The Asian Anthropocene: Electricity and Fossil Developmentalism

Abstract

Much scholarship extrapolates global narratives of the Anthropocene from the “fossil capitalism” of European imperial powers. This analysis deploys the alternative lens of grid electricity—the great macro-technology of the twentieth century—to reevaluate the dynamics of the Anthropocene outside the Anglozone. Histories of Asian electrification refute the notion of any simple relationship between colonialism and fossil capitalism. Instead, they point towards a postcolonial trend of fossil developmentalism. Especially in the context of late development, energy expansion became a state-led moral project. Cutting against fossil capitalism's logic of commodification, electricity provision was increasingly conceptualized as a national good and an entitlement, even if one honored in the breach. This trend transcended the distinction between market and planned economies, and extended beyond formal democracies. The (partial) democratization of consumption brought by fossil developmentalism is the hallmark of the “Great Acceleration” in human impacts on the environment since 1950.

Energy in South Asian history

“…Elizabeth Chatterjee has recently discussed the emergence of these energy infrastructures as part of a broader Asian moral economy of electricity consumption premised on state provisioning (Chatterjee, 2020).…”

“…Coal nationalization precipitated a shift in the primary utilization of coal from railways to thermal power under expanded public sector energy companies like Coal India Limited, now the world's largest single coal‐mining company, and the National Thermal Power Corporation, both established in 1975. Elizabeth Chatterjee has recently discussed the emergence of these energy infrastructures as part of a broader Asian moral economy of electricity consumption premised on state provisioning (Chatterjee, 2020).…”

Born Secret (Cash for Kryptonite): A field guide to the Anthropocene mode of production

“…To be sure, as Lagendijk (2019) has indicated, TVA’s expertise gradually merged into a post-colonial context with no single center of authority. And as Chatterjee (2020) points out in an important article, the “Asian Anthropocene” of the 1950s cannot be ascribed to the global spread of private capitalist industry, but rather to a form of state-led “fossil developmentalism” that absorbed, transformed, and intensified TVA’s relatively modest achievements in the realm of public power provision. As the 1950s wore on, the indicators of fertilizer and petroleum use, population growth, the production of novel substances, and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere all started climbing exponentially.…”

On Decolonizing the Anthropocene: Disobedience via Plural Constitutions

“…Important anti-colonial critiques of the Anthropocene's homogenizing force have, for instance, focused on and through Asia (ex. Chatterjee 2020). The examples mobilised here are offered as "alternative descriptions" (Latour 2018, 94) but ones whose earthbound constitution radically unsettles humanist exceptionalism and its universalising Anthropocenic logics.…”