Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t8hqh Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T00:56:10.137Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2019

Elizabeth Chatterjee Open the ORCID record for Elizabeth Chatterjee [Opens in a new window]
Elizabeth Chatterjee*
Affiliation:
Elizabeth Chatterjee ([email protected]) is Lecturer in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.
Get access

Abstract

Much scholarship extrapolates global narratives of the Anthropocene from the “fossil capitalism” of European imperial powers. This analysis deploys the alternative lens of grid electricity—the great macro-technology of the twentieth century—to reevaluate the dynamics of the Anthropocene outside the Anglozone. Histories of Asian electrification refute the notion of any simple relationship between colonialism and fossil capitalism. Instead, they point towards a postcolonial trend of fossil developmentalism. Especially in the context of late development, energy expansion became a state-led moral project. Cutting against fossil capitalism's logic of commodification, electricity provision was increasingly conceptualized as a national good and an entitlement, even if one honored in the breach. This trend transcended the distinction between market and planned economies, and extended beyond formal democracies. The (partial) democratization of consumption brought by fossil developmentalism is the hallmark of the “Great Acceleration” in human impacts on the environment since 1950.

Keywords

CapitaloceneChinaclimate changecoalcolonialismconsumptionelectrificationenergyIndiastate-led development
Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , February 2020 , pp. 3 - 24
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

