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Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil
Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy.
Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called “the economy” and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.
In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order.
In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.
Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called “the economy” and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East.
In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order.
In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.
278 pages, Hardcover
Published November 7, 2011
186 people are currently reading
4424 people want to read
About the author
Timothy Mitchell
58 books223 followersProfessor
Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures
Columbia University
612 Kent Hall, Mail Code 3928
1140 Amsterdam Ave.
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212-854 5252
Email: tm2421@columbia.edu
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist who studies the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, the politics of large-scale technical systems, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity.
Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt, a study of the emergence of the modern state in the colonial period and an exploration of the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity. The book has been influential in fields as diverse as anthropology, history, law, philosophy, cultural studies, and art history. Translations have appeared or are in preparation in seven languages, including Arabic, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese.
Mitchell's subsequent work covered a variety of topics in political theory and the contemporary political economy of the Middle East. His essay on the modern state, originally published in the American Political Science Review, has been republished on several occasions. Further writings on the nature of European modernity include an edited volume, Questions of Modernity, bringing together the work of leading scholars of South Asia and the Middle East. In political economy he has published a number of essays on agrarian transformation, economic reform, and the politics of development, mostly drawing on his continuing research in Egypt. The research includes long-term fieldwork in a village in southern Egypt, which he has studied and written about for more than a decade.
His 2002 book, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, draws on his work in Egypt to examine the creation of economic knowledge and the making of “the economy” and “the market” as objects of twentieth-century politics; the wider role of expert knowledge in the formation of the contemporary state; the relationship between law, private property, and violence in this process; and the problems with explaining contemporary politics in terms of globalization or the development of capitalism.
Mitchell's research on the making of the economy led to a four-year project that he directed at the International Center for Advanced Study at NYU on The Authority Of Knowledge in a Global Age. Articles on The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science, The Properties of Markets, Rethinking Economy, and The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World, explored these concerns, and developed Mitchell's interest in the broader field of science and technology studies (STS). His current research brings together the fields of STS and postcolonial theory in a project on "Carbon Democracy," which examines the history of fossil fuels and the possibilities for democractic politics that were expanded or closed down in the construction of modern energy networks.
Mitchell has served on the editorial committees of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the American Political Science Review, Middle East Report (where he has also been chair of the editorial committee), Social Text, Society and Space, the Journal of Historical Sociology, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and Development and Change. He has been invited to lecture at most leading research universities in the United States, and at universities and academic conferences in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Several of his wri
Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures
Columbia University
612 Kent Hall, Mail Code 3928
1140 Amsterdam Ave.
New York, NY 10027
Tel: 212-854 5252
Email: tm2421@columbia.edu
Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist who studies the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, the politics of large-scale technical systems, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity.
Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies.
Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt, a study of the emergence of the modern state in the colonial period and an exploration of the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity. The book has been influential in fields as diverse as anthropology, history, law, philosophy, cultural studies, and art history. Translations have appeared or are in preparation in seven languages, including Arabic, German, Polish, Spanish and Japanese.
Mitchell's subsequent work covered a variety of topics in political theory and the contemporary political economy of the Middle East. His essay on the modern state, originally published in the American Political Science Review, has been republished on several occasions. Further writings on the nature of European modernity include an edited volume, Questions of Modernity, bringing together the work of leading scholars of South Asia and the Middle East. In political economy he has published a number of essays on agrarian transformation, economic reform, and the politics of development, mostly drawing on his continuing research in Egypt. The research includes long-term fieldwork in a village in southern Egypt, which he has studied and written about for more than a decade.
His 2002 book, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, draws on his work in Egypt to examine the creation of economic knowledge and the making of “the economy” and “the market” as objects of twentieth-century politics; the wider role of expert knowledge in the formation of the contemporary state; the relationship between law, private property, and violence in this process; and the problems with explaining contemporary politics in terms of globalization or the development of capitalism.
Mitchell's research on the making of the economy led to a four-year project that he directed at the International Center for Advanced Study at NYU on The Authority Of Knowledge in a Global Age. Articles on The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science, The Properties of Markets, Rethinking Economy, and The Work of Economics: How a Discipline Makes Its World, explored these concerns, and developed Mitchell's interest in the broader field of science and technology studies (STS). His current research brings together the fields of STS and postcolonial theory in a project on "Carbon Democracy," which examines the history of fossil fuels and the possibilities for democractic politics that were expanded or closed down in the construction of modern energy networks.
Mitchell has served on the editorial committees of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, the American Political Science Review, Middle East Report (where he has also been chair of the editorial committee), Social Text, Society and Space, the Journal of Historical Sociology, the Journal of Cultural Economy, and Development and Change. He has been invited to lecture at most leading research universities in the United States, and at universities and academic conferences in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia. Several of his wri
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February 5, 2019
ما الذى يدفع أحد الدول العربية لبناء أعلى بناء بشرى فى العالم؟
وما الذى يدفع أحد أثرياء النفط العربى لشراء أغلى قصر فى العالم ؟ أو شراء أغلى يخت بحرى فى العالم؟ أو شراء نادى عاصمة من أكبر عواصم العالم؟
هذه أسئلة قد تتبادر إلى ذهن أى إنسان يعيش فى منطقة الشرق الأوسط، التى تقلبت شئونها السياسية والاقتصادية بين المعسكرين الشرقى والغربى – بين الاشتراكية تارة والشيوعية أحياناً وبين الرأسمالية الآن، فى الماضى كانت الحكومات تملك الشركات والمؤسسات والهيئات وتتحكم فى الأسعار، أما الآن فقانون العرض والطلب هو ما يتحكم فى الأسواق وترفع الحكومات يدها تماماً عن الأسواق فأصبح الفقراء أكثر فقراً والأغنياء أكثر غنى.
