Coal mines have long been productive sites of historical inquiry. Delving into the labor relations within them and the communities around them, scholars have uncovered insights into how societies and economies have been fundamentally remade in the industrial age. It was not until more recently, though, that sustained consideration was also given to coal mines as sites of energy extraction that helped fuel the era’s far-reaching industrial transformations. In this talk, I explore the implications of such an energetic perspective for how we can make sense of the workings of coal mines and, by extension, the wider world that came to so deeply depend upon them.

Victor Seow is a historian of technology, science, and industry, focusing on 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), a study of the relationship between energy and power through the history of East Asia’s onetime largest coal mine. Carbon Technocracy has received several awards, including the Association for Asian Studies’ John Whitney Hall Book Prize and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations’ Michael H. Hunt Prize for International History. Victor is currently working on a new project on the history of industrial psychology in China.