Try free for 30 days
-
Carbon Technocracy
- Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute)
- Narrated by: Jim Lee
- Length: 12 hrs and 39 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $14.63
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Pollution Is Colonialism
- By: Max Liboiron
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Metis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research—an anticolonial science laboratory—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land.
-
Frozen Empires
- An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula
- By: Adrian Howkins
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Perpetually covered in ice and snow, the mountainous Antarctic Peninsula stretches southward toward the South Pole where it merges with the largest and coldest mass of ice anywhere on the planet. Yet far from being an otherworldly "Pole Apart", the region has the most contested political history of any part of the Antarctic Continent. In Frozen Empires, Adrian Howkins argues that there has been a fundamental continuity in the ways in which imperial powers have used the environment to support their political claims in the Antarctic Peninsula region.
-
Seeing Like a State
- By: James C. Scott
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? Author James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not - and cannot - be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge.
-
-
useful but too long
- By Edward Burrowes on 22-07-2022
-
The Cheese and the Worms
- The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
- By: Carlo Ginzburg, Anne C. Tedeschi - translator, John Tedeschi - translator
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the 16th century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society in which Menocchio lived.
-
Seeing Red
- Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
- By: Michael John Witgen
- Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves.
-
Empire of Rubber
- Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia
- By: Gregg Mitman
- Narrated by: Amir Abdullah
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company transformed Liberia into America's rubber empire. Scouring remote archives, historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war.
-
Pollution Is Colonialism
- By: Max Liboiron
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 5 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Metis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations. Liboiron draws on their work in the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research—an anticolonial science laboratory—to illuminate how pollution is not a symptom of capitalism but a violent enactment of colonial land relations that claim access to Indigenous land.
-
Frozen Empires
- An Environmental History of the Antarctic Peninsula
- By: Adrian Howkins
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Perpetually covered in ice and snow, the mountainous Antarctic Peninsula stretches southward toward the South Pole where it merges with the largest and coldest mass of ice anywhere on the planet. Yet far from being an otherworldly "Pole Apart", the region has the most contested political history of any part of the Antarctic Continent. In Frozen Empires, Adrian Howkins argues that there has been a fundamental continuity in the ways in which imperial powers have used the environment to support their political claims in the Antarctic Peninsula region.
-
Seeing Like a State
- By: James C. Scott
- Narrated by: Michael Kramer
- Length: 16 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Why do well-intentioned plans for improving the human condition go tragically awry? Author James C. Scott analyzes failed cases of large-scale authoritarian plans in a variety of fields. Centrally managed social plans misfire, Scott argues, when they impose schematic visions that do violence to complex interdependencies that are not - and cannot - be fully understood. Further, the success of designs for social organization depends upon the recognition that local, practical knowledge is as important as formal, epistemic knowledge.
-
-
useful but too long
- By Edward Burrowes on 22-07-2022
-
The Cheese and the Worms
- The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
- By: Carlo Ginzburg, Anne C. Tedeschi - translator, John Tedeschi - translator
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the 16th century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society in which Menocchio lived.
-
Seeing Red
- Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
- By: Michael John Witgen
- Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves.
-
Empire of Rubber
- Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia
- By: Gregg Mitman
- Narrated by: Amir Abdullah
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company transformed Liberia into America's rubber empire. Scouring remote archives, historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America—on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war.
Publisher's Summary
Audiobook edition
A forceful reckoning with the relationship between energy and power through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine.
The coal-mining town of Fushun in China’s Northeast is home to a monstrous open pit. First excavated in the early twentieth century, this pit grew like a widening maw over the ensuing decades, as various Chinese and Japanese states endeavored to unearth Fushun’s purportedly “inexhaustible” carbon resources. Today, the depleted mine that remains is a wondrous and terrifying monument to fantasies of a fossil-fueled future and the technologies mobilized in attempts to turn those developmentalist dreams into reality.
In Carbon Technocracy, Victor Seow uses the remarkable story of the Fushun colliery to chart how the fossil fuel economy emerged in tandem with the rise of the modern technocratic state. Taking coal as an essential feedstock of national wealth and power, Chinese and Japanese bureaucrats, engineers, and industrialists deployed new technologies like open-pit mining and hydraulic stowage in pursuit of intensive energy extraction. But as much as these mine operators idealized the might of fossil fuel-driven machines, their extractive efforts nevertheless relied heavily on the human labor that those devices were expected to displace. Under the carbon energy regime, countless workers here and elsewhere would be subjected to invasive techniques of labor control, ever-escalating output targets, and the dangers of an increasingly exploited earth.
Although Fushun is no longer the coal capital it once was, the pattern of aggressive fossil-fueled development that led to its ascent endures. As we confront a planetary crisis precipitated by our extravagant consumption of carbon, it holds urgent lessons. This is a groundbreaking exploration of how the mutual production of energy and power came to define industrial modernity and the wider world that carbon made.
Critic Reviews
"Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Seow reveals the intertwined stories of the Fushun colliery and the succession of state regimes that have drawn on Fushun’s material (and even rhetorical) power, from the contestation among Chinese, Russian, and Japanese interests at the turn of the last century through the consolidation of the People’s Republic of China. The clarity of Seow’s thinking, the felicity of his prose, and the significance of his topic will ensure a large audience among modern East Asian historians, energy historians, and the many scholars in environmental studies and environmental humanities who focus on carbon-driven climate change. Clearly written and very thoughtfully conceived."—Thomas G. Andrews, author of Killing for Coal
"Seow shows that civilizations built on coal undermine their own foundations with each strike of the shovel. His exploration of carbon technocracy highlights how the desire for technological progress and development runs along a deep seam of violence. Profoundly humane and thoughtful."—Kate Brown, author of Manual for Survival
"Focusing on the history of the Fushun coal mine in Northeast China, this engaging book traces the worlds that coal made across twentieth-century East Asia. Shifting seamlessly from the abstract structures of states and economies to the everyday lives of engineers and workers, Seow tells the story of the big science, big engineering, and big technology that made up the carbon foundation of both Imperial Japan and Communist China. A probing account of the origins and challenges of the climate crisis."—Louise Young, author of Japan's Total Empire