يؤسس الكاتب هنا لأشكال الحكم السياسى فى عصور الفحم ومن ثم النفط، وأوضح كيف أن طريقة إنتاج الفحم ساهمت فى تركيز الكتلة السكانية حول مناجم الفحم وساعدت العمال على التأثير فى عملية توزيع الأرباح وساعدتهم على عمل الإضرابات والمظاهرات والحصول على حقوقهم ولذلك تم توزيع أرباح الفحم بشكل لا يراكم الثروة فى يد أنظمة الحكم أو فى يد العائلات الحاكمة.
أما على صعيد النفط فالطرق الحديثة والمتطورة فى إنتاج / استخراج النفط ونقله عبر الأنابيب جعل من تأثير العمال فى عملية الإنتاج تأثير محدود وبذلك تراكمت الأموال النفطية فى أيدى العائلات والحكومات مما يساعد على شراء التأييد السياسى ووأد المظاهرات لأن عمليات الثراء الحكومى تساعد بشدة على شراء الأسلحة والأدوات المطلوبة فى عمليات فض المظاهرات أو تخفيف الضغوط المطالبة بتوزيع عادل للثروة.
ويعرج هنا ميتشل إلى أنه فى العصر الحديث استخدم المال النفطى فى قمع الثورات ويصل بعد استعراض عدة أمثلة إلى حالة البحرين واليمن ومصر وتونس فى الوقت التى تعد فيه هذه الدول من الدول الفقيرة بالنفط إلا أن البُعد السياسى لظهور ديمقراطيات فى منطقة الشرق الأوسط وتحديداً فى هذه الدول سيخلق حالة عامة من المطالبة بالديمقراطية وتداول السلطة وعدم تركيز السلطة فى يد فئة / عائلة معينة
وعليه نستنتج أن صناعة واستخراج الفحم أدت إلي ظهور عملية ديمقراطية ، وتكوين اتحادات عمالية، بينما استخدم النفط ضد الديمقراطية.
مرت مراحل انتاج النفط بتقلبات فتم الضغط سياسياً على الدول المنتجة لزيادة الإنتاج تارة وتقليله تارات واستحوذ الأجانب على رئاسة الشركات المنتجة للنفط فترات طويلة ومؤخراً أصبح لزاماً على الدول الغنية بالنفط أن تنفق الأموال النفطية فى الغرب عن طريق شراء العقارات بغية حفظ تلك الأموال فى مأمن من أى ثورات أو احتجاجات قد تطيح بالعائلات الحاكمة والحكومات.
وما الذى يدفع أحد أثرياء النفط العربى لشراء أغلى قصر فى العالم ؟ أو شراء أغلى يخت بحرى فى العالم؟ أو شراء نادى عاصمة من أكبر عواصم العالم؟
هذه أسئلة قد تتبادر إلى ذهن أى إنسان يعيش فى منطقة الشرق الأوسط، التى تقلبت شئونها السياسية والاقتصادية بين المعسكرين الشرقى والغربى – بين الاشتراكية تارة والشيوعية أحياناً وبين الرأسمالية الآن، فى الماضى كانت الحكومات تملك الشركات والمؤسسات والهيئات وتتحكم فى الأسعار، أما الآن فقانون العرض والطلب هو ما يتحكم فى الأسواق وترفع الحكومات يدها تماماً عن الأسواق فأصبح الفقراء أكثر فقراً والأغنياء أكثر غنى.
يؤسس الكاتب هنا لأشكال الحكم السياسى فى عصور الفحم ومن ثم النفط، وأوضح كيف أن طريقة إنتاج الفحم ساهمت فى تركيز الكتلة السكانية حول مناجم الفحم وساعدت العمال على التأثير فى عملية توزيع الأرباح وساعدتهم على عمل الإضرابات والمظاهرات والحصول على حقوقهم ولذلك تم توزيع أرباح الفحم بشكل لا يراكم الثروة فى يد أنظمة الحكم أو فى يد العائلات الحاكمة.
أما على صعيد النفط فالطرق الحديثة والمتطورة فى إنتاج / استخراج النفط ونقله عبر الأنابيب جعل من تأثير العمال فى عملية الإنتاج تأثير محدود وبذلك تراكمت الأموال النفطية فى أيدى العائلات والحكومات مما يساعد على شراء التأييد السياسى ووأد المظاهرات لأن عمليات الثراء الحكومى تساعد بشدة على شراء الأسلحة والأدوات المطلوبة فى عمليات فض المظاهرات أو تخفيف الضغوط المطالبة بتوزيع عادل للثروة.
