Coal mining, resource anxieties, and regimes of governance: A Roundtable on Victor Seow’s "Carbon Technocracy"
Compiled by Liat Spiro, Editor-at-Large.
Participant bios:
Mark Hendrickson is associate professor of History at UC San Diego and author of American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from World War I to the Great Depression (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He is currently at work on a project treating the history of American mining engineers in the development of capitalism, science and foreign policy, supported by the Mellon Foundation’s New Directions Fellowship. Parts of this project have been published in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and History and Technology.
Trish Kahle is assistant professor of History at Georgetown University Qatar. She is a scholar of energy, work, and politics in the modern United States and the world. Her first book, Energy Citizenship: Coal and Democracy in the American Century, will soon be published by Columbia University Press. With Vicky Googasian and Firat Oruc, she co-leads the Energy Humanities Research Initiative.
Victor McFarland is associate professor of History at the University of Missouri and author of Oil Powers: A History of the U.S.-Saudi Alliance (Columbia University Press, 2020). He has published extensively on the history of energy, environment, and U.S.-Middle East relations.
Victor Seow is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. A historian of technology, science, and industry, he focuses on China and Japan in their global contexts and on histories of energy and work. He is the author of Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022)—the subject of this forum—which received the Association for Asian Studies’ John Whitney Hall Book Prize, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Michael H. Hunt Prize in International History, and other prizes. Victor is currently working on a new book about the history of industrial psychology in China.
Victor Seow's Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (The University of Chicago Press 2022) brings together histories of science and technology with political economy to tell the story of the massive coal-mining operation at Fushun, Manchuria. At Fushun, he traces continuities in technocratic logics across Japanese imperial rule (Manchukuo), the short-lived Nationalist interregnum, and Communist control. He highlights the human toll of technocratic management, analyzing systemic short-sightedness in framing problems and critiquing technocracy’s narrow focus on supply-side solutions. In so doing, he casts light on one of the prevailing questions of the contemporary climate crisis: is technocracy better suited than liberal democracy to adapting energy regimes? Without offering a conclusive answer, Seow's interpretation of the history of Fushun provides reasons to doubt technocracy. Moreover, he reminds us that decarbonization domestically may be accompanied by the introduction of fossil-fueled industry abroad, historically between Japan and China and today between China and countries engaged in the Belt and Road Initiative.
For scholars of global history, Seow's Carbon Technocracy will be of major interest as it situates East Asian energy regimes among empires and across developmental states. This places his work in dialogue with as wide-ranging works as Megan Black's The Global Interior and Charles Maier's Among Empires. Seow details the transnational circulation of mining expertise and machinery among the U.S., Germany, Japan, and China.
Introducing the concept of “warscapes of intensification,” Seow shows how Japanese energy resource extraction generated an ever-increasing momentum, in violent scale and scope, during the Second World War across Asia. Working across scales, he moves seamlessly from the geopolitical to the household. In his analysis of resource anxieties, he demonstrates how energy conservation and fuel economy efforts in the Japanese metropole could live alongside agendas of increased coal production on the imperial periphery in Manchuria. He analyzes the roles of Japanese personnel remaining at work in Fushun following the Communist takeover. Reckoning with the legacy of Japanese imperialism at Fushun, Seow excavates the developmental aspects of the extractive regime while clearly demonstrating that technological transformations need not be a defense or apologia for empire.
Reading Carbon Technocracy alongside Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy invites multiple avenues of inquiry. Whereas Mitchell associates coal with democratization, as workers' movements could successfully block the mining and transshipment of the resource more effectively than subsequently with oil, Seow shows little such potential in a coal-based regime in itself. Although he refers to twenty-six major strikes between 1914 and 1930, he documents how Fushun's technocrats developed surveillance mechanisms to effectively police the movements of workers—in essence, arguing that Fushun’s imperial managers realized Mitchell’s argument at the time, a century prior. While Mitchell's analysis of oil points to sabotage by capital in using cartels to limit supply, Seow's account of coal extraction is purely productivist: Fushun's managers sought to overcome limits toward a monotonically increasing supply. As “carbon technocracy” and “carbon democracy” overlapped historically, one wonders what could be reached via a synthesis. Should we view them as alternative resource and political regimes? Or intertwined dynamics of empire and development, war and stabilization, in the twentieth century?
