Jean-Baptiste Fressoz shows that in the 19 th century wax candles were both an object of technological innovation, producing light without producing smoke and without collapsing as they burned, and of globalized exchanges, whose production growth was made possible by the large-scale arrival of American tallow and tropical oilseeds. When Balzac’s character Eugénie Grandet wanted to enhance the bedroom of her beloved and ungrateful cousin Charles, she risked her miserly father’s wrath by buying new wax candles to replace the old tallow ones. Tools such as these were constantly being improved. Didier Perrier shows that the number of tordoirs ‒ windmills equipped with pestles for extracting oil from oilseeds ‒ around Lille reached a peak in the 1840s and that, some 30 years later, several dozen were still in operation. Other sources were mobilized to support the first wave of industrialization: the use of wood from forests, as we have said, but also the distribution of proto-industrial production units near the rural workforce, the intensification of labor, forced labor resulting from colonization, animal labor in the fields and then in urban transport and mines, and the perfecting of water and wind technologies. 25)Ĭoal did not yet form the core of the energy world, but it was a pioneering energy source. If the energy system in 1900 had remained the same as in 1750, the amount of fertile land required would have been more than three times the total area of Europe.” (p. “The energy system of pre-industrial societies was based on biological transformers ‒ plants, animals and humans themselves ‒ with most of the available energy used for food and heat. This was the period of the “great divergence”, studied by Kenneth Pomeranz, between the industrial growth of England and that of the lower Yangtze valley in China, and coal is part of the explanation: it provided a seemingly inexhaustible reserve of energy compared to wood from forests that were becoming scarce. The first period studied begins in the 1860s. But the introductions to each part form an attempt in their own right, offering a periodization and an overall vision. It is a collective book that brings together numerous case studies, risking the heterogeneity that is typical of such undertakings. The book edited by François Jarrige and Alexis Vrignon, Face à la puissance, Une histoire des énergies alternatives à l’âge industriel, connects these two lines of analysis. However, environmental history, attentive to the social and political conflicts that structure changes in humanity’s use of natural resources, can also shed light on the history of these energy sources through past attempts to promote other resources and other uses. What can history tell us? It can give an account of the origin of fossil fuel dominance in the expansion of industrial capitalism and deconstruct the idea of energy transitions: built on the pressing demand for economic growth, the contemporary system has accumulated energy sources incessantly without switching from one to another. So the question of the moment is: how we can escape from our “energy-intensive growth societies”? All the evidence suggests that the time is ripe for a climate storm. Our future use of fossil fuels will determine our ability to maintain a livable Earth, or at least one less unlivable than our past and present emissions already condemn it to be.
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