ويعرج هنا ميتشل إلى أنه فى العصر الحديث استخدم المال النفطى فى قمع الثورات ويصل بعد استعراض عدة أمثلة إلى حالة البحرين واليمن ومصر وتونس فى الوقت التى تعد فيه هذه الدول من الدول الفقيرة بالنفط إلا أن البُعد السياسى لظهور ديمقراطيات فى منطقة الشرق الأوسط وتحديداً فى هذه الدول سيخلق حالة عامة من المطالبة بالديمقراطية وتداول السلطة وعدم تركيز السلطة فى يد فئة / عائلة معينة
وعليه نستنتج أن صناعة واستخراج الفحم أدت إلي ظهور عملية ديمقراطية ، وتكوين اتحادات عمالية، بينما استخدم النفط ضد الديمقراطية.
مرت مراحل انتاج النفط بتقلبات فتم الضغط سياسياً على الدول المنتجة لزيادة الإنتاج تارة وتقليله تارات واستحوذ الأجانب على رئاسة الشركات المنتجة للنفط فترات طويلة ومؤخراً أصبح لزاماً على الدول الغنية بالنفط أن تنفق الأموال النفطية فى الغرب عن طريق شراء العقارات بغية حفظ تلك الأموال فى مأمن من أى ثورات أو احتجاجات قد تطيح بالعائلات الحاكمة والحكومات.
January 18, 2016
The book has some valuable and interesting observations about the history of fossil fuel economy and the middle east. It has some important flaws as well.
It gives carbon energy too much importance in the history, and achieves that by omitting what doesn't fit it's narrative from the discussion. The examples here would be importance of colonialism, slave trade and plantation economy as the economic base of early capitalist economy, the contemporary existence of millions of people in slums across the world, in high density urban environments which are neither determined nor benefiting from carbon energy flows, the lack of discussion of coal mining and other resource mining outside the west and explanation why that did not lead to emergence of mass working class democracy like it did in the West.
The narrative is centered on the West and the USA. The bulk of the book is concerned with the Middle East but it's mostly discussed as an area where the western governments and corporation compete, where Western ideas play out, it barely ever appears as the subject on it's own. Even in the chapter on emergence of sovereign Arab states, there are many more Western politicians discussed than Arab. The Palestinian independence never appears as an issue on it's own, only as a factor in destabilising local politics and ensuring oil shortage. The 1973 Arab war only exists as a factor in development of American militarism. The result is an view on the history of the Middle East that is often insightful and eye opening, but fragmented and subordinated to the history of the West.
It gives carbon energy too much importance in the history, and achieves that by omitting what doesn't fit it's narrative from the discussion. The examples here would be importance of colonialism, slave trade and plantation economy as the economic base of early capitalist economy, the contemporary existence of millions of people in slums across the world, in high density urban environments which are neither determined nor benefiting from carbon energy flows, the lack of discussion of coal mining and other resource mining outside the west and explanation why that did not lead to emergence of mass working class democracy like it did in the West.
The narrative is centered on the West and the USA. The bulk of the book is concerned with the Middle East but it's mostly discussed as an area where the western governments and corporation compete, where Western ideas play out, it barely ever appears as the subject on it's own. Even in the chapter on emergence of sovereign Arab states, there are many more Western politicians discussed than Arab. The Palestinian independence never appears as an issue on it's own, only as a factor in destabilising local politics and ensuring oil shortage. The 1973 Arab war only exists as a factor in development of American militarism. The result is an view on the history of the Middle East that is often insightful and eye opening, but fragmented and subordinated to the history of the West.
June 8, 2014
The Middle East unveils the true nature of capitalism, but falls short of democracy
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites.]
Mitchell offers what he knows about the history of the Middle East, the oil business, and economics as a discipline, to interpret the history of the West - and a thing called capitalism for want of better terms - since the mid-nineteenth century. The result is brilliant, almost encyclopedic, of a philosophical quality - and blew me away. The book is not an organic whole though, but a collection of philosphical fragments or “archaeologies”, in the sense of Michel Foucault – as Nick has pointed out – stitched together as if this were a standard university publisher's book.
The most revealing archaeologies (to me) are those dedicated to
- the examination of the linkage between the organisation of the coal industry in Great Britain and the success of workers' claims
- the quest for oil in the Middle East as a mechanism for “producing scarcity” and for maximising rents from existing oil fields
- the analysis of the evolution of trade union relations in the US
- the Marshall Plan, as the US-engineered switch of the European economy to oil dependence and US-style union relations
- the birth of “the economy” as a technocratic device aimed at controlling politics and any “excess of democracy”, and money as a veil between politics and the nuts and bolts of our societies
- the Bretton Woods monetary system as the companion to the newly engineered oil dependence of Western economies
- the 1973 oil crisis as the mother of all manufactured crises to come
- the long-term maintainance of unresolved conflicts as a strategy of planned instability in the Middle East.
But what really struck me above all as the revelation of a truly stable feature of the West and capitalism is the carefully unburied notion that “development” has always meant, and will always mean, “separate development”, i.e. the idea that no equal footing is acceptable – ever – between the West and the rest. This notion has an explanatory power that beats the explanatory potential of any of the other masterfully researched archaeologies. The West is determined to kick away the ladder (in the sense of Ha Joon Chang) and is prepared to do whatever illogical actions to maintain an unequal status quo.