Liat Spiro, College of the Holy Cross
Mark Hendrickson
It is a real pleasure to have the opportunity to engage with Victor Seow’s meticulously researched and carefully crafted book. Thanks, too, to the Toynbee Prize Foundation blog for the opportunity to learn more from Victor about a topic of immense importance.
Victor, in one of the central claims of the book, argues that the search for and the extraction and use of carbon explains the emergence of the modern state. A central premise of the book, as he makes clear in the introduction, is that “the fossil fuel economy made possible the modern state and the modern state the fossil fuel economy.” This mutual- or co-production has, according to Victor, “defined our modern age.” (7) The focus on the tight relationship between coal and state development left me wondering about other commodities. Could historians of cotton, for instance, make much the same case? Additionally, the state development stories that unfold in Victor’s remarkable narrative are many, and I wondered if he might speculate on the similarities and differences in the impact of coal on the development of the state and regimes in Japan, China, and the Soviet Union. Leaders in all of these cases came to the same conclusion—we need more coal and we need it now—but did this pursuit impact their development in similar ways? Or are there important differences in the ways that the quest for fossil fuels shaped state development in these different contexts?
In Victor’s narrative, mining engineers and government officials aspired to displace labor with new technologies and machines, but the constant and overwhelming demand for more and more coal rendered these efforts largely ineffective. As a result, the costs of mining and processing Fushun’s “inexhaustible” coal reserves were born squarely by the workers who labored in the mines under the most difficult and dangerous of circumstances. The meager wages, deadly working conditions, and environmental hazards encountered by those who worked in and around the mine provide further evidence that miners and their communities benefited little if at all from the product of their labor or from the resources that lay under their homes and communities. Even in the early years of the People’s Republic of China, covered later in the book, the knowledge of workers might have been glorified by the party, but Communist leaders, as Victor points out, only valued labor’s input to the extent that it would increase production in the mine. It is in this section that there is more than a tinge of regret in Victor’s tone. Mining, he seems to suggest, could have been done (or maybe not done?) in ways that enhanced worker safety and compensation and limited waste. I wondered if Victor sees the decision not to pursue these more egalitarian strategies as inevitabilities given the logic of carbon technocracy that pervaded every regime that governed the workings of the mine? Or, should we see this story as more contingent?
The historiography of mining in the U.S. and western Europe comes with a rich description of mine worker resistance to capital, managers, and mine owners, but we see little of this in the Fushun works, particularly after Japan took full control of the mine. From the perspective of labor this is a grim, even relentlessly grim, story. I wondered if Victor might reflect more on this and why this was the case? This is not to say that workers resistance is completely absent in Victor’s analysis. For instance, in chapter two, he notes that strikes “occasionally met with success,” but, he cautions, these were short (“at most three days”) and isolated events that required the participation of at least five-hundred miners to achieve success (100). I wondered if the lack of evidence of more persistent and widespread resistance might be more of a problem inherent in the sources that Victor had at his disposal. Labor newspapers, public investigations, company records, and oral histories, among other sources have all provided rich troves of evidence for labor and mining historians, and these types of sources may not exist in the case of Fushun.
Along these same lines, Victor provides a powerful counter-argument to Timothy Mitchell’s linkage of coal mining to the emergence of democratic institutions, but I wondered if Victor might say more about what he thinks about the relationship between political and social movements and bottlenecks in the supply chains for coal or other minerals and fuels. In what ways does the type of mining (underground versus open pit) shape the opportunities for resistance and the building of worker solidarity? Looking to U.S. labor and mining history, one major issue concerns how and to what degree racially and ethnically diverse mine workers came to recognize a common interest in the face of dangerous, dehumanizing, and low paying mine work. Is there evidence of this sort of mine worker culture and solidarity developing in the open pit at Fushun? To the degree that it did, how much of it can be traced to the nature of the work or to the pre-migration experiences of the workers who came to Fushun? Did they have traditions of resistance in their home regions in North China that could be deployed in Fushun? If this sort of worker culture did not exist, which seems entirely plausible, does the migratory nature of these workers at Fushun offer an explanation? Or are there larger more political, institutional, or other explanations for this?
