Victor Seow is a historian of technology, science, and industry, specializing in modern China and Japan within global contexts and in histories of energy and work. His book, Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2022), studies the deep links between energy extraction and technocratic politics through the history of what was once East Asia’s largest coal mine. In delving into the origins of fossil-fueled development in China and Japan, this book unearths both the dominant role of the state in energy transitions toward coal and oil and the enduring reliance on human labor power in the carbon age. 

Co-sponsored by the USC Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture