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In her review of Victor Seow's groundbreaking recent book, "Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia" (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Elizabeth Miller notes the shared features of modern extractivism that are evident across states and geographies.
Andreas Malm's 2016 book, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, has significantly shaped debates about the relationship between energy, capitalism, and global warming. Eva Cherniavsky (University of Washington) introduces this EH Forum on Fossil Capital, in which four leading scholars assess the strengths and limits of Malm’s influential book, and ask: where do we locate the cultural and political prospects for creating a post-carbon economy?
What do literary narratives have to do with resource extraction? Quite a lot, according to Stacey Balkan. In her book, Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India, Balkan challenges developmentalist narratives pushed by industry through an examination of Anglophone Indian picaresque novels, or “rogue” tales. Looking to novels by writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Indra Sinha, and Aravind Adiga, Balkan reveals startling connections between landscape ideology, agricultural improvement, extractive capitalism, and aesthetic expression in British-occupied Bengal, 1980s Bhopal, and the coal-soaked terrain of contemporary Dhanbad.