Another major if more subtle theme in the book is another kind of mobility, particularly the mobility of engineering expertise that made it possible to identify, extract, and process material buried deep in the earth’s crust. Chinese, Japanese, American, and Russian engineers all played a role in building or rebuilding Fushun’s capacity. In the case of the Russians in the early 1950s, Victor notes, this was a little ironic since just years earlier Soviet forces had looted Fushun’s mining machinery on their way out of town following Japan’s defeat in World War II, but that is another story. More to the point, international mobility of mining engineering knowledge is not a new story in China or anywhere else, but this mobility and its impact took on an outsized importance in the period Victor covers. How should we characterize this expansion in the movement of knowledge and technical expertise, and what brought this change about? Were the engineers tools of expanding states and corporate entities? Or, were they more autonomous actors driving historical change in ways we have not fully thought through? In what ways did the relationship between engineering, states, and business entities change over time? Or, put another way, to what degree is carbon technocracy a global phenomenon fostered, at least in part, by engineers who circulated mining and processing knowledge globally? These are all questions Victor’s touches on in his fine book, but I would be curious to get his thoughts on how, or if, the story of Fushun helps us to make sense of these larger global changes that left a deep (literally) impact on the history of our planet and its people.
My last question is more concerned with helping set an intellectual agenda for future scholars who might uncover new source material. I wondered if Victor might talk a bit about how access (or perhaps more importantly the lack of access) to source material shaped the story he told? The primary source material for the chapters dealing with Japan’s operation of the mine were richer than those for chapters that looked at the Nationalist and Communist operation of the mine. Are there any specific questions or issues that the lack of source material prevented him from addressing? Or, perhaps put another way, were there any intellectual puzzles that could not be addressed given the lack of appropriate source material available at the time he was researching the book that others might take up in the future?
Trish Kahle
What kind of place is a coal mine? Victor Seow’s Carbon Technocracy helps us reimagine the way we answer this question with his expansive and richly researched study of China’s Fushun colliery, where the mine becomes a site of investigation into the relationship between energy, empire, and governance in the twentieth century.
As energy studies has increasingly grappled with the implications of the idea that modern conceptions of freedom rested on unsustainable fossil fuel extraction, Seow reminds us not lose sight of the unfreedoms which extraction and extractivism have entailed. His work asks us to revisit our understanding of the link between fuels and politics, between energy and power. In particular, he reminds us, the coal energy regime in Fushun didn’t lead to the rise of democratic politics as posited by Timothy Mitchell’s now-canonical Carbon Democracy—but rather to the emergence of a modern form of technocracy.
Carbon technocracy, like its democratic counterpart, never truly lived up to its own political imaginary. The aspiration for expert control remained a story of “slippage” and unintended consequences. The relationship between coal energy and technocracy was bidirectional. On the one hand, political and industrial actors built institutions which made the existence of the Fushun colliery possible; on the other hand, the energy produced from the Fushun mine then powered new kinds of political imaginaries (18). In the middle, the wide-ranging cast of characters at the center of Seow’s story were left to accommodate the weighty contradictions of coal-fired energy systems: workers who were treated as machines, in the end, weren’t; modes of extraction meant to secure supply lent themselves to scarcity panics; efforts to build new kinds of political futures struggled to break free of past practice.
The power of Seow’s emphasis on technocracy is how it focuses our attention on the relationship between the coal mine and the state. Fushun, the colliery from which he crafts his argument, is so large that it can stand as a singular mine in relation with the state, but this method of thinking about the relationship between sites of energy production and statecraft works even if “the coal mine” is imagined as an aggregate set of mines. The state and the coal mines have mutually constituted histories.
The relationship between the mine, the Japanese empire, and the Chinese state also offers a place to reflect on the core questions of the field of energy history. Seow’s Carbon Technocracy arrived in the growing and revitalized field of energy history at an auspicious moment, a little more than a decade after the publication of Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy. He poses an important challenge to Mitchell’s account which linked coal to the emergence of mass democratic politics and the post-WWII rise of oil as marking democracy’s decline. At the same time, his book affirms on a deeper level the continued salience of Mitchell’s underlying query: what exactly is the relationship between energy systems and political systems? For Seow, understanding “technocratic tendencies around energy resource management” is key to understanding “the modern condition” (19). That would seem to propose a story of unity and continuity between the early twentieth century and the present—rather than seeing the post-World War II period as a moment as a moment of energy transition. This emphasis on continuity offers an important corrective to a global narrative of energy transition that has placed too much emphasis on the North American and European experiences of the shift to a hydrocarbon economy.