I do not think though that this book says much about democracy and its future. And it is unable to do so because it fails to incorporate “in the equation” two variables that to me are absolutely critical: state and consumption. State defined – like in a videogame – as that thing that provides roads, railways, schools, hospitals, law courts, armies, police, electricity grids and much other infrastructure that is liable to sabotage, so that the government can be blackmailed by the protesting workers into yielding to their claims. Consumption as energy turned into wellbeing (liable to sabotage too), equal access to which is the goal of all the protests. Failing to notice that as oil companies delayed the construction of railways in Iraq at the beginning of the last century they were not so much manufacturing scarcity but delaying the advent of a state in the modern sense and consumption for all, is a glaring weakness of the book. The coal workers in Great Britain lived in an electrified world, where mobility and the mechanized production of goods that workers had the possibility to consume was made possible by the sudden availabiliy of coal-fired power. Railways and the electricity grid had been built by an efficient state, and could be sabotaged.
Mitchell has a glimpse of the importance of access to carbon-based consumption and the development of state infrastructure for the formation of democracy when he mentions the demonstrations of the Electrical Utility Workers Union in Iraq in 2010, protesting because people had only intermittent electricity supply to their houses. Says Hashmeya Muhsin al-Saadawi, leader of the union: “If people are desperate enough, the government believes they'll accept anything to get electricity, including privatization”. (Sherwood Ross, Union-busting in Iraq, Counterpunch, 19 October 2010). In 2012 the situation of the grid had not improved. This is a contemporary example of how the “separate development” programme is still alive and kicking a century later in Iraq and how the maintenance of a non-state (or rogue state) is key to the prevention of development (and therefore democracy).
In marxist terms, Mitchell repeats that capitalism is weak, and does not possess a logic of its own. To the contrary, the book explains very well that the logic of separate development - both across and within societies, in the form of inequality - is its guiding force and strength, along with a fundamental hatred of democracy that other forces in society attempt to counter.
[Through my ratings, reviews and edits I'm providing intellectual property and labor to Amazon.com Inc., listed on Nasdaq, which fully owns Goodreads.com and in 2013 posted revenues for $74 billion and $274 million profits. Intellectual property and labor require compensation. Amazon.com Inc. is also requested to provide assurance that its employees and contractors' work conditions meet the highest health and safety standards at all the company's sites.]
Mitchell offers what he knows about the history of the Middle East, the oil business, and economics as a discipline, to interpret the history of the West - and a thing called capitalism for want of better terms - since the mid-nineteenth century. The result is brilliant, almost encyclopedic, of a philosophical quality - and blew me away. The book is not an organic whole though, but a collection of philosphical fragments or “archaeologies”, in the sense of Michel Foucault – as Nick has pointed out – stitched together as if this were a standard university publisher's book.
The most revealing archaeologies (to me) are those dedicated to
- the examination of the linkage between the organisation of the coal industry in Great Britain and the success of workers' claims
- the quest for oil in the Middle East as a mechanism for “producing scarcity” and for maximising rents from existing oil fields
- the analysis of the evolution of trade union relations in the US
- the Marshall Plan, as the US-engineered switch of the European economy to oil dependence and US-style union relations
- the birth of “the economy” as a technocratic device aimed at controlling politics and any “excess of democracy”, and money as a veil between politics and the nuts and bolts of our societies
- the Bretton Woods monetary system as the companion to the newly engineered oil dependence of Western economies
- the 1973 oil crisis as the mother of all manufactured crises to come
- the long-term maintainance of unresolved conflicts as a strategy of planned instability in the Middle East.
But what really struck me above all as the revelation of a truly stable feature of the West and capitalism is the carefully unburied notion that “development” has always meant, and will always mean, “separate development”, i.e. the idea that no equal footing is acceptable – ever – between the West and the rest. This notion has an explanatory power that beats the explanatory potential of any of the other masterfully researched archaeologies. The West is determined to kick away the ladder (in the sense of Ha Joon Chang) and is prepared to do whatever illogical actions to maintain an unequal status quo.
I do not think though that this book says much about democracy and its future. And it is unable to do so because it fails to incorporate “in the equation” two variables that to me are absolutely critical: state and consumption. State defined – like in a videogame – as that thing that provides roads, railways, schools, hospitals, law courts, armies, police, electricity grids and much other infrastructure that is liable to sabotage, so that the government can be blackmailed by the protesting workers into yielding to their claims. Consumption as energy turned into wellbeing (liable to sabotage too), equal access to which is the goal of all the protests. Failing to notice that as oil companies delayed the construction of railways in Iraq at the beginning of the last century they were not so much manufacturing scarcity but delaying the advent of a state in the modern sense and consumption for all, is a glaring weakness of the book. The coal workers in Great Britain lived in an electrified world, where mobility and the mechanized production of goods that workers had the possibility to consume was made possible by the sudden availabiliy of coal-fired power. Railways and the electricity grid had been built by an efficient state, and could be sabotaged.
