The Birth of Energy
Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work
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.
About this Author
Cara New Daggett is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Virginia Tech.
Reviews
"The Birth of Energy is a major contribution to the environmental humanities that speaks to the notion of 'political ecology' in the most literal sense."
"The book is at its strongest when diagnosing the reverberations of the past in the current moment.... The Birth of Energy has much to offer to scholars engaged in questions of fossil fuels, imperialism, labor, and environmental politics."
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