the Meiji Restoration, an industrialized Japan also embraced the promises and pitfalls of coal energy. Interestingly, as Seow points out, Japan’s shift to the new energy source did not incubate democracy as Mitchell predicted, but technocracy, a term that any scholar concerned with the East Asian developmentalist states will surely encounter. While most researchers explain the origins of East Asian technocracy using political ideologies, cultural