Empires of Coal

Shellen Xiao Wu is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

出版者:Stanford University Press

作者:Shellen Wu

页数:280

出版时间:2015-4-22

价格:USD 45.00

装帧:Hardcover

isbn号码:9780804792844

图书标签:经济史环境史近代史海外中国研究历史煤炭清史计划

From 1868–1872, German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen went on an expedition to China. His reports on what he found there would transform Western interest in China from the land of porcelain and tea to a repository of immense coal reserves. By the 1890s, European and American powers and the Qing state and local elites battled for control over the rights to these valuable mineral deposits. As coal went from a useful commodity to the essential fuel of industrialization, this vast natural resource would prove integral to the struggle for political control of China.

Geology served both as the handmaiden to European imperialism and the rallying point of Chinese resistance to Western encroachment. In the late nineteenth century both foreign powers and the Chinese viewed control over mineral resources as the key to modernization and industrialization. When the first China Geological Survey began work in the 1910s, conceptions of natural resources had already shifted, and the Qing state expanded its control over mining rights, setting the precedent for the subsequent Republican and People's Republic of China regimes.

In Empires of Coal, Shellen Xiao Wu argues that the changes specific to the late Qing were part of global trends in the nineteenth century, when the rise of science and industrialization destabilized global systems and caused widespread unrest and the toppling of ruling regimes around the world.

用户评价

有点差强人意。感觉主要讨论的是话语和观念上的转变。

有些章节写的不错，有些就太勉强。

煤工业在晚清国家现代化中的的知识技术、政策法规等问题；有很强国际向度：外国地质学家、德国采煤技术专家进入洋务企业、清廷翻译地质知识等

What is the turn after the material turn

前一阵去SF带着的，最后也没有看完。读得很慢，因为背景知识太少。涉及知识，技术扩散，产权等多个话题。只做记录。