Shellen Xiao Wu. Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920.

Abstract

When one thinks of the dynamics of China’s industrial expansion over the past several decades, coal is certainly one element of it that readily comes to mind. Coal has been a principal fossil fuel energizing China’s growth in national and personal incomes, as well as a source of profound environmental degradation. In Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920, Shellen Xiao Wu asks how coal became king in China. Her fascinating exploration of this question implicates the history of European science, imperialism, scientism, and nationalist discourses. Consistent with recent scholarship that has reassessed the late Qing, Wu argues that the foundations for China’s contemporary “empire of coal” are found in the last decades of the Qing dynasty, when Chinese political and intellectual elites fundamentally changed their views of minerals and resource management as China confronted the mutually supportive powers of Western imperialism and science. Over six chapters, the author arrives at her conclusion that China largely bought into modern global discourses and practices of mining and energy between 1860 and 1920 through successive phases: from the creation of a cultural space for science through the writings and surveys of Ferdinand von Richthofen and translations of Western scientific tomes, to the introduction of foreign engineers (principally German) in the late nineteenth century, to mining rights–recovery movements during the last decade of the Qing, and ultimately to Chinese geologists who increasingly viewed geology as a metaphor for national identity and survival. All these stages were essential to the adoption of modern conceptions of resource management and the predilection to interpret the “science” of geography in terms of its productive potential.