Powering empire: how coal made the Middle East and sparked global carbonization

IF 0.5 2区 历史学 Q1 HISTORY Mediterranean Historical Review Pub Date : 2021-07-03 DOI:10.1080/09518967.2021.1976968
Aaron G. Jakes
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Abstract

concepts like “union”, “progress”, “equality” and “freedom” is here compressed into a view of transnational linkages between coal mines. Across the longer sweep of the book’s eight chapters, such analytical choices result in a peculiar winnowing of the possibilities available to those who found reason to challenge coalonialism’s steep inequalities and structures of domination: either direct confrontations with the material conditions surrounding coal’s extraction and combustion or modes of critique emanating from the shifting currents of Islamic thought. In showing how fear of disaster could serve as “an ethical force directing man to the righteous path” (191) or how the shar’i designation of coal as rikaz or “buried treasure” could underwrite Ottoman uses of fossil wealth for charity (218), Barak’s nuanced excavation of Islamic knowledge production around coal technologies and their hazards in the book’s fifth and sixth chapters is clearly intended to unearth elements of a usable past. In the book’s moving conclusion, through a daring leap into the present, he makes explicit the sense of urgency attending this search for alternative lifeways and imaginaries that might inform the “painstaking political work” of decarbonizing the world (226). But such compelling arguments about the messy and complex entanglements of global carbonization are undercut by the markedly narrower criteria according to which specific actions, concepts and movements appear to “count” as part of that political work within the book itself. Even if, in places, Barak’s methodological commitments thus serve to obscure the full range of political forces and ideas that might be directed against the powers of fossil fuel, he has written a magnificent study that reveals the breath-taking magnitude and sweep of the struggles that remaking a world forged out of coal’s blazing flames will entail.
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为帝国提供动力:煤炭如何造就中东并引发全球碳化
“联盟”、“进步”、“平等”和“自由”等概念在这里被压缩成煤矿之间跨国联系的观点。在这本书的八章中,这种分析性的选择导致了那些找到理由挑战煤炭主义的严重不平等和统治结构的人所能获得的可能性的特殊筛选:要么是与煤炭开采和燃烧周围的物质条件的直接对抗,要么是伊斯兰思想潮流变化所产生的批判模式。在展示对灾难的恐惧如何成为“指引人类走上正义道路的道德力量”(191),或者伊斯兰教法将煤炭指定为rikaz或“埋藏的宝藏”如何为奥斯曼帝国将化石财富用于慈善事业提供担保(218)时,巴拉克在书的第五章和第六章中细致入微地挖掘了围绕煤炭技术及其危害的伊斯兰知识生产,显然是为了挖掘有用的过去元素。在这本书感人的结论中,通过大胆地跳到现在,他明确表示了参与寻找替代生活方式和想象的紧迫感,这些方式和想象可能会为世界脱碳的“艰苦政治工作”提供信息(226)。但是,关于全球碳化的混乱和复杂纠缠的这些令人信服的论点被明显狭窄的标准所削弱,根据这些标准,具体的行动、概念和运动似乎“算作”书中政治工作的一部分。即使在某些地方,巴拉克的方法论承诺掩盖了可能针对化石燃料力量的各种政治力量和思想,但他写了一篇精彩的研究报告,揭示了重塑一个由煤炭熊熊燃烧的世界所需的斗争的艰巨性和广度。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.70
自引率
0.00%
发文量
13
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