Victor Seow (Cornell, History), "Carbon Technocracy: East Asian Energy Regimes and the Industrial Modern"

http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/events/sts_circle/

Sandwich lunches are provided. Please RSVP to sts@hks.harvard.edu by Wednesday at 5PM the week before.

Abstract: What is the relationship between energy and the making of modern states? What kinds of politics and publics do carbon-based economies engender? This talk draws upon my ongoing research on the history of the fossil fuel industry in Northeast China – a region once commonly called Manchuria – in the first half of the twentieth century in an attempt to offer responses to those questions. Focusing on Fushun, the “coal capital” that once boasted the largest coal mining operations in East Asia, I examine the efforts by multiple states – namely the Japanese imperial, Chinese Nationalist, and Chinese Communist – to master and manage this site of extraction, and the way in which Fushun coal as an energy resource featured in developmental statist imaginaries both constituted and challenged by ideas about scarcity, autarky, and the industrial modern. Through this, I set out to make a case for the co-production of caloric and political power in the rise of technocratic regimes in transwar East Asia.

Biography: Victor Seow is a graduate student in History and East Asian Languages at Harvard. He specializes in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century China, with interests in energy and the environment, technology and society, business and labor, and state power. He is currently completing his dissertation on the history of coal mining and the fossil fuel industry in Northeast China in the first half of the twentieth century, and will be joining Cornell as Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese History in Fall 2014.