The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work by Cara New Daggett (review)

The Birth of Energy is a well-structured book that frames energy humanities, British colonialism, and environmental history within the field of cultural studies. This work is a resource for the social history of technology in the United Kingdom of the Victorian era, and a contribution to energy and environmental studies. The author’s cross-disciplinary approach aims to spark new avenues of interpretation and discussion of today’s energy consumption, conservation, waste, and inequality. The book focuses on the mark given to the human habitat by the dominating “culture of labor” rooted in the mantra of the need for perpetually increasing productivity, and on the epistemological and physical origin of the concept of energy in the nineteenth-century United Kingdom, revisiting the history of thermodynamics. In doing this, Cara New Daggett attempts to explain how the Western perception of force, growing in dominance in the nineteenth-century, shaped the idea of work, human-machine interdependency, and energy utilization—and changed the course of human and environmental conditions. In her book, Daggett engages the reader with her analysis of the links between the mechanics of steam technology, Protestant culture, politics, and industrialization, eventually showing how these forces contributed to expansionist goals. The book develops in two parts. Part I is composed of four chapters on early studies and interpretations of energy, the understanding of the potential of the steam engine, and the role of the Protestant work ethic. Within this framework, the governing elites utilized the mass exploitation of fossil fuels and the rise of a “wage-labor” working class to create a so-called unequivocal avenue to the (supposed) wealth of the masses to the glory of capitalist society. B O O K R E V I E W S