Energy’s History: From colonialism, to anti-colonialism, and back again?

This volume presents visions of energy-driven development beyond the Western capitalist model and provides an expansive and critical account of how energy histories have shaped the past and continue to impact the present. The event focuses on the role of technology in the imagination of historical change, as well as the possibilities and limitations of writing a global energy history from a more cosmopolitan perspective. Talks and discussion will explore history, colonialism, anti-colonialism, fossil developmentalism, and neo-energy colonialism.

The event consists of an introduction to the book by its editors Daniela Russ and Thomas Turnbull, followed by a talk by the renowned historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. In his latest book More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (2024) Fressoz argues that we have long be taught that humanity’s relationship with energy is one of progressive transitions, with wood superseded by coal, coal by oil, oil by nuclear, until at some future point everything will be supposedly replaced by “green” energy.

But the long-held belief in transition and sustainability is completely untrue. More and More and More addresses this idea critically, showing how our industrial age and beyond has in fact been powered by an ever-greater accumulation of each major energy source, each feeding off the others.