A review by cameroncl
Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm

challenging informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

Absolutely fascinating. Malm takes a Marxian lens to the British transition to steampower (and the genesis of self-sustaining economic growth contingent on the consumption of fossil fuels), and finds significant holes in the conventional explanations for the rise of coal. Rather than resource scarcity or economic efficiency, Malm sees the rise of coal as a consequence of its spatial and temporal advantages to water power, which was both abundant and much cheaper, in a capitalist economy: you don't have to overcome coordination problems to exploit coal power, and its regularity and dissociation from a specific place is more conducive to the kind of labour control that early industrial capitalism was building.

The twelfth chapter, where all the threads of the adoption of coal/steam are fully synthesized, was an absolute tour de force.  One of the most original and interesting works of history I've ever read. And, unlike most Marxian history, the prose was incredibly readable.