Carbon Technocracy also offers a much-need new story about coal’s place in post-World War II energy history. In part representative of the trend which Christopher Jones termed “petromyopia,” the central place of coal in the way different state actors—from China, to the United States, to India—imagined the future has often been sidelined. Seow powerfully captures the way the Chinese state used the Fushun colliery and Chinese coal more generally to conjure industrialized futurity. In chapter six, Mao “longs” for a utopia populated with smokestacks as far as the eye can see (272). These coal-dependent futurisms are critical to understanding, in Seow’s case, how Japanese technocratic practices persisted past the imperial period. Even if the Japanese mining manuals were translated and the political meaning of technologies recast, the Communist imagination of a coal-powered future drew the legacies of Japanese colonialism forward too. Far from being an artifact of older energy systems hanging on in a new world of oil and nuclear power, coal retained its hold on the future.
The questions raised by Carbon Technocracy are ones the field will continue to grapple with for a long time. Is it possible to theorize this relationship beyond the specific histories from which particular energy systems and their attendant states, empires, and other political formations emerge? Is Fushun indeed a planetary parable, as Seow suggests? What are the perils and promises of theorizing the relationship between energy and politics? Seow offers a model for how we can narrate the relationship between energy and politics beyond determinism and without losing the aspiration that the relationship between the two can indeed be theorized. Indeed, as long as we live in the world that carbon made, the coal mine will always have salience in explaining it.
Victor McFarland
There are few tasks for historians more important than uncovering the roots of the climate crisis. Even so, energy history remains an underexplored topic. The scholarship that does exist concentrates heavily on the United States and Western Europe. That makes some sense. The modern fossil fuel economy originated in those places, and the United States has produced more greenhouse gases than any other nation. China, however, is making up for lost time, and is now the world’s leading source of new emissions. Victor Seow’s remarkable new book Carbon Technocracy helps explain the backstory to that development. Through a close look at the giant open-pit Fushun coal mine in Manchuria, Seow explores the beginning of carbon-intensive economic development in East Asia.
Seow’s account differs from histories of Anglo-American fossil fuel extraction that focus on private industry. Coal, oil, and gas companies tell origin stories about heroic inventors and entrepreneurs. Their critics paint them as more malign, but still powerful – more powerful than the companies like to admit. Think of Ida Tarbell on John D. Rockefeller’s ruthless empire-building; Robert Vitalis and Myrna Santiago on the harm that Anglo-American oil companies caused in other countries; or Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway on the “merchants of doubt” who blocked climate action.
Seow, by contrast, puts the state front and center. The only two corporations that play a sustained role in the story, Mantetsu and Mantan, were essentially arms of the Japanese government. After 1945, and especially after the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, Fushun came under even more direct state control. Seow’s main characters are technocrats, not plutocrats. In his narrative, the primary motive for mining Fushun’s coal was not the dream of private riches – it was the determination of the Japanese and Chinese governments to bolster their military and economic power, ensuring their survival in a hostile world. We might summarize Seow as updating Charles Tilly: in East Asia, war and fossil fuels made the state, and the state used fossil fuels to make war.
The Fushun mine was first developed by Chinese and Russian business interests, then seized by Japan in 1905. For the next 40 years, the mine operated with a largely Chinese workforce under Japanese control. Foreign engineers and technical knowledge imported from overseas, including from the United States, also played an important role. Seow’s multilingual research is extraordinarily impressive throughout this book, but never more so than when he examines the racialized labor hierarchy at Fushun under Japanese rule. The mine was a multicultural place. It was also a brutal and deeply inegalitarian one, culminating in mass slaughter at the 1932 Pingdingshan massacre and the emergence of a harsh forced-labor regime during World War II. Japanese managers denied their Chinese workers the most rudimentary safety equipment, then blamed them for the fatal accidents that occurred with depressing regularity. One Japanese student assigned to Fushun wrote: “Because Chinese laborers are generally low in intellect and deficient in basic mining knowledge, they have a complete lack of sense concerning matters like mine safety” (111). Mine administrators learned some Chinese to communicate with their employees, but the language textbooks instilled more prejudice and distrust. They taught managers to accuse workers of lying about their age and their suspected misdeeds. Sample phrases included: “You must be shooting morphine,” and “I do not believe you” (56-57).
