Introduction

This book untangles the connections between British industrialization and colonial expansion in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The addition of fossil fuels to the energy mix in this period drove overwhelming social and economic change in Britain, the north-east United States, and Europe, but it also had important and uneven consequences within a range of Euro-American colonies. Opening a new field of inquiry into fossil fuel-powered technologies and their critical role in colonial expansion, this book demonstrates how carbon- based economies dramatically accelerated the annexing of foreign lands and the extraction of their resources. Yet, while the use of coal on a commercial scale from the late 1700s powered an explosion of growth in manufacturing between 1760 and 1840 and these years coincided with the incursion and violence on colonial frontiers, the peripheries tended to rely on wood where they could. This intensification of animal and timber power complicated the nationalist narratives of coal-fired industrialization and economic development. A history of the meanings and ideas around carbon, fossil fuels, and their bearing within colonial expansion is increasingly relevant as rapid changes to climate bring into focus the legacy of carbonization in dispossession, sustainability, environmental, labor, and atmospheric relational histories.