Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. xii, 266 pp. (Maps, illustrations.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-9284-4.
China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal, from mining to electricity production, and in state and household use. China’s growth for much of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been driven and fuelled by coal, resulting in a variety of social implications as well as environmental pollution. Shellen Xiao Wu’s Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order adds an interesting and important set of insights into the history of coal mining, coal imperialism, and the science and political economy of coal in China.
The history of coal mining, industry, and coal in China’s socio-economic realm are not new topics of study. Academics and policy specialists have long studied the relationships between industrialization, economic development, imperialism, fuels, and natural resources, especially through the lenses of success and failure in an imperial and colonial world. In Empires of Coal, Wu begins by developing a kind of dialogue between imperial geographer Ferdinand von Richthofen and Qing statesman Zhang Zhidong, among others, to highlight the complex but productive tension of resource development in late imperial China, and subsequently how China fits in to the development of global modernity. In the end, this speaks to an “underlying reconceptualization of mineral resources and their significance for China’s place in the world,” where “coal ceased to be a familiar mineral and became the fuel of a ‘new’ imperialism” (3). In this way, Wu’s analysis of coal places imperialism, foreign advisors and discourse, and Chinese adoption, adaptations, and transformation in a modern, new world of coal, front and center.
At the heart of Wu’s study is the “inescapable reality” (20) of imperialism and of coal, and in particular, the construction of the imperial and then Chinese nationalist discourse on energy and fuel. In this sense, Empires of Coal adds to the history of global discourse on energy and imperialism in several ways. These include how an engagement in coal fueled industrialism, deeply implicated in structures of imperialism, and transformed China within a global circuit of knowledge production. This knowledge production, mostly by foreign experts, fueled China’s adaptation of foreign coal science and geology, as well as its expansion and exploitation of “new” natural resources. This was all part of a fundamental conceptual transformation, in this case, linked to German imperialism in Shandong Province and beyond, where China was part of the imperial knowledge Great Game within a web of other “points of contact” (29), not simply falling behind or failing to modernize.
This book chronicles different aspects of how China viewed this natural resource in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Chapters 1 to 3 discuss a historiographical context and a Chinese history of geology, the foreign establishment and mineral resources, and especially Ferdinand von Richthofen’s contributions to Chinese geology and identifying exploiting mineral wealth. Wu also looks at translations of geology and mining research by missionaries and engineers, and the often diverse perspectives of various translators involved in crafting a new Qing science despite deep conceptual and cultural differences.
Chapters 4 to 6 take a slightly different track and offer more of a political and economic history of natural resource management. Chapter 4 in particular examines Chinese intellectuals and the translation and adaptation of the imperial science of resource management, touching on figures like Li Hongzhang, Zhang Zhidong, as well as other key German scientists, who created a new “‘cultural space’ for science” (127). Chapter 5 is a fascinating study of the intersection of nationalism, anti-colonialism, and a rights reclamation movement in Shandong Province around natural resources and the development of mineral rights laws applicable to other provincial governments of the 1900s. Chapter 6 then examines the continuities and changes in Chinese views of mining from the late-imperial through the Republican era, especially the Chinese discourse on geology and geological sciences deployed as a means of resistance against imperialism—literally a history of geology motivated by Han nationalism.
This study is best suited to courses and research into the confluence of empire, science, and technology in China toward the end of the late imperial and Republican eras. It adds a fascinating and novel layer of analysis of German imperialism and engineering at work in China—in particular, the career of Ferdinand von Richthofen and others—that has been missing in many of the wider discussions of imperialism and global transformations during the time period. This is a great strength of this study as it draws heavily on documents from German archives and published material in German, but this also serves to highlight one of its overall weaknesses. While Empires of Coal offers some great insights into Western colonial projects, agency, mining, and conceptualizations of the world, the Chinese side of the narrative and analysis is less well developed. We learn a great deal about German and American colonial agents and translators, but much less about their Qing and Republican era counterparts, who come across as more reactive characters within this arguably revolutionary transformation of ideas around natural resources.
While this study does not really examine the historical organization and operation of coal mining in China, or much of the wider social implications (social history) of coal operations, this topic is addressed in work by Albert Feuerwerker, Tim Wright’s Coal Mining in China’s Economy and Society 1895-1937 (Cambridge, 1984), and Elspeth Thomson’s The Chinese Coal Industry: An Economic History (Routledge, 2003). In any event, Wu’s Empires of Coal is an interesting and readable analysis of the transnational coal revolution and its implications for technology, industry, and law in China during the late Qing and Republican eras.
Jack Patrick Hayes
Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Surrey, Canada