Seow views this contempt for workers as linked not only to Japanese imperialism and theories of racial superiority, but also to a broader technocratic ideology that was shared by the Republic of China (ROC) and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Carbon technocracy sought to replace humans with machines or, failing that, to treat workers as interchangeable parts. This mindset found its purest expression in the diary of the PRC soldier Lei Feng, who aspired to be a never-rusting “screw” in the revolutionary “machine” (302). Consistent with that attitude, ordinary workers remain largely anonymous in most of Seow’s sources. Engineers and managers receive more attention. Perhaps the closest thing to a human main character in this book is Kubo Tōru, a Japanese official and a true believer in carbon technocracy who spent almost his entire adult life in Fushun. Even senior bureaucrats like Kubo, however, come across as loyal functionaries more than independent leaders – keeping the mine running smoothly, but never questioning its purpose.
The true protagonist of the narrative – albeit a villainous one – is the Fushun mine itself. We first meet it on the first page of the book, in the memorable words of the Japanese poet Yosano Akiko: “A ghastly and grotesque form of a monster from the earth, opening its large maw toward the sky” (1). That monster spends the next 300 pages devouring people – sometimes dozens or even hundreds at a time, in major disasters, and sometimes one by one, through smaller accidents and grinding, everyday oppression. Even after the Japanese were defeated and Kubo was executed for war crimes, his project continued for decades under new leadership, experiencing what Seow calls an “afterlife,” like a creature from a horror movie that cannot stay dead (207).
The mine had another monstrous ability: it could warp people’s thoughts. Although carbon technocracy presented itself as rational, Seow argues that it was “anything but” (8). Fushun offered the technocrats “fantasies” of unlimited power – “a promise that proved more intoxicating than any spirit” and left them in a “stupor” (14, 157). When they got a taste of Fushun’s energy, they developed a “deep addiction,” possessed by “carbon cravings” they could never satisfy as they “hungered for coal” in ever-greater quantities (9, 123, 134).
There is some risk here of excessively deemphasizing human choices by portraying everyone as trapped in the same delusion. With so many characters representing an all-pervasive carbon technocracy, it can be hard to tell where the real decisions were being made. There is also some risk of flattening the distinctions between the Japanese Empire, the ROC, and the PRC. Seow writes that “the similarities between the [Japanese and ROC] energy regimes exceed the differences,” and the PRC’s “similar pursuit of fossil-fueled development” would take it down some of the same “well-trodden and twisted paths” as its predecessors (254). It is true that all three regimes were authoritarian, and all three sought to boost coal production through scientific management. In other ways, Japan’s predatory extraction of China’s resources was quite different from the ROC and PRC’s development projects. That point is clearer elsewhere in Carbon Technocracy. Seow notes, with some understatement, that Chinese workers under the ROC were “not subjected to the same degree of direct abuse” that they suffered under the wartime Japanese regime (249). He also shows that the PRC valorized common laborers and sought to incorporate their knowledge into mining operations, an attitude totally absent during Japanese rule.
Emphasizing the common features of the Japanese Empire, the ROC, and the PRC does serve an important purpose. Seow’s introduction and conclusion denounce carbon technocracy, stress the threat of climate change, and condemn hubristic attempts to dominate nature. One might characterize Seow’s implied stance as “degrowth,” though he does not use that term. There is a stark contrast between this approach and the ideas of every prominent historical character in the book. We never meet anyone in Carbon Technocracy, Japanese or Chinese, who seriously challenged the prevailing model of fossil-fueled development. Calls for energy conservation, like the campaign for “low-temperature-living” in colonial Manchuria and Korea during the 1930s, were purely tactical – designed to redirect coal supplies from domestic heating to more urgent military and industrial uses (193). The closest thing to modern environmentalism we see is a modest attempt to reduce smoke pollution in Osaka during the interwar years, designed to protect the aesthetic qualities and health of a single city rather than fundamentally changing the energy regime. Of course, we cannot expect twentieth-century Japanese and Chinese leaders to have held twenty-first century views on the environment, or to have foregone industrial development for the sake of limiting carbon emissions – but the structure of Seow’s book makes it impossible to ignore the dissonance between those leaders’ actions and what we know today.
