Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America by Christopher F. Jones (review)

Combining technological and environmental perspectives, energy history is a young field offering fascinating insights along with some challenges in method and focus. Routes of Power illustrates both. Originating as dissertation, the book looks at three infrastructures built to transmit energy across the mid-Atlantic region of the United States: the canals that brought anthracite coal to markets in Philadelphia and New York City, long-distance pipelines built circa 1880 to carry oil to eastern refineries, and the Holtwood transmission infrastructure that carried hydroelectric power down Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River to Baltimore. Historians have walked these grounds before, but Christopher Jones finds fresh insights. He thinks that energy history has focused too much on supply innovations like Spindletop or Pearl Street, and too much on novel demand triggers, like automobiles. He argues that energy transport infrastructures also played important roles in shaping supply, demand, and development of energy types, from coal to oil to electricity.

Jones lays out his themes in six chapters. A chapter on the coal canals is paired with one on “The Anthracite Energy Transition.” Next a chapter summarizing the discovery, exploitation, marketing, and uses of Pennsylvania crude oil (1860–80) pairs with “Pipelines and Power.” Then the Progressive-era Holtwood hydro project is followed by “The Electrification of America.” The three infrastructure chapters offer fresh perspective from original sources, which is an accomplishment, as these are well-worked topics. The overview chapters on each energy type are competently drawn from the voluminous secondary source base.

The chapters advance several larger themes. Any energy transport infrastructure produced winners and losers; typically, capitalists and urbanites benefited while rural folks were bypassed or their landscapes “sacrificed” in the scramble for new energies. Each transmission system encouraged falling prices and intensified use of that energy. Jones contrasts the organic energy regime that launched American industrialization with the mineral regime (fossil fuels) that sustained and accelerated economic growth, and he teases out synergies and feedback loops across the mineral regime. Technical qualities in infrastructures really mattered: canals fostered broad economic growth across regions since they carried energies and goods back and forth across their routes. By contrast, oil pipelines drained the mineral wealth of northwest Pennsylvania while diverting profits to Standard Oil. These insights underscore the value of Jones’s analysis—and of the Envirotech project that has many SHOT contributors and fans

A young and careful scholar, Jones seldom challenges standing interpretations in energy history. But I found some implicit corrections. Martin Melosi’s early and authoritative survey, Coping with Abundance (1985), presented fuel cornucopia as the leitmotif of all U.S. energy history. For Jones, the abundance of wood and coal was checked by another fact: their use also required large inputs of human and animal power. As Jones notes, oil and electricity finally bypassed those organic constraints, fully severing production and consumption, causing total energy use to skyrocket. Another influential energy scholar, David Nye, emphasizes consumer choice across his Consuming Power (1998). For Jones, consumers had only a brief window of autonomy when new energies came to market; soon thereafter “they became locked in a world of intensive energy consumption” (p. 13).

This insightful study also illustrates some challenges confronting energy historians. Jones largely merges historical geography, environmental history, and history of technology—and he leaves out a lot of business history (Alfred Chandler’s 1977 Visible Hand gets one cursory citation, although his concept of industrial throughput ties directly to Jones’s intensification, while Chandler’s “Anthracite Coal and the Beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in the United States” [Business History Review 46, 1972] is overlooked). You can’t do everything, but these omissions surprise. More broadly, Jones structures the book around “energy transitions,” though he notes that Americans never gave up waterpower, wood fuels, or coal, even as they adopted new fuels. The notion of a transition implies a beginning, middle, and end that the record does not support. Transition also implies an evolutionary cast to...