List of References

Abraham, Itty. 1998. The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy and the Postcolonial State. New York: Zed Books.Google Scholar
Aklin, Michaël, Bayer, Patrick, Harish, S. P., and Urpelainen, Johannes. 2018. Escaping the Energy Poverty Trap: When and How Governments Power the Lives of the Poor. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.10.7551/mitpress/11479.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allen, Robert C. 2003. Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Altvater, Elmar. 2007. “The Social and Natural Environment of Fossil Capitalism.” In Coming to Terms with Nature, eds. Colin Leys and Leo Panitch, 37–59. London: Merlin Press.Google Scholar
Angus, Ian. 2016. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Austin, Gareth. 2017. “Introduction.” In Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on Asia and Africa, ed. Gareth Austin, 1–22. London: Bloomsbury Academic.Google Scholar
Bedi, Heather Plumridge. 2018. “‘Our Energy, Our Rights’: National Extraction Legacies and Contested Energy Justice Futures in Bangladesh.” Energy Research & Social Science 41:168–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonneuil, Christophe, and Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Brown, David S., and Mobarak, Ahmed Mushfiq. 2009. “The Transforming Power of Democracy: Regime Type and the Distribution of Electricity.” American Political Science Review 103(2):193–213.10.1017/S0003055409090200CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Carlin, Wendy, Schaffer, Mark, and Seabright, Paul. 2013. “Soviet Power Plus Electrification: What Is the Long-Run Legacy of Communism?” Explorations in Economic History 50(1):116–47.10.1016/j.eeh.2012.07.003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cavert, William M. 2016. The Smoke of London: Energy and Environment in the Early Modern City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139680967CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35(2):197–222.10.1086/596640CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2014. “Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories.” Critical Inquiry 41(1):1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterjee, Elizabeth. 2017. “Reinventing State Capitalism in India: A View from the Energy Sector.” Contemporary South Asia 25(1):85–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterjee, Elizabeth. 2018. “The Politics of Electricity Reform: Evidence from West Bengal, India.” World Development 104:128–39.10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.11.003CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. 2004. The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Chen, Ling. 2010. “Playing the Market Reform Card: The Changing Patterns of Political Struggle in China's Electric Power Sector.” China Journal 64:69–95.10.1086/tcj.64.20749247CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coleman, Leo. 2017. A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Coopersmith, Jonathan. 1992. The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Corlett, Richard T. 2013. “Becoming Europe: Southeast Asia in the Anthropocene.” Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 1. doi:10.12952/journal.elementa.000016.Google Scholar
Crutzen, Paul J. 2002. “Geology of Mankind.” Nature 415(6867):23.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Dasgupta, Aditya. 2018. “Technological Change and Political Turnover: The Democratizing Effects of the Green Revolution in India.” American Political Science Review 112(4):918–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dubash, Navroz, Kale, Sunila S., and Bharvirkar, Ranjit, eds. 2018. Mapping Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in India's States. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.10.1093/oso/9780199487820.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Gurgaon, India: Allen Lane.10.7208/chicago/9780226323176.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goswami, Omkar. 1989. “Sahibs, Babus, and Banias: Changes in Industrial Control in Eastern India, 1918–50.” Journal of Asian Studies 48(2):289–309.10.2307/2057379CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Government of India. 1965. Report of the Energy Survey of India Committee. New Delhi: Government of India.Google Scholar
Greacen, Chuenchom Sangarasri, and Greacen, Chris. 2004. “Thailand's Electricity Reforms: Privatization of Benefits and Socialization of Costs and Risks.” Pacific Affairs 77(3):517–41.Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna, Ishikawa, Noboru, Gilbert, Scott F., Olwig, Kenneth, Tsing, Anna L., and Bubandt, Nils. 2016. “Anthropologists Are Talking—About the Anthropocene.” Ethnos 81(3):535–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hausman, William J., Hertner, Peter, and Wilkins, Mira. 2008. Global Electrification: Multinational Enterprise and International Finance in the History of Light and Power, 1878–2007. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511512131CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Headrick, Daniel R. 1988. The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850–1940. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Henisz, Witold J., Zelner, Bennet A., and Guillén, Mauro F.. 2005. “The Worldwide Diffusion of Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reform, 1977–1999.” American Sociological Review 70(6):871–97.10.1177/000312240507000601CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirsh, Richard F. 2000. Power Loss: The Origins of Deregulation and Restructuring in the American Electric Utility System. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hossain, Naomi. 2018. “Energy Protests in Fragile Settings: The Unruly Politics of Provisions in Egypt, Myanmar, Mozambique, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe, 2007–2017.” IDS Working Paper 2018-513. Brighton: Institute of Development Studies.Google Scholar
Hughes, Thomas P. 1983. Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880–1930. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Indian National Congress. 1949. Power and Fuel: Report of the Sub-Committee. National Planning Committee Series, ed. K. T. Shah. Bombay: Vora.Google Scholar
Jonsson, Fredrik Albritton. 2012. “The Industrial Revolution in the Anthropocene.” Journal of Modern History 84(3):679–96.10.1086/666049CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Journal of Asian Studies. 2014. 73(4).Google Scholar
Kale, Sunila S. 2014a. Electrifying India: Regional Political Economies of Development. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Kale, Sunila S. 2014b. “Structures of Power: Electrification in Colonial India.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34(3):454–75.10.1215/1089201X-2826037CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Toronto: Knopf.Google Scholar
Klingensmith, Daniel. 2007. “One Valley and a Thousand”: Dams, Nationalism, and Development. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala, ed. 2014. The Coal Nation: Histories, Ecologies and Politics of Coal in India. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.Google Scholar
