Technology, natural resources, crises

I’m back from a somehwat unusual academic workshop in Berlin, organized by the Max Planck Society: “Energy Transformations: Perspectives from the Humanities“. Two different institutes of the society have initiated a cooperation: the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion – an interesting attempt to bring historians and natural scientists together. The natural scientists acted mainly as commentators, the historians as presenters. But how can such a discussion be made relevant for all? The contributions were diverse, to say the least, ranging from Jamie Cross‘s anthropology of energy storage (based on field research in New Guinea and the use of batteries there) and Benjamin Steininger‘s cultural-studies approach to motor fuels in the the twentieth century to Andreas Malm‘s provocative views on steam power in the British Empire and my own attempts to synthesize a transnational European energy history. Let’s see what comes next; a follow-up workshop is already being planned.

The Berlin workshop had some similarities with two other workshops I participated in last autumn but which I have forgotten to write about. The first took place in Trondheim (Norway) in early autumn and dealt with the history of natural resource extraction in national, regional and global perspective and brought together historians of various breeds, from transnational and business historians to historians of science and technology. The Norwegian University of Science and Technology at Trondheim has built up impressive expertise in this area and scholars such as Pål Thonstad Sandvik, Mats Ingulstad and Hans Otto Fröland have recently won several large research grants targeting natural resource history. The workshop featured a number of valuable discussions on topics such as resource nationalism, political regulation of natural resources, the EU’s evolving quest for raw materials and resource extraction from a colonial perspective.

The other workshop took place in St. Petersburg and I participated in it in conjunction with my archival research there. It was essentially a Tensions of Europe event and was a first step in the effort to explore one of the new wider themes that this network of historians of technology has identified as crucial: “Technology, Natural Resources and Crises in Past and Present of Europe and Beyond“. This workshop shared some focus with the Berlin and the Trondheim workshops, but it also differed from these in at least interesting respect – by going back in time not only to the 20th and 19th centuries, but also to Europe’s deeper past. The most interesting examples here included some of the Russian historians’ accounts of water and wood in early modern Russian history. I’m very sympathetic of such efforts. But as historians of technology we definitely need to work more on integrating these analyses and narratives into our general understanding of Europe’s history of technology – and of its crisis-ridden present. Too often do we neglect the heavy weight of the deeper past and how it continues to shape our own era in breathtaking ways. I will have reason to return to these issues later on this spring.