Mitchell has a glimpse of the importance of access to carbon-based consumption and the development of state infrastructure for the formation of democracy when he mentions the demonstrations of the Electrical Utility Workers Union in Iraq in 2010, protesting because people had only intermittent electricity supply to their houses. Says Hashmeya Muhsin al-Saadawi, leader of the union: “If people are desperate enough, the government believes they'll accept anything to get electricity, including privatization”. (Sherwood Ross, Union-busting in Iraq, Counterpunch, 19 October 2010). In 2012 the situation of the grid had not improved. This is a contemporary example of how the “separate development” programme is still alive and kicking a century later in Iraq and how the maintenance of a non-state (or rogue state) is key to the prevention of development (and therefore democracy).
In marxist terms, Mitchell repeats that capitalism is weak, and does not possess a logic of its own. To the contrary, the book explains very well that the logic of separate development - both across and within societies, in the form of inequality - is its guiding force and strength, along with a fundamental hatred of democracy that other forces in society attempt to counter.
November 4, 2012
This book is well worth reading, though I still question the amount of emphasis placed on energy as *the* basis of democracy/capitalism. Mitchell nevertheless makes a strong argument for the influence of oil companies and associated representational-disciplinary entities on destruction of labor and creation of a "limitless resource" economic representation while at the same time limiting production of oil so as to retain profits. Mitchell is a Foucauldian complement to David Harvey's Marxism, in that both offer coherent sets of specifics (Aramco, Eisenhower and others for Mitchell; Lewis Powell and others for Harvey; and the right-wing think tanks for both) in support of their arguments. As a result, though their basic epistemological perspectives are quite divergent, both Mitchell in this book and Harvey in A Brief History of Neoliberalism provide important narratives about the individuals and groups that support, represent and seek to underpin corporate exploitation.
Mitchell's approach to Foucauldian analysis is also much more informed by Latour's anthropological (actor-network) notions than for example the more discursive micro-disciplinary approaches of Deleuze and Guattari, Gibson-Graham and even James Ferguson (Anti-Politics Machine and Global Shadows) or Tania Murray Li (The Will to Improve). Discourse/representation and governmenality are more closely associated with violence than micro-structures of self-discipline. Thus, there is more space for resistance. In addition, there is more space to discuss collective organization of labor.
Mitchell's approach to Foucauldian analysis is also much more informed by Latour's anthropological (actor-network) notions than for example the more discursive micro-disciplinary approaches of Deleuze and Guattari, Gibson-Graham and even James Ferguson (Anti-Politics Machine and Global Shadows) or Tania Murray Li (The Will to Improve). Discourse/representation and governmenality are more closely associated with violence than micro-structures of self-discipline. Thus, there is more space for resistance. In addition, there is more space to discuss collective organization of labor.
September 28, 2023
Normalize reading even the unassigned parts of school books so you can mark the book on Goodreads and also be a teacher’s pet. Win win.
February 27, 2014
If only I could have read this book 40 years ago! This is certainly one of the best books I've read on history, economics, ecology or politics.
Forty years ago when I was a student of the philosophy of economics, I was stymied. I could not find any solid foundation for economics, and the Sioux medicine man Lame Deer seemed to have it right in summarizing the "green frog-skin world" of the American dollar as an illusion. But this illusion clearly had immense power over the whole world, and I thought even an illusion must have some foundation in reality, something that gave the illusion its power. But nothing I read or thought could explain the remarkable strength and staying power of the illusion of the American economy, and I eventually gave up on economics and tried to put the riddle out of my mind.
Carbon Democracy offers a detailed explanation of this and many other riddles. For the first time in my historical studies, I read about the origin of the concept of "the economy", in the years shortly before my birth. "The economy", Timothy Mitchell explains, was based on the sudden abundance of fossil-fuel energy, a resource that was seen as so nearly infinite that there was no need to even account for its gradual depletion. Instead, "the economy" became a system of money flows which could grow infinitely, unhindered by the sort of physical limits encountered in what humans used to consider reality. In the halycon days of the fossil-fuel fiesta, the workings of "the economy" could be calculated as purely mathematical flows of numbers, aka dollars, which became completely detached from any physical foundation.
Just a couple of generations later, of course, the infinite supply of oil has proven to be mythical. Today a society and empire that ran on an abundant but finite energy nears collapse. Meanwhile the esteemed profession of economics, which pretended that the society ran on pure disembodied dollars, blew itself up spectacularly in the sub-prime loans bubble, and is now performing equally well partway through the subprime resource bubble of shale gas, shale oil and diluted bitumen.
Carbon Democracy is not an easy read. The history is detailed and well documented. Sometimes the language is highly abstract, particularly when discussing the almost perfectly abstract "science of economics". Nevertheless the story Mitchell tells is refreshingly down to earth and thoroughly rooted in the realities of geology, technology, and human interaction. It is a slow read, simply because Mitchell re-writes so much of the history of the last 200 years. To cop a phrase from Marx, rather than turning economics upside down, Mitchell sets economics on its feet.
Forty years ago when I was a student of the philosophy of economics, I was stymied. I could not find any solid foundation for economics, and the Sioux medicine man Lame Deer seemed to have it right in summarizing the "green frog-skin world" of the American dollar as an illusion. But this illusion clearly had immense power over the whole world, and I thought even an illusion must have some foundation in reality, something that gave the illusion its power. But nothing I read or thought could explain the remarkable strength and staying power of the illusion of the American economy, and I eventually gave up on economics and tried to put the riddle out of my mind.