Lanthier, Pierre. 2014. “From the Raj to Independence: British Investment in the Indian Electricity Sector.” Utilities Policy 29:44–53.10.1016/j.jup.2014.02.001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lewis, Joanna I. 2013. Green Innovation in China: China's Wind Power Industry and the Global Transition to a Low-Carbon Economy. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, Simon L., and Maslin, Mark A.. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519(7542):171–80.10.1038/nature14258CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Malm, Andreas, and Hornborg, Alf. 2014. “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative.” Anthropocene Review 1(1):62–69.10.1177/2053019613516291CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mayer, Kristy, Banerjee, Sudeshna Ghosh, and Trimble, Chris. 2015. Elite Capture: Residential Tariff Subsidies in India. World Bank Studies. Washington, D.C.: World Bank.Google Scholar
McNeill, John R., and Engelke, Peter. 2014. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Meiton, Fredrik. 2019. Electrical Palestine: Capital and Technology from Empire to Nation. Oakland: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mikhail, Alan. 2016. “Enlightenment Anthropocene.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 49(2):211–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Min, Brian. 2015. Power and the Vote: Elections and Electricity in the Developing World. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Min, Brian, and Golden, Miriam. 2014. “Electoral Cycles in Electricity Losses in India.” Energy Policy 65:619–25.10.1016/j.enpol.2013.09.060CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mitchell, Timothy. 2011. Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Moore, Jason W., ed. 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, Calif.: PM Press.Google Scholar
Moore, Jason W. 2017. “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis.” Journal of Peasant Studies 44(3):594–630.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Naqvi, Ijlal. 2018. “Contesting Access to Power in Urban Pakistan.” Urban Studies 55(6):1242–56.10.1177/0042098017705600CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pachauri, Shonali. 2014. “Household Electricity Access a Trivial Contributor to CO2 Emissions Growth in India.” Nature Climate Change 4(12):1073–76.10.1038/nclimate2414CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parthasarathi, Prasannan. 2011. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511993398CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parthasarathi, Prasannan. 2017. “Forests and a New Energy Economy in Nineteenth-Century South India.” In Economic Development and Environmental History in the Anthropocene: Perspectives on Asia and Africa, ed. Gareth Austin, 145–58. London: Bloomsburg Academic.Google Scholar
Patel, Raj, and Moore, Jason W.. 2017. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Phipps, Catherine L. 2015. Empires on the Waterfront: Japan's Ports and Power, 1858–1899. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pietz, David A. 2015. The Yellow River: The Problem of Water in Modern China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Polanyi, Karl. 1944. The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.Google Scholar
Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2000. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2009. “Introduction: World History and Environmental History.” In The Environment and World History, eds. Edmund Burke III and Kenneth Pomeranz, 3–32. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Ramana, M. V. 2012. The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India. New Delhi: Penguin Viking.Google Scholar
Rao, Srinivasa, and Lourdusamy, John. 2010. “Colonialism and the Development of Electricity: The Case of Madras Presidency, 1900–47.” Science, Technology & Society 15(1):27–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Tirthankar. 2000. The Economic History of India, 1857–1947. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Samuels, Richard J. 1987. The Business of the Japanese State: Energy Markets in Comparative and Historical Perspective. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Suvobrata. 2015. “Domesticating Electric Power: Growth of Industry, Utilities and Research in Colonial Calcutta.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 52(3):357–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shen, Grace Yen. 2014. Unearthing the Nation: Modern Geology and Nationalism in Republican China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stafford, Robert A. 1989. Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration and Victorian Imperialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Steffen, Will, Broadgate, Wendy, Deutsch, Lisa, Gaffney, Owen, and Ludwig, Cornelia. 2015. “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.” Anthropocene Review 2(1):81–98.10.1177/2053019614564785CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thaxton, Ralph. 2016. Force and Contention in Contemporary China: Memory and Resistance in the Long Shadow of the Catastrophic Past. New York: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Julia Adeney. 2014. “Reclaiming Ground: Japan's Great Convergence.” Japanese Studies 34(3):253–63.10.1080/10371397.2014.954532CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Julia Adeney, Parthasarathi, Prasannan, Linrothe, Rob, Fan, Fa-Ti, Pomeranz, Kenneth, and Ghosh, Amitav. 2016. “JAS Round Table on Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable.” Journal of Asian Studies 75(4):929–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Van Gevelt, Terry. 2014. “Rural Electrification and Development in South Korea.” Energy for Sustainable Development 23:179–87.10.1016/j.esd.2014.09.004CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Victor, David G., and Heller, Thomas C., eds. 2007. The Political Economy of Power Sector Reform: The Experiences of Five Major Developing Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Williams, James H., and Dubash, Navroz K.. 2004. “Asian Electricity Reform in Historical Perspective.” Pacific Affairs 77(3):411–36.Google Scholar
Wrigley, E. A. 2010. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wu, Shellen Xiao. 2015. Empires of Coal: Fueling China's Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.10.11126/stanford/9780804792844.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yi-chong, Xu. 2002. Powering China: Reforming the Electric Power Industry in China. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Dartmouth.Google Scholar
Yi-chong, Xu. 2017. Sinews of Power: The Politics of the State Grid Corporation of China. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Young, Louise. 1998. Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Yusoff, Kathryn. 2018. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar