Powering Empire - by On Barak (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Global decarbonization is humanity's most pressing challenge. Powering Empire offers the first historical roadmap charting how the world was carbonized. It also jettisons some misleading yet prevalent myths and clears impediments to this task. One is the naèive assumption that we are currently living in the age of oil, or even post-oil, and that coal fumes are a thing of the past. Quite the reverse! This is still the age of coal and much of what we associate with oil rests upon the foundations of coal. We must also overturn the conjecture that global carbonization started in Western Europe and then spread to the rest of the world. Settings like the Ottoman Empire were early arenas for testing and adopting coal and steamships. The steamer-friendly corridors running between Europe and Asia--which would become the "Middle East"--stimulated British industrialization and imperial expansion simultaneously. Finally, we must resist the control of energy on all things fossil: the globalization of the hydrocarbon economy cannot be reduced to considerations of fueling alone. Coal depots were also created as a pretext for imperial land grab, out of concerns about ballasting, and stemmed from aspects of coal that had little to do with its combustion. This book, therefore, reveals a thickening carbon-intensive entanglement of energy and empire, of Western and non-Western powers, thereby excavating unfamiliar resources--from Islamic risk-aversion, through Ottoman attitudes to the underground, to Gandhian vegetarianism--for a climate justice that relies on a more diverse ethical repertoire"--

Book Synopsis

The Age of Empire was driven by coal, and the Middle East--as an idea--was made by coal. Coal's imperial infrastructure presaged the geopolitics of oil that wreaks carnage today, as carbonization threatens our very climate. Powering Empire argues that we cannot promote worldwide decarbonization without first understanding the history of the globalization of carbon energy. How did this black rock come to have such long-lasting power over the world economy?

Focusing on the flow of British carbon energy to the Middle East, On Barak excavates the historic nexus between coal and empire to reveal the political and military motives behind what is conventionally seen as a technological innovation. He provocatively recounts the carbon-intensive entanglements of Western and non-Western powers and reveals unfamiliar resources--such as Islamic risk-aversion and Gandhian vegetarianism--for a climate justice that relies on more diverse and ethical solutions worldwide.

From the Back Cover

"In rewriting the entangled histories of coal, Powering Empire recasts the history of the Middle East as well as our understanding of empire and the map of our present predicament. Barak has written a brilliant book."--Timothy Mitchell, author of Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil

"An imaginative, timely intervention in debates on the popular but contested idea of the Anthropocene, Barak's account of coal and the British Empire in the Middle East effectively historicizes many of our contemporary anxieties and concerns. His wide-ranging and impeccable scholarship and his judicious discussion of 'energy transition' in the Middle East will make this book compulsory reading for all historians and students of energy regimes."--Dipesh Chakrabarty, author of The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories

"We all know that the energy source that made the modern Middle East is oil--wrong! As On Barak shows in this fascinating book, British coal during the nineteenth century--and an archipelago of coaling stations designed to safeguard Britain's seaborne links to India and beyond--triggered enormous changes in everything from high politics to diet, labor, environment, and ideas about the body in Egypt, the Red Sea, and the Arabian Peninsula. But 'coalonialism, ' as the author calls it, was not only powered by coal. Water, human and animal muscles, plus abstract notions of energy, work, and risk both made the projection of coal-based power possible and also were transformed by it--often in ways that anticipated and persisted into the so-called 'age of oil' that would follow. This book will stimulate lots of new thinking about how our current relationships to energy sources took shape and what it might mean to transform them."--Kenneth Pomeranz, author of The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy

"Powering Empire is an extraordinarily original account that unsettles conventional energy histories of the Middle East, which focus to a great degree on oil. What Barak shows is that it was the nineteenth century intersection of British coal exports and colonialism that helped create the infrastructural and social basis for the twentieth century's oil regime. Brilliantly insightful and marvelously written, this book reminds us of how deeply the legacy of coal continues to inform contemporary energy politics."--Dominic Boyer, author of The Life Informatic: Newsmaking in the Digital Era

Review Quotes

"The present work by social and cultural historian On Barak is the result of an extremely ambitious research. . . .It is a text that deserves to be read not only for the bibliographical research work done by the author, for the audacious storytelling and some keen observations, but also because it stimulates a timely reflection on the perspectives of contemporary historiography."-- "The Journal of European Economic History"

"Truly fascinating . . . . Powering Empire is an important work for those wishing to broaden their understanding of the role fossil fuels--notably coal--played and continue to play in politics and daily life. It is written in accessible language and is not weighed down by overly technical information or dry economic analysis. As such, it should be of great interest to those seeking to learn about the history of the Middle East, imperialism, and globalization."

-- "The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs"

"Powering Empire is at its best in illuminating these seeming contradictions that break down the flattening effect of globalization and changing "regimes." In untangling these interwoven origins of the carbon age, Barak makes the case for thinking about decarbonization as a multidirectional and multifocal process that must involve both material and cultural transformation."

-- "Isis"

"Powering Empire is a valuable and ground-breaking work and should be of interest to any scholar working in the fields of the history and culture of the modern Middle East and British Empire."

-- "Diyâr"

About the Author

On Barak is a social historian of science and technology in non-Western settings, and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Middle Eastern and African History at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt.