Description:

“Coalolialism: Energy and Empire before the Age of Oil”

The Middle East played a crucial yet neglected role in nineteenth-century industrialization. Such foreign markets for English and Welsh coal allowed the export of fossil fuel and its eventual replacement of sustainable energy sources across the globe. The talk presents a book-project that retraces this role and the region’s lasting footprints on the carbon economy from well before the shift to oil, exploring also how this legacy still animates present-day politics and religion.

On Barak is a social and cultural historian of science and technology in non-western settings. He is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Middle Eastern & African History in Tel Aviv University. His most recent book is On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (University of California Press, 2013).

Lunch will be served.