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

Empires of Coal opens by juxtaposing German geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) and Qing official Zhang Zhidong (張之洞 1837–1909). Shellen Wu points out that, though very different, the two “shared a remarkably similar vision for the future of a modern China defined by technological and industrial development” (2). By asking how and why this was so, she sets up a perceptive and meticulously researched study of the world that men like Richthofen and Zhang created, a world we have inherited and one in which resources and fuel continue to shape meanings and priorities across an increasingly interconnected globe. At heart this book explores “the underlying reconceptualization of mineral resources and their significance for China’s place in the world” and traces the gestalt shift in which “coal ceased to be a familiar mineral and became the fuel of a ‘new’ imperialism” (3). For this reason, it is not a history of science per se, but a history of the ways that geological sciences and mining were implicated in emerging transnational practices of sovereignty, statecraft, citizenship, and power.

The first chapter provides historiographical and historical context and begins by tracing the role of coal in scholarly attempts to rethink China’s place in the development of global modernity. Wu builds on this by centering mining within the longer history of Chinese statecraft. Geology and mining technologies offer a window into the many possibilities available to late Qing powerholders, and the chapter provides an interesting history of the engagement of the Chinese with their underground resources. Though science in a narrow sense has often been used as a measure of China’s failure to modernize, Wu suggests that a looser view of science that embeds it within a web of other “points of contact” (29) will direct us away from such comparisons and toward the bigger picture of global change spurred by nineteenth-century industrialization.

To this end, Chapter 2 addresses the travels and writings of Ferdinand von Richthofen. Wu’s analysis, which sets Richthofen’s expeditions in China against the backdrop of political shifts in Europe, rapidly evolving colonial relations, and developments in both the geological sciences and the technologies of industry and travel, deftly conveys the excitement and potential of the historical moment. Her nuanced reading of Richthofen’s diaries and letters humanizes what could otherwise be a caricature of the colonial gaze and underscores the challenges of cultural contact and the logic of industrialization. The chapter closes with the results of Richthofen’s explorations, the impact of his publications and maps, and the ways his description of Shanxi’s vast coal reserves haunted both Chinese and foreign dreams well into the twentieth century.

This directs attention to the “afterlife” (65) of Richthofen’s work, but Chapter 3 turns to the translation of geological texts into Chinese and sits somewhat awkwardly in the flow of the larger narrative. Here Wu examines the complex process of translation and argues that underlying assumptions about “science as the source of Western wealth and power” (95) shared by both Western missionaries and Chinese translators helped to open up “a space for science” (94). However, the chapter’s strengths in presenting the divergent perspectives of different translators, the fluidity of “science” as a category, and the difficulties of mediating cultural and conceptual differences at times dampen the book’s overarching argument about a watershed in global perception.

Far more satisfying are the two chapters that follow, which do a great job of fleshing out the industrial worldview. Chapter 4 unpacks a wealth of German archival material to paint an eye-opening picture of the strategic role of engineers in the extension and imagination of empire, and it illuminates the practical ways in which individual career trajectories and on-the-ground conditions modulated German and Chinese ambitions, with far-reaching consequences for later Japanese imperialism and Republican-era...