Carbon Democracy offers a detailed explanation of this and many other riddles. For the first time in my historical studies, I read about the origin of the concept of "the economy", in the years shortly before my birth. "The economy", Timothy Mitchell explains, was based on the sudden abundance of fossil-fuel energy, a resource that was seen as so nearly infinite that there was no need to even account for its gradual depletion. Instead, "the economy" became a system of money flows which could grow infinitely, unhindered by the sort of physical limits encountered in what humans used to consider reality. In the halycon days of the fossil-fuel fiesta, the workings of "the economy" could be calculated as purely mathematical flows of numbers, aka dollars, which became completely detached from any physical foundation.
Just a couple of generations later, of course, the infinite supply of oil has proven to be mythical. Today a society and empire that ran on an abundant but finite energy nears collapse. Meanwhile the esteemed profession of economics, which pretended that the society ran on pure disembodied dollars, blew itself up spectacularly in the sub-prime loans bubble, and is now performing equally well partway through the subprime resource bubble of shale gas, shale oil and diluted bitumen.
Carbon Democracy is not an easy read. The history is detailed and well documented. Sometimes the language is highly abstract, particularly when discussing the almost perfectly abstract "science of economics". Nevertheless the story Mitchell tells is refreshingly down to earth and thoroughly rooted in the realities of geology, technology, and human interaction. It is a slow read, simply because Mitchell re-writes so much of the history of the last 200 years. To cop a phrase from Marx, rather than turning economics upside down, Mitchell sets economics on its feet.
January 25, 2025
كتاب مهم للباحث تيموثي ميتشل، يستكشف فيه العلاقة الجدلية بين الطاقة والسياسة. يناقش الكتاب كيف أدى تحول الاقتصاد العالمي من الفحم إلى النفط إلى تغيير أنماط القوة السياسية، وشكَّل ما نعرفه اليوم بالديمقراطية الليبرالية في الدول الصناعية أو "العالم الأول".
الفحم والديمقراطية:
كان التحكم في الطاقة – سواء كوسيلة تمكين أو أداة تقييد – عاملًا محوريًا في تشكيل القوة السياسية. الفحم، بسبب ارتباطه ببنى اجتماعية واقتصادية معقدة، صعَّب عمليات التحكم، مما سمح ببروز قوى عمالية وسياسية داعمة للحراك الديمقراطي.
النفط والتحكم المركزي:
مع الانتقال إلى النفط، أصبح التحكم في الطاقة أكثر سهولة بفضل مركزية استخراجه وتوزيعه. هذا التحول منح الحكومات والنخب مزيدًا من السيطرة، بينما قلَّص قدرة الجماهير على التأثير في السلطة.
النفط كعامل سياسي:
لا يُقدِّم ميتشل النفط كسلعة اقتصادية فحسب، بل كعامل سياسي محوري في التحولات الكبرى بالعالم. يرصد كيف ساهم النفط في بروز النقود وقوة الدولار، وأعطى أهميةً لكيانات دولية مثل الأمم المتحدة وصندوق النقد الدولي.
أزمة النفط عام 1973:
يستعرض الكتاب بالتفصيل كيف استفادت الشركات المنتجة للنفط من أزمة 1973، حيث تم خلق "ندرة وهمية" لرفع الأسعار وإعادة تشكيل السياسة الخارجية الأمريكية تجاه الشرق الأوسط.
July 28, 2013
really compelling, especially the early chapters that examine how oil became more politically useful than coal. the manufacturing of the energy crisis was also meticulously examined. the conclusion and afterword were strangely soft and left me wanting more. nonetheless, this book will become a standard for geographers and anyone interested in oil, energy, and the infrastructure of capitalist politics.
August 8, 2020
A historical review of fossil fuel economics and politics, which for the most part presents a complex system of relationships and stakeholders (not to mention exploitative mechanics).
For me, the interesting core of the book is near the end where considerations that look at how post carbon economy may not be as compatible with democratic governance as is commonly thought. Also the relationship between authority in religion and globalisation and how this may come to crisis.
Curious reframing of many commonly held perspectives.
In a nutshell the exploitation of “inexpensive” energy drived a bubble around the western economies and a global democratic system and environmental damage. Now we may have to pay a price for this which will drive different politics.
For me, the interesting core of the book is near the end where considerations that look at how post carbon economy may not be as compatible with democratic governance as is commonly thought. Also the relationship between authority in religion and globalisation and how this may come to crisis.
Curious reframing of many commonly held perspectives.
In a nutshell the exploitation of “inexpensive” energy drived a bubble around the western economies and a global democratic system and environmental damage. Now we may have to pay a price for this which will drive different politics.
March 21, 2018
تيموني ميتشل هو أفضل من يكتب عن تشكلات السياسة في الشرق الأوسط. ولو يترك قليلاً الثرثرة وعدم التنظيم في مؤلفاته لكان ذلك أفضل
فالكتاب ملئ بمحاولة الكاتب ابراز فكرة وحيدة وهي أن البترول قد ساهم في تشكل صورة الشرق الأوسط الحالية وهذا ما لا يختلف عليه اثنان.
