The birth of energy : fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The birth of energy : fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work
（Elements / a series edited by Stacy Alaimo and Nicole Starosielski）
Duke University Press, 2019
- : hardcover
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [239]-253) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In The Birth of Energy Cara New Daggett traces the genealogy of contemporary notions of energy back to the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today's uses of energy. These early resource-based concepts of power first emerged during the Industrial Revolution and were tightly bound to Western capitalist domination and the politics of industrialized work. As Daggett shows, thermodynamics was deployed as an imperial science to govern fossil fuel use, labor, and colonial expansion, in part through a hierarchical ordering of humans and nonhumans. By systematically excavating the historical connection between energy and work, Daggett argues that only by transforming the politics of work-most notably, the veneration of waged work-will we be able to confront the Anthropocene's energy problem. Substituting one source of energy for another will not ensure a habitable planet; rather, the concepts of energy and work themselves must be decoupled.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Putting the World to Work 1
Part I. The Birth of Energy
1. The Novelty of Energy 15
2. A Steampunk Production 33
3. A Geo-Theology of Energy 51
4. Work Becomes Energetic 83
Part II. Energy, Race, and Empire
5. Energopolitics 107
6. The Imperial Organism at Work 132
7. Education for Empire 162
Conclusion. A Post-Work Energy Politics 187
Notes 207
Bibliography 239
Index 255
by "Nielsen BookData"