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Author: Peter A. Shulman Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421417073 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 333
Book Description
The fascinating history of how coal-based energy became entangled with American security. Since the early twentieth century, Americans have associated oil with national security. From World War I to American involvement in the Middle East, this connection has seemed a self-evident truth. But, as Peter A. Shulman argues, Americans had to learn to think about the geopolitics of energy in terms of security, and they did so beginning in the nineteenth century: the age of coal. Coal and Empire insightfully weaves together pivotal moments in the history of science and technology by linking coal and steam to the realms of foreign relations, navy logistics, and American politics. Long before oil, coal allowed Americans to rethink the place of the United States in the world. Shulman explores how the development of coal-fired oceangoing steam power in the 1840s created new questions, opportunities, and problems for U.S. foreign relations and naval strategy. The search for coal, for example, helped take Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan in the 1850s. It facilitated Abraham Lincoln's pursuit of black colonization in 1860s Panama. After the Civil War, it led Americans to debate whether a need for coaling stations required the construction of a global empire. Until 1898, however, Americans preferred to answer the questions posed by coal with new technologies rather than new territories. Afterward, the establishment of America's string of island outposts created an entirely different demand for coal to secure the country's new colonial borders, a process that paved the way for how Americans incorporated oil into their strategic thought. By exploring how the security dimensions of energy were not intrinsically linked to a particular source of power but rather to political choices about America's role in the world, Shulman ultimately suggests that contemporary global struggles over energy will never disappear, even if oil is someday displaced by alternative sources of power.
Author: Peter A. Shulman Publisher: JHU Press ISBN: 1421417073 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 333
Book Description
The fascinating history of how coal-based energy became entangled with American security. Since the early twentieth century, Americans have associated oil with national security. From World War I to American involvement in the Middle East, this connection has seemed a self-evident truth. But, as Peter A. Shulman argues, Americans had to learn to think about the geopolitics of energy in terms of security, and they did so beginning in the nineteenth century: the age of coal. Coal and Empire insightfully weaves together pivotal moments in the history of science and technology by linking coal and steam to the realms of foreign relations, navy logistics, and American politics. Long before oil, coal allowed Americans to rethink the place of the United States in the world. Shulman explores how the development of coal-fired oceangoing steam power in the 1840s created new questions, opportunities, and problems for U.S. foreign relations and naval strategy. The search for coal, for example, helped take Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan in the 1850s. It facilitated Abraham Lincoln's pursuit of black colonization in 1860s Panama. After the Civil War, it led Americans to debate whether a need for coaling stations required the construction of a global empire. Until 1898, however, Americans preferred to answer the questions posed by coal with new technologies rather than new territories. Afterward, the establishment of America's string of island outposts created an entirely different demand for coal to secure the country's new colonial borders, a process that paved the way for how Americans incorporated oil into their strategic thought. By exploring how the security dimensions of energy were not intrinsically linked to a particular source of power but rather to political choices about America's role in the world, Shulman ultimately suggests that contemporary global struggles over energy will never disappear, even if oil is someday displaced by alternative sources of power.
Author: On Barak Publisher: Univ of California Press ISBN: 0520973933 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 340
Book Description
The Age of Empire was driven by coal, and the Middle East—as an idea—was made by coal. Coal’s imperial infrastructure presaged the geopolitics of oil that wreaks carnage today, as carbonization threatens our very climate. Powering Empire argues that we cannot promote worldwide decarbonization without first understanding the history of the globalization of carbon energy. How did this black rock come to have such long-lasting power over the world economy? Focusing on the flow of British carbon energy to the Middle East, On Barak excavates the historic nexus between coal and empire to reveal the political and military motives behind what is conventionally seen as a technological innovation. He provocatively recounts the carbon-intensive entanglements of Western and non-Western powers and reveals unfamiliar resources—such as Islamic risk-aversion and Gandhian vegetarianism—for a climate justice that relies on more diverse and ethical solutions worldwide.
Author: Shellen Xiao Wu Publisher: Stanford University Press ISBN: 0804794731 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
From 1868–1872, German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen went on an expedition to China. His reports on what he found there would transform Western interest in China from the land of porcelain and tea to a repository of immense coal reserves. By the 1890s, European and American powers and the Qing state and local elites battled for control over the rights to these valuable mineral deposits. As coal went from a useful commodity to the essential fuel of industrialization, this vast natural resource would prove integral to the struggle for political control of China. Geology served both as the handmaiden to European imperialism and the rallying point of Chinese resistance to Western encroachment. In the late nineteenth century both foreign powers and the Chinese viewed control over mineral resources as the key to modernization and industrialization. When the first China Geological Survey began work in the 1910s, conceptions of natural resources had already shifted, and the Qing state expanded its control over mining rights, setting the precedent for the subsequent Republican and People's Republic of China regimes. In Empires of Coal, Shellen Xiao Wu argues that the changes specific to the late Qing were part of global trends in the nineteenth century, when the rise of science and industrialization destabilized global systems and caused widespread unrest and the toppling of ruling regimes around the world.