ولكنه ناقش أيضاً كيف ان الفحم ومن بعده البترول ساهما في تأسيس ومن ثم خلخة الديموقراطية التي أسهم العمال في تأسيسيها وذلك في بريطانيا والولايات المتحدة أيضاً.
النفط هو لعنة المنطقة والتي أتمني ان ينفذ بسرعة لكي نري وجه الخليج بدون نفطه الذي مَا جعلوه الا وبالا علينا.
August 28, 2023
Very interesting and thorough, but also very dense.
May 24, 2017
Son 100 yıldaki büyük siyasi olayların ve hareketlerin neredeyse tamamının kömür/petrol/enerji ile doğrudan ilişkisini detaylı şekilde anlatıyor. Bilhassa İran,Irak, Suudi Arabistanın tamamen petrol çevresinde dönen/döndürülen siyaseti, bugünkü çatışmalar ve yakınlaşmaları anlamak için çok iyi bir temel sağlıyor.
December 16, 2012
Mitchell seeks to show how the actual physical infrastructure of oil - the coal mines in the 19th and early 20th centuries; oil pumps, pipes and ships, influenced the development of modern democracy and capitalism. Although a lot of his argument focuses on oil in the Middle East, I think his argument is strongest in its first portion, where he shows how the methods of coal mining in England - with independent teams of miners working in pairs hauling coal to a rail infrastructure with just a few "choke points" in the caes of a strike - created conditions that helped lead to 20th century labor organization and with it, the modern form of democracy.
September 22, 2012
Presents a very well-made argument for considering the emergence of hydrocarbon fuel sources and the fight for control of those resources as central to the rise of the urbanization, the modern welfare state, the political violence of the 20th century, and the contemporary globalized market economy.
February 26, 2022
Essential reading for those who wish to understand the history and present of oil politics, Western - mainly U.S. - foreign policy in the Middle East and the tensions between economic theory and oligopolic realities of hydrocarbon exploitation. Can be a little dense, is here and there a bit poorly worded and sometimes erratic in its structure. Worth it, though. 3.5/5
December 20, 2016
It is nearly impossible to understand contemporary world-political systems without investigating into the relationship between democracies, energy capitalism, and governmentality's powers – as Mitchell does here so well. Please, read this.
September 27, 2025
First, I would like to praise Verso for the paperback edition: this edition is the ideal size, design, and formatting for non-fiction. Makes it easy to tote around and jot notes (plenty of margins). In fact, I feel that all non-fiction should follow suit (I'm sick of annotating on hardcovers).
Carbon Democracy is clearly well-researched and offers, at the very least, a comprehensive timeline of the key events and players underlying our continued reliance of the fossil fuel today. I found it difficult at first to get into it, likely a result of limited knowledge about the history of oil and not fully grasping the significance of the events in its early days. I did find the conclusion paragraphs of each chapter to be useful summaries, but it took several rereading of the chapters to really understand the message. To that point, it feels that Mitchell is not trying to convince the general public but instead focusing more on an academic audience. Which is his prerogative, but you would think that, this being the third edition of this book, he would at least update the language in the text to be more digestible. That said, I have not read the previous versions, so maybe this is the most digestible version to date.
I remain skeptical about the collusion narrative, the extent to which democracy was "engineered" by oil geopolitics. "The problem of democracy becomes a question of how to manufacture a new model of the citizen, one whose mind is committed to the idea of democracy…the notion that democracy is an engineering project, concerned with the manufacture of new political subjects and with subjecting people to new ways of being governed." (p. 3) Initially, I thought my confusion stemmed from not understanding "democracy" in this context. In the very first few sentences of the book, Mitchell introduces the idea of "carbon democracy" as a "certain kind of democratic politics" that has emerged. But then throughout most of the book, the "democracy" becomes conflated with this "carbon" version of it. My understanding of "democracy" is a system of government where power is vested in the people, either directly or through elected representatives. The "carbon democracy" Mitchell describes is the complete opposite of that, where vested interests have created conditions that limit the agency of the people - "democracy without democratization.":
So why even call it democracy if nothing about the system of collusion is democratic in nature? Defining something by what it is not just makes it confusing.
I can get behind Mitchell's views of energy systems as drivers of economic development and geopolitics, and how the emergence of new sources of energy established the modern "market" of globalization. This I will explore more in Fressoz's book (and in particular, intrigued by his criticism of Mitchell's book). I am less convinced of the assigned motivations for many of the decisions: the development of oil industry is presented more as a conspiracy theory where a minority of political and industry leaders pull the strings for nefarious reasons - as if the profit motive is the only driver of geopolitics and unaffected by time (i.e., different players maintain a system of exploitation) - rather than a convergence of outcomes of poorly informed decisions. Part of this is the limited focus on the main oil industry players (i.e., the US, Russia, and the Middle East), though they are the most significant elements to the narrative. Another reviewer puts it best: "The result is a view on the history of the Middle East that is often insightful and eye opening, but fragmented and subordinated to the history of the West."