The effect, once again, is a bit like a horror movie. Seow tells us that coal mining at Fushun helped set East Asia on a path with disastrous environmental consequences, but we spend six chapters watching those mining operations proceed – with no one questioning that decision. We know something very bad is in the basement, and then we watch the characters go into the basement anyway.
Any historian will admire Seow’s abilities with multiple languages, his prodigious archival research, and his skill at weaving a complicated story into a gripping narrative. His greatest achievement in this book, however, might be something else: writing a history of technocracy without yielding to technocracy’s preferred narrative mode. The people who ran the mine deemphasized the consideration of any values other than efficiency. They preferred to speak the language of technical details and statistics, an antiseptic discourse that obscured Fushun’s reality of violence, forced labor, and environmental destruction. Seow makes us look right at the monster instead.
A response from Victor Seow, author of Carbon Technocracy
In Underland, his remarkable study of subterranean spaces, adventurer and writer Robert Macfarlane characterizes the world beneath our feet as having served a triad of functions: “to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.” Of the three, I have long been taken by the second. There is something that I find both fascinating and terrifying about human efforts to extract from the earth its ancient riches, particularly the fossilized life forms that we burn for heat, light, and power. It is thus a real pleasure to have my book be read and reviewed by three fellow historians of mining and energy, Mark Hendrickson, Trish Kahle, and Victor McFarland. Thank you to each of these esteemed colleagues for so thoughtfully engaging my work. My sincerest gratitude, too, to Liat Spiro of the Toynbee Prize Foundation for skillfully introducing the book and kindly convening this conversation.
I am touched by the reviewers’ generous assessments of Carbon Technocracy. While my work in general is geographically centered on East Asia, an enduring aspiration has been that it might speak to those who study regions beyond. And so, I find it heartening that this project and its main interventions appear to resonate well with these specialists of the United States and American foreign relations. I also very much appreciate the questions they have brought to the table for discussion. My response to these is organized around five topic areas: the state, coal, labor, expertise, and the mine. I will go through them in that order. But first, a brief introduction to the book.
Carbon Technocracy uses the history of East Asia’s onetime largest coal mine, the Fushun colliery in southern Manchuria, to explore the relationship between energy and power in the industrial age. Subjected to modern mining from the turn of the twentieth century, Fushun’s coalfields were exploited by different Chinese and Japanese states at different times in the decades that followed. Markedly distinct as these political regimes may have been, each became invested in strikingly similar visions of technology-driven industrial development that demanded ever-increasing volumes of carbon energy—instantiations of an ideal that I term “carbon technocracy.” The extractivist endeavors they undertook in response would deliver much harm not only to Fushun and other sites that were so worked but also to the countless miners who labored in those depths.
A primary thing that the book does, then, is to, as McFarland frames it, “put the state front and center” in its account of the fossil fuel transition. Because of its importance to statist preoccupations, from building industry to waging war, coal (and later also oil) came to serve as both a means and an objective for the exercise of power. McFarland further suggests that what we have here is an “updating” of Charles Tilly’s famous dictum: “in East Asia, war and fossil fuels made the state, and the state used fossil fuels to make war.” I am more than flattered by this characterization. I do think, though, that this is an aspect of my account that well extends to other regions, as might be evidenced from the many interstate conflicts over oil across the globe in the long twentieth century.
From a history of energy standpoint, the book’s focus on coal is, to Kahle, something worth commending. This offers a corrective, she contends, to what energy historian Christopher Jones has termed the field’s “petromyopia,” its inordinate attention to oil. Although coal is widely recognized to have been essential to the industrial revolution, it tends to be relegated to the background in accounts of energy in the twentieth century, even though global consumption of this fuel grew almost fivefold between the start and the end of those hundred years. As the book shows, coal continued to be prized by many state actors as, among other things, an industrial input, a strategic resource, a marketable commodity, and, as Kahle points out, a means of conjuring “industrialized futurity.”
