Fossil Consumerism - by Wout Saelens (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A groundbreaking perspective on energy history that reveals the early modern home, and not industry, as the first major driver of fossil-fuel adoption.

This book explores how the homes of ordinary city dwellers sparked our modern dependence on fossil fuels. Drawing on a rich variety of sources, including probate inventories, household manuals, personal journals, medical treatises and contemporary artwork, it reveals how households in the early modern Low Countries embraced peat and coal to fuel new standards of warmth, light and domesticity. Yet, with these new home comforts came rising indoor pollution, intensified and gendered housework and, ultimately, a quiet shift in humanity's relationship with nature.

Bridging the histories of environments, material culture and consumption, Fossil Consumerism offers a reinterpretation of the historical roots of global warming, finding these not in the industrial mill, but in the intimate, overlooked spaces of the home. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the everyday origins of the Anthropocene.

Review Quotes

In this carefully researched, historiographically alert, and smoothly written book, Saelens offers a novel look at the triumph of fossil fuels in modern history. In bringing hearths and stoves to center stage, Saelens has expanded the reach of energy history into the home, into everyday life, and into domestic divisions of labor - while injecting energy into the history of consumption. - J.R. McNeill, Georgetown University

What if the modern history of energy began not on factory floors, but on kitchen hearths-with the stove, not the steam engine, as its unlikely hero? Based on a meticulous study of household inventories, this book shifts the focus from industrial machines to everyday domestic life, revealing how fireplaces, lamps, and heating devices quietly powered a revolution. By tracing energy through the intimate spaces of the home, it uncovers a rich and often overlooked story: how ordinary households helped shape the path to the modern energy economy. - Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Centre de Recherches Historiques

About the Author

Wout Saelens is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Urban History of the University of Antwerp and the Social History of Capitalism of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His research interests focus on the (early) modern histories of consumption, energy, pollution, political ecology and popular environmentalism.