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. In so doing, it presents a panorama of a site that well serves as a microcosm of the wider world that carbon made, the legacies of which we still grapple with today.

Victor Seow is a historian of technology, science, and industry, specializing in China and Japan in global contexts and in histories of energy and work. He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022), and is currently writing a new book on the history of industrial psychology in China.

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