Powering Up Canada: A History of Power, Fuel, and Energy from 1600 ed. by R.W. Sandwell (review)

“Why a Canadian Energy History?” This question frames R.W. Sandwell’s edited volume, Powering Up Canada: A History of Power, Fuel, and Energy from 1600, in which she and thirteen other contributors trace the evolution of energy use in Canada over the last four hundred years. Powering Up breaks important ground in energy historiography and offers many promising avenues for discussion that will be sure to enrich the field in the coming years. Sandwell claims that greater mobilization around energy history is needed for two reasons. First, historians have largely naturalized energy’s place in history or neglected to analyze how it has shaped key historical processes, such as the Industrial Revolution. Second, the energy scholarship that does exist lacks a larger interpretive framework, with multiple “energy silos” prevailing instead (7). She presents Powering Up Canada as a solution to both of these issues, characterizing it as a “kind of historical energy primer” that collects different studies on the history of Canadian energy in one place, as well as an “energy sampler” that connects energy to broader historical and contemporary topics in Canada (6). Aware that energy can sometimes be a complicated and very technical subject, Powering Up Canada also includes a terminology primer in the appendix to explain some key terms.

An historical survey of energy over several centuries presents some organizational challenges, but Sandwell structures the volume around E.A. Wrigley’s theory of a shift from an organic energy regime (seasonal, sun, land, and water-based energy flows) to a mineral energy regime (constant, concentrated, transportable energy stocks) in the nineteenth century. On that basis, the volume is divided into two sections of six chapters each, bookended by Sandwell’s introduction and conclusion. The first section looks at organic energies, and the second turns to mineral energies; taken together, virtually every significant power, fuel, and energy since the pre-modern period–from food to nuclear–is covered here.

Powering Up Canada succeeds as a national energy primer because its contributors keep things simple. Each chapter essentially surveys an individual energy source, tracing the rise (and fall, if applicable) in its production and consumption as it related to the shift from an organic to mineral energy regime. The authors rely more on secondary literature and government data than on archival sources, but this undoubtedly reflects Sandwell’s intent to make the book a starting point for more detailed discussion. Even with limited primary research, many of the chapters are still richly empirical; pieces by Matthew Evenden and Jonathan Payton on hydroelectricity and Steve Penfold on petroleum liquids are two that particularly stand out.

As an energy primer, Powering Up Canada also challenges energy history orthodoxy and advances historical understanding in the process. In particular, several chapters reveal a more complex and uneven transition from an organic to mineral energy regime in Canada than in other industrialized countries. For example, Joshua MacFayden shows how in rural Canada wood consumption remained steady through the early twentieth century because the country’s rural population remained high and people remained well connected to forests. This and other findings in the volume convincingly reveal that Canada’s energy history is a distinctly national story in many respects.

Powering Up Canada also works very well as an energy sampler that links energy to broader historical issues and themes. This varies from chapters that ingeniously reinterpret key developments through the lens of energy, to others that consider, even briefly, the social and environmental impact of specific energy sources at different times and in different places. Highlights include George Colpitts’s study of food energy in the fur trade, in which he attributes the fur trade’s commercial expansion to the emergence of pemmican in traders’ diets, and Joanna Dean and Lucas Wilson’s fascinating piece on horse power in cities, which functions in part as a social...