Giacomo Bonan (Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt)
from 01 February 2021 at 17:00 to 04 February 2021 at 19:00
Microsoft TEAMS
In recent decades, history of energy has been the focus of much attention. Once confined to the field of economic history, this issue is nowadays at the centre of the academic debate, both in historiography and in other disciplines. Thanks to the use of new methodological tools (such as the concepts of entropy, social metabolism, energy systems and transitions), the new research approaches have studied energy flows as a way through which understanding the significant ecological, economic and social transformations of a given historical phase. The favoured junction of these analyses has been the industrial transition: in fact a set of transitions that led, at different times and in different ways, to the shift from a pre-industrial system to the current industrial energy system. The reasons for this interest are hardly in doubt: it is almost impossible to find work on the subject that does not explicitly refer to the environmental impact of our energy regime and to the problems connected with it, both within specific contexts and globally. The seminar aims to propose an overview on this debate, focusing on the social and environmental implications of the industrial transition, and trying to highlight the different – and often conflicting – interpretations of this process.
The new history of energy: concepts; approaches; methodologies.
- G. Massard-Guilbaud , ‘From the History of Sources and Sectors to the History of Systems and Transitions: how the History of Energy Has Been Written in France and Beyond’, Journal of Energy History/Revue d'Histoire de l'Énergie, online, URL: http://energyhistory.eu/node/88
- C. Jones, Routes of Power: Energy and Modern America, Cambridge (USA) 2014, pp. 1-21.
In which terms this new research approach allows to reconsider the causes and consequences of the industrial revolution.
-E. A. Wrigley, ‘Energy and the English Industrial Revolution’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 371 (2013) doi: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2011.0568
-S. Barca, ‘Energy, Property, and the Industrial Revolution Narrative’, Ecological Economics 70 (2011): 1309–15.
Which is the relationship between energy systems, political changes and social dynamics?
- T. Mitchell, ‘Carbon Democracy’, Economy and Society 38/III (2009): 399-432.
- A. Malm, ‘The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry’, Historical Materialism 21/I (2013): 15–68.
A concluding remark on the historical roots of the present ecological crisis.
-W. Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 369 (2011): 842-67.
- C. Bonneuil, ‘The Geological Turn. Narratives of the Anthropocene’, in C. Hamilton et al. (eds), The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis. Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, London 2015, pp. 15-31.