Working Nature: A History of the Energy Economy
By Daniela Russ (Verso)
Recommended by NICHOLAS OSTRUM
The American Historical Association likes to quip that “everything has a history,” from the most consequential battle or word-historic rupture to the smallest quotidian items sprawled across our desks, dashboards, and counters. If this is true, which it is, it should come as no surprise that energy and the energy economy have histories as well. In Working Nature: A History of the Energy Economy, Daniela Russ applies a heavy dose of historical materialist critical theory (especially that of Theodor Adorno) to the questions of those origins and, in the process, sets the birthdate of our modern understanding of energy—the alienated, abstracted, objectified, and protean understanding of nature’s capacity to work, the calculability of that capacity, and the interchangeability of different inputs into that capacity—to the emergence of the motor during the rise of industrial capitalism. The emergence of the energy economy would soon follow.
Working Nature then follows a variety of hybridized energy regimes between the time of early industrial heavy exploitation of wood and coal to the present age of oil and gas and that of the emerging potential for a deepening transition to renewable sources of energy based on a new, though at this point undertheorized, historical materialist approach to nature and energy. This arc in itself is not unique, nor is the geographic expanse of the study, which primarily covers the UK, the US, Germany, and the USSR. What is exceptional is Russ’s conceptualization of the relationship between capital and energy (which she derives from Karl Marx, Theodor Adorno, Andreas Malm, Timothy Mitchell, and others) and her understanding of the antagonistic relationship between society and nature mediated by energy. “The energy economy,” she explains, “develops from nature not by actualizing and affirming an energetic order in nature.” Instead, it “is a realization of society against resistance from nature” (13). It is a negative dialectic that rhetorically separates society from natural world while subjecting nature to the logics and purposes of industrial capitalist production. Neither of these processes, however, is or can be complete, and therein lies our current paradoxical situation of increasing energy and especially hydrocarbon exploitation, climate change acceleration, and the only partial subsumption of nature and energy to human designs. In the end, Russ does little to map a definitive way out of this trap but does much to make the compelling case that we need to understand the industrial-capitalist roots of our modern conception of energy economy before we can properly imagine a future governed by less-polluting, -alienating, and -exploitative socio-economic systems. Working Nature is an important contribution to establishing that fundamental historical understanding.
Narrating Nuclear Disaster: Literary Form After Chornobyl and Fukushima
By Hannah Klaubert (Bloomsbury Academic)
Recommended by Hélène B. Ducros
Based on her dissertation about the narrative representation of Chornobyl, Hannah Klaubert’s latest book intervenes in a context of acute environmental anxiety, constant talk of the energy transition and decarbonization, the war in Ukraine, shifting geopolitical networks, and worldwide energy vulnerability. Narrating Nuclear Disaster: Literary Form After Chornobyl and Fukushima is a fascinating “econarratology” analysis of literary texts, or how narrative forms intersect with ecological issues. The book surveys environmentally engaged fictions and non-fictions whose respective plots involve realized nuclear disasters, as opposed to imaginary, fictional accidents. In this way, it contributes to the nuclear power discourse even beyond the express literary value of the German, French, Japanese, or Anglophone texts it charts, whether thrillers, short stories, “nuclear noir” and crime novels, travelogues, and other postmodern, realist, or fantastic storyworlds.
In asking how literature can help humans grasp the material, social, and embodied ramifications of real nuclear disasters, Klaubert classifies post-apocalypse literary genres, by the same token bringing to the fore individual experiences in the face of post-disaster risk, uncertainty, and injustices. Her focus on post-disaster transgenerational angst, the tension between different experiential scales in terms of fallout and contamination—the body, the national, the local, the global—and citizens’ distrust caused by disinformation and reigning secrecy, participates in the building of a nuclear cultural archive that highlights the open-endedness, ambiguity, and endlessness of nuclear disasters’ after-effects. She advances literature as a space where people can learn to effectively navigate the indeterminate and fragmented temporalities, locations, and actors that are typical of post-nuclear encounters. She thus offers a new approach to toxicity narratives that accounts for human societies’ disorientation when confronted with an invisible yet tangibly perceived threat: radiation. Scholars and students interested in literary studies, ecocriticism, the cultural representation of risk, energy humanities, but also nuclear proliferation, the history of nuclear culture and politics, the long-term “slow violence” of disasters in general, and the role afforded to aesthetics and the arts in the energy and environmental discourse will find this book absolutely compelling. The current context only makes it more intensely relevant.
