Colonial Extraction and Industrial Steam Power, 1790-1880: Decarbonising Imperial History (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies)

This book untangles the connections between British industrialization and colonial expansion in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The addition of fossil fuels to the energy mix in this period drove overwhelming social and economic change in Britain, the north-east United States, and Europe, but it also had important and uneven consequences within a range of Euro-American colonies. Opening a new field of inquiry into fossil fuel-powered technologies and their critical role in colonial expansion, this book demonstrates how carbon- based economies dramatically accelerated the annexing of foreign lands and the extraction of their resources. Yet, while the use of coal on a commercial scale from the late 1700s powered an explosion of growth in manufacturing between 1760 and 1840 and these years coincided with the incursion and violence on colonial frontiers, the peripheries tended to rely on wood where they could. This intensification of animal and timber power complicated the nationalist narratives of coal-fired industrialization and economic development. A history of the meanings and ideas around carbon, fossil fuels, and their bearing within colonial expansion is increasingly relevant as rapid changes to climate bring into focus the legacy of carbonization in dispossession, sustainability, environmental, labor, and atmospheric relational histories. Introduction Carbon Colonies Contents Notes on Contributors List of Figures Cotton, Coal and Colonialism: Rethinking the Fossil Economy in the Geopolitical Context of British Imperialism Introduction Full Steam Ahead: Theories of the Emerging Fossil Economy Capitalism and Empire: Moving beyond Diffusionism to Theorise Extractivism Beyond Europe: The History of British Cotton as a Colonial-Extractivist Project Navigating Empire: Agents of the Energy Transition and Their Imperial Self-Conception Fossil Capital 2.0? How Cotton Capitalists Prevented the Diffusion of the Fossil Economy to India The Manchester Cotton Lobby and British India ‘But What About the Railways?’: Steam in British India Beyond the Fossil Economy? Concluding Remarks and a Tentative Thought on Decarbonisation Notes Colonial Staples: Steam Imperialism in Britain’s Carbon Frontier of Victoria Colonial Staple Fuels Victorian Coal Carbon Frontier Indigenous Carbon Aftermath Conclusion Notes Steam-Powered but Wood-Fired: Coal and Renewable Energy in Colonial Economies Introduction Firewood Consumption Firewood Production Forest Exploitation and Management Coal Discussion Conclusion Notes Awabakal and Nikkin: Reconnecting Histories of First Peoples, Coal and Colonists Nikkin in Awabakal Everywhen A ‘Force Field’ and ‘Wounded Space’ Notes Carbon Old and New: The Australian Agricultural Company, Coal, Wood and the Complexities of Energy Transition in New South Wales, 1825–1847 Notes Cheap Energy, Cheap Nature: Newcastle/Awabakal Coals in Colonial Capitalism, 1850–1880 Introduction Cheap Nature, Fossil Capital and the Commodity Frontier Gold, Labour and Machines Rail, State and Finance Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index