The World in a Mine
In this talk, historian Victor Seow will be introducing his recently published book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia. This book uses the story of what was once the largest coal mine in East Asia—the Fushun colliery in southern Manchuria—to examine how the different Chinese and Japanese states that had owned and operated this enterprise in the first half of the twentieth century came to embrace fossil-fueled visions of development and mobilized various extractive technologies toward that end.