With felicitous prose and powerful images, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia by Victor Seow, assistant professor of the History of Science at Harvard University, tells an expansive story of fossil fuel energy regimes, centering around, but not limited to, what was once East Asia's largest coal and shale oil mine, in Fushun, Manchuria. Palpably paying tribute to Timothy Mitchell's seminal work, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (2011), Seow proposes the concept of "carbon technocracy" to make sense of the continuity of the colliery's management, often motivated by developmentalist and autarkic aspirations amidst fears for energy scarcity, under the Japanese Empire, Chinese Nationalists, and then Chinese Communists, against a global backdrop.
