2020 Clay Morgan Award for the Best Book in Environmental Political Theory
2020 Yale H. Ferguson Book Award, International Studies Association Northeast
Check out my interview on the “Cultures of Energy” podcast to hear more about the book and my research.
“Cara New Daggett’s The Birth of Energy is a landmark work in the emergent field of energy humanities.”
The Birth of Energy traces the genealogy of contemporary notions of energy back to the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today's uses of energy. These early resource-based concepts of power first emerged during the Industrial Revolution and were tightly bound to Western capitalist domination and the politics of industrialized work. As Daggett shows, thermodynamics was deployed as an imperial science to govern fossil fuel use, labor, and colonial expansion, in part through a hierarchical ordering of humans and nonhumans.
By systematically excavating the historical connection between energy and work, Daggett argues that only by transforming the politics of work—most notably, the veneration of waged work—will we be able to confront the Anthropocene's energy problem. Substituting one source of energy for another will not ensure a habitable planet; rather, the concepts of energy and work themselves must be decoupled.
Available at // Duke University Press // Free to read at OAPEN // Support your local indie bookstore at Bookshop
“This complex, ambitious book represents a significant contribution to energy studies, offering an innovative history that situates the scientific discovery of energy within nineteenth-century cultures of imperialism, industrialization, and the governance of work. Cara New Daggett helps reframe the Anthropocene as the most recent realization of our profoundly misguided understanding of energy.”
REVIEWS
“The Birth of Energy is accordingly a composition of numerous rich seams of scholarship, combining detailed archival work with sustained conceptual analysis. ... This book is not only a laudable work of historical analysis, however, but also a call to arms for scholars and others seeking to respond more effectively to the various environmental crises of our present time.”
“Cara New Daggett’s The Birth of Energy is a major contribution to the environmental humanities that
speaks to the notion of “political ecology” in the most literal sense.”