Author: Crosbie Smith Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107196728 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 473
Book Description
An innovative account of the trials and tribulations of first-generation Victorian mail steamship lines, their passengers and the public.
Author: Donald Quataert Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 9781845451349 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 284
Book Description
Table of Contents 1 Introduction and historiographical essay 1 2 The Ottoman coal coast 20 3 Coal miners at work : jobs, recruitment, and wages 52 4 "Like slaves in colonial countries" : working conditions in the coalfield 80 5 Ties that bind : village-mine relations 95 6 Military duty and mine work : the blurred vocations of Ottoman soldier-workers 129 7 Methane, rockfalls, and other disasters : accidents at the mines 150 8 Victims and agents : confronting death and safety in the mines 184 9 Wartime in the coalfield 206 10 Conclusion 227 Appendix on the reporting of accidents 235.
Author: Steven Gray Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137576421 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 289
Book Description
This book examines how the expansion of a steam-powered Royal Navy from the second half of the nineteenth century had wider ramifications across the British Empire. In particular, it considers how steam propulsion made vessels utterly dependent on a particular resource – coal – and its distribution around the world. In doing so, it shows that the ‘coal question’ was central to imperial defence and the protection of trade, requiring the creation of infrastructures that spanned the globe. This infrastructure required careful management, and the processes involved show the development of bureaucracy and the reliance on the ‘contractor state’ to ensure this was both robust and able to allow swift mobilisation in war. The requirement to stop regularly at foreign stations also brought men of the Royal navy into contact with local coal heavers, as well as indigenous populations and landscapes. These encounters and their dissemination are crucial to our understanding of imperial relationships and imaginations at the height of the imperial age.
Author: Richard Martin Publisher: St. Martin's Press ISBN: 1466879246 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 288
Book Description
Since the late 18th century, when it emerged as a source of heating and, later, steam power, coal has brought untold benefits to mankind. Even today, coal generates almost 45 percent of the world's power. Our modern technological society would be inconceivable without coal and the energy it provides. Unfortunately, that society will not survive unless we wean ourselves off coal. The largest single source of greenhouse gases, coal is responsible for 43 percent of the world's carbon emissions. Richard Martin, author of SuperFuel, argues that to limit catastrophic climate change, we must find a way to power our world with less polluting energy sources, and we must do it in the next couple of decades—or else it is "game over." It won't be easy: as coal plants shut down across the United States, and much of Europe turns to natural gas, coal use is growing in the booming economies of Asia— particularly China and India. Even in Germany, where nuclear power stations are being phased out in the wake of the Fukushima accident, coal use is growing. Led by the Sierra Club and its ambitious "Beyond Coal" campaign, environmentalists hope to drastically reduce our dependence on coal in the next decade. But doing so will require an unprecedented contraction of an established, lucrative, and politically influential worldwide industry. Big Coal will not go gently. And its decline will dramatically change lives everywhere—from Appalachian coal miners and coal company executives to activists in China's nascent environmental movement. Based on a series of journeys into the heart of coal land, from Wyoming to West Virginia to China's remote Shanxi Province, hundreds of interviews with people involved in, or affected by, the effort to shrink the industry, and deep research into the science, technology, and economics of the coal industry, Coal Wars chronicles the dramatic stories behind coal's big shutdown—and the industry's desperate attempts to remain a global behemoth. A tour de force of literary journalism, Coal Wars will be a milestone in the climate change battle.
Author: Ralph Crane Publisher: Reaktion Books ISBN: 1789143675 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
While concerns about climate change have focused negative attention on the coal industry in recent years, as descendants of the industrial revolution we have all benefitted from the mining of the black seam. Coal has significantly influenced the course of human history and our social and natural environments. This book takes readers on a journey through the extraordinary artistic responses to coal, from its role in the works of writers such as Émile Zola, D. H. Lawrence, and George Orwell; to the way it inspired the work of painters, including J. M. W. Turner, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh; to the place of coal in film, song, and folklore; as well as the surprising allure of coal tourism. Strikingly illustrated, Coal provides engaging and informative insight into the myriad ways coal has affected our lives.
Author: Jeff Goodell Publisher: HarperCollins ISBN: 0547526628 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 357
Book Description
Long dismissed as a relic of a bygone era, coal is back -- with a vengeance. Coal is one of the nation's biggest and most influential industries -- Big Coal provides more than half the electricity consumed by Americans today -- and its dominance is growing, driven by rising oil prices and calls for energy independence. Is coal the solution to America's energy problems? On close examination, the glowing promise of coal quickly turns to ash. Coal mining remains a deadly and environmentally destructive industry. Nearly forty percent of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year comes from coal-fired power plants. In the last two decades, air pollution from coal plants has killed more than half a million Americans. In this eye-opening call to action, Goodell explains the costs and consequences of America's addiction to coal and discusses how we can kick the habit.
Author: Peter A. Shulman
Author: Peter A. Shulman
Author: On Barak
Author: Shellen Xiao Wu
Author: Crosbie Smith
Author: Donald Quataert
Author: Steven Gray
Author: Richard Martin
Author: James L. Holton
Author: Ralph Crane
Author: Jeff Goodell