The centrality of coal prompts the question of its exceptionality. Referencing my claim about the mutual constitution of the fossil fuel economy and the modern state, Hendrickson asks if historians of other commodities might be able to make a similar case. There are most certainly other commodities whose histories, too, were tied up with the emergence and development of major institutions like states and markets, as Sven Beckett has shown with cotton and Sidney Minz with sugar. Something that perhaps sets coal apart is how its widespread use, in greatly expanding the energetic bases of many societies, lay at the heart of the industrial age’s material transformations, including those related to the manufacturing and movement of other commodities.
The centrality of coal prompts the question of its exceptionality.
As much as this is a book about coal, it is also about the workers who braved numerous dangers to recover this resource. Hendrickson notes that the labor resistance frequently seen in histories of Euro-American mining regions seems circumscribed in Fushun’s case. He wonders if this is an issue of the unavailability of sources. I do not believe this to be so. In my search for collective action among Fushun’s workers, I was able to consult most of the types of sources that Hendrickson mentions—from company records to oral histories. But the episodes were comparatively few for the immensity of the mine. This seems especially odd given Fushun’s racialized labor hierarchy, in which the Japanese management’s often harsh treatment of the majority Chinese workforce served as a source of resentment for the latter.
The book discusses several reasons why labor resistance in Fushun was as limited as it was. The migratory nature of the colliery’s Chinese workers, many of whom hailed from different parts of North China, may help explain difficulties in establishing solidarity, as Hendrickson suggests. Another factor was the ineffectiveness of the Chinese Communist agents who tried on a number of occasions to mobilize Fushun’s miners against its Japanese management. Unlike their counterparts at the Anyuan coal mine, who successfully organized workers for a landmark strike by appealing to the particularities of local culture, the operatives here made missteps in their messaging. For instance, even as they urged workers to oppose imperialist wars, they staunchly took the Soviet Union’s side in recent Sino-Soviet tensions that had arisen over what many Chinese regarded as that socialist state’s imperialistic actions. Among other reasons for the limited labor resistance in Fushun were various technologies of control deployed by the Japanese management. One of these was open-pit mining. As historian Brian Leech has similarly noted in his study of the Berkeley Pit, when miners were moved from subsurface to surface operations, they found themselves more exposed to managerial machinations from which their former underground workings offered some distance.
Turning to the issue of expertise, Hendrickson highlights “the international mobility of mining engineering knowledge” that runs through the book and asks about the extent to which carbon technocracy represents “a global phenomenon fostered, at least in part, by engineers who circulated mining and processing knowledge globally.” Insofar as carbon technocracy is defined by a statist vision of securing access to cheap and abundant sources of energy through technoscientific means, then border-traversing mining engineers were important to that ideal and its (unavoidably imperfect) actualization. What is noteworthy is not so much that these experts moved around the globe. It is that they often did so with great confidence that their methods and machines might be transplanted without much friction, the excavations they helped unearth readily replicated in new geographies. This was certainly so with the American engineers who traveled to Manchuria to advise on the expansion of Fushun’s open pit. Here, as often elsewhere, the execution of their plans on the ground was not as smooth as on paper, but they dug in and, in so doing, left another massive gash in our increasingly altered Earth.
Finally, the mine at the center of the study. To McFarland, it is “the true protagonist of the narrative—albeit a villainous one.” It is the monster that hurtles through the pages and tramples those in its path. There is, McFarland playfully suggests, something about this that resembles a horror movie— “we know something very bad is in the basement, and then we watch the characters go into the basement anyway.” Given the powerful promise of carbon technocracy, many would indeed embrace its extractivist excesses at deep environmental cost. But this was not entirely inevitable. Although leaders in Japan and China at that time may not have known what we now know about the planetary impacts of fossil-fuel consumption, as McFarland acknowledges, they often knew that the speed and scale of mining they took as necessary to meet ever-escalating output targets put more and more workers in harm’s way. That they persisted in such efforts regardless is something for which they can be held accountable. At the mine, questions of social justice and of environmental justice are invariably intertwined.
I want to end by once again thanking Mark, Trish, Victor, and Liat for their close engagement with my work. I look forward to more conversations down the road.