In this Book
- The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work
- Book
- 2019
- Published by: Duke University Press
- Series: Elements
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
summary
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

- Title Page, Copyright Pagei
- pp. i-vi
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- Part I. The Birth of Energy
- pp. 13-14
- 1: The Novelty of Energy
- pp. 15-32
- 2: A Steampunk Production
- pp. 33-50
- 3: A Geo-Theology of Energy
- pp. 51-82
- 4: Work Becomes Energetic
- pp. 83-104
- Part II. Energy, Race, and Empire
- pp. 105-106
- 5: Energopolitics
- pp. 107-131
- 6: The Imperial Organism at Work
- pp. 132-161
- 7: Education For Empire
- pp. 162-186
- Conclusion. A Post-Work Energy Politics
- pp. 187-206
- Bibliography
- pp. 239-254
Additional Information
ISBN
9781478005346
Related ISBN(s)
9781478005018, 9781478006329, 9781478090007
MARC Record
OCLC
1089780479
Pages
280
Launched on MUSE
2020-04-27
Language
English
Open Access
Yes
Creative Commons
CC-BY-NC-ND
Copyright
2019