The Modernist Wish: A History of Europe, 1914–1939
By Geoff Eley (Cambridge University Press)
Recommended by OKSANA ERMOLAEVA
The ongoing Russian war against Ukraine, unfolding against the backdrop of an increasingly fragile and unsettling armed peace in Europe, has highlighted the tragic cyclicality of European history, underscoring the importance of understanding the historical processes leading to repeating catastrophes across the continent: war, mass displacement, and humanitarian crises. Geoff Eley’s The Modernist Wish: A History of Europe, 1914–1939 is a valuable contribution, as the book explains the origins of the twentieth century’s greatest dramas through a highly distinctive analytical lens. In approaching the 1914-1939 period as one of intense transformation, Eley places the concept of modernity at the center of his interpretation. He argues that the European tragedies incurred because of fascism and communism—whose confrontation culminated in WWII—were neither inevitable nor historically predetermined but instead emerged as a spontaneous and unintended series of unfortunate circumstances, in other words, a whim of human modernity, shaped by industrialization, mass politics, technological change, the expansion of the state, and the profound social upheavals unleashed by WWI. For Eley, the driving force behind these transformations was the “modernist wish,” a pan-European belief that society could be fundamentally remolded through political, technological, and cultural forces. Equally innovative is Eley’s reach. His European history does not concentrate on Europe’s major powers only but encompasses East and West, North and South, large and small states alike, for a vision of Europe liberated from conventional nation-centered narratives. He reimagines Europe as a single laboratory of modernity, in which political, social, and cultural projects competed to define the continent’s future.
One of the book’s greatest strengths lies in Eley’s compelling demonstration of where optimism and an unquestioning faith in technological progress can lead when detached from humanistic values. He exposes how the unprecedented potential of science, technology, rational planning, education, and knowledge, together with the expansion of “big-city living”—gave rise to some of humanity’s darkest moments and how aspirations to build a better, more rational, and more just society paved the way for war, mass violence, and immense human suffering. In this sense, The Modernist Wish is not only a history of interwar Europe but also a warning against the dangers of believing that technological innovation and social engineering, by themselves, can guarantee human progress. Eley reminds us that modernization is never inherently emancipatory: without democratic institutions, ethical constraints, and a commitment to human dignity, the very forces that promise emancipation may instead produce oppression, exclusion, and destruction. Resonating far beyond the historical period it examines, at a time when Europe is once again confronted with war, forced displacement, humanitarian crises, and growing political polarization, the book deserves to be read by not only historians of modern Europe but also political scientists, sociologists, and anyone seeking to learn from previous upheavals and understand the historical roots of today’s geopolitical and humanitarian crises.
Before Recognition: How the Politics of Religion Shaped the International Order
By Maria Birnbaum (Cambridge University Press)
Recommended by EDINA PALEVIQ
Religion is often presented as a key driver of modern political conflict. It appears in debates about war, nationalism, migration, minority rights, and statehood, usually treated as a natural and self-evident political category. In Before Recognition: How the Politics of Religion Shaped the International Order, Maria Birnbaum asks a different question: not what religion does in world politics, but how religion became one of the main ways through which world politics is understood. Birnbaum’s answer takes readers into the late British Empire, where administrators, census takers, constitutional reformers, and political leaders increasingly learned to govern populations through religious classifications. Many religious communities that seem clearly defined today were shaped by governments that sorted people into religious categories and gave those categories political importance. Groups with multiple and overlapping identities were gradually turned into distinct religious communities with defined political interests. The book focuses on the connected histories of British India and Mandate Palestine. Birnbaum shows how debates about minority rights, self-determination, representation, and partition travelled across imperial networks, linking political developments that are otherwise often studied separately. A particularly revealing figure is Muhammad Zafarullah Khan, who played an important role in the creation of Pakistan and later represented his country at the United Nations during debates over Palestine. His story illustrates how closely these histories were intertwined.
One of the book’s most important insights is that recognition can have unintended consequences. Before a community can be recognized politically, it first has to be defined, and someone must decide who belongs to it, who speaks for it, and where its boundaries lie. Birnbaum shows how categories originally created to provide representation could later become tools of exclusion, including in the case of the Ahmadiyya community in Pakistan. By the end of the book, religion appears not as a timeless force in politics but as a category shaped by historical struggles over power and governance. Birnbaum’s central message is simple but powerful: before communities can be recognized, they must first be made recognizable. In that process, some of the foundations of the modern international order were created around religious affiliation.