I also feel that Mitchell assigns much more weight to the role of economists in defining paradigms that enabled unfettered global oil production. I can see how early economic theory could breed the narrative of scarcity purported by oil companies to affect energy pricing, but I doubt that the economic theory of the time was entirely designed for the purpose of unilateral price control, which I interpret as Mitchell's views on the matter. In my view, economic study became a deliberate tool for resource management only as a result of the politics. But perhaps Mitchell leans that way in certain aspects as well.
In summary, for readers less familiar with energy history, this is a useful perspective, but one that should be taken with a grain of salt and accompanied by other perspectives of energy history.
Carbon Democracy is clearly well-researched and offers, at the very least, a comprehensive timeline of the key events and players underlying our continued reliance of the fossil fuel today. I found it difficult at first to get into it, likely a result of limited knowledge about the history of oil and not fully grasping the significance of the events in its early days. I did find the conclusion paragraphs of each chapter to be useful summaries, but it took several rereading of the chapters to really understand the message. To that point, it feels that Mitchell is not trying to convince the general public but instead focusing more on an academic audience. Which is his prerogative, but you would think that, this being the third edition of this book, he would at least update the language in the text to be more digestible. That said, I have not read the previous versions, so maybe this is the most digestible version to date.
I remain skeptical about the collusion narrative, the extent to which democracy was "engineered" by oil geopolitics. "The problem of democracy becomes a question of how to manufacture a new model of the citizen, one whose mind is committed to the idea of democracy…the notion that democracy is an engineering project, concerned with the manufacture of new political subjects and with subjecting people to new ways of being governed." (p. 3) Initially, I thought my confusion stemmed from not understanding "democracy" in this context. In the very first few sentences of the book, Mitchell introduces the idea of "carbon democracy" as a "certain kind of democratic politics" that has emerged. But then throughout most of the book, the "democracy" becomes conflated with this "carbon" version of it. My understanding of "democracy" is a system of government where power is vested in the people, either directly or through elected representatives. The "carbon democracy" Mitchell describes is the complete opposite of that, where vested interests have created conditions that limit the agency of the people - "democracy without democratization.":
"The premise of the project is that 'successful democratization requires a citizenry that values democracy and possesses the elements of a democratic political culture'. Yet there is no reliable evidence, as far as I am aware, that the presence of a civic culture - attitudes of trust, tolerance, mutual respect and other liberal virtues - facilitates the emergence of democracy. There is, in fact, no shortage of historical evidence to suggest the opposite." (p. 4)
So why even call it democracy if nothing about the system of collusion is democratic in nature? Defining something by what it is not just makes it confusing.
I can get behind Mitchell's views of energy systems as drivers of economic development and geopolitics, and how the emergence of new sources of energy established the modern "market" of globalization. This I will explore more in Fressoz's book (and in particular, intrigued by his criticism of Mitchell's book). I am less convinced of the assigned motivations for many of the decisions: the development of oil industry is presented more as a conspiracy theory where a minority of political and industry leaders pull the strings for nefarious reasons - as if the profit motive is the only driver of geopolitics and unaffected by time (i.e., different players maintain a system of exploitation) - rather than a convergence of outcomes of poorly informed decisions. Part of this is the limited focus on the main oil industry players (i.e., the US, Russia, and the Middle East), though they are the most significant elements to the narrative. Another reviewer puts it best: "The result is a view on the history of the Middle East that is often insightful and eye opening, but fragmented and subordinated to the history of the West."
I also feel that Mitchell assigns much more weight to the role of economists in defining paradigms that enabled unfettered global oil production. I can see how early economic theory could breed the narrative of scarcity purported by oil companies to affect energy pricing, but I doubt that the economic theory of the time was entirely designed for the purpose of unilateral price control, which I interpret as Mitchell's views on the matter. In my view, economic study became a deliberate tool for resource management only as a result of the politics. But perhaps Mitchell leans that way in certain aspects as well.
In summary, for readers less familiar with energy history, this is a useful perspective, but one that should be taken with a grain of salt and accompanied by other perspectives of energy history.
July 5, 2022
After 9/11, there was a whole genre of literature trying to explain why the Middle East is so messed up. Less racist authors tended to gravitate to the “resource curse,” the idea that oil wealth slows down development and invites foreign intervention.
Carbon Democracy blows all that literature out of the water. Instead of an isolated basket case, the Middle East is just one end of a larger system, the global carbon-powered economy. And while oil has caused much of the chaos in the region, it has also helped undo democracy in the United States and Europe.
The book focuses on two important milestones in modern economic life. First, the Industrial Revolution allowed coal to replace muscle power as the main energy source of civilization. With that change came working-class power. The large crews who mined fuel and transported it to factories had the power to shut down European society, which allowed them to force elites to accept democratic change.
But then oil created a global market for energy. Unlike coal, oil and petroleum products was extracted by small, specialized crews in specific locations, then shipped around the world. Energy production was now separated from energy consumption by thousands of miles of supply chains. Oil companies and petroleum engineers took the reigns of civilization.
And oil brought war, although not in the way people expect. For most of the 20th century, the problem was *too much* oil in the world, which threatened oil companies’ high profits and imperial powers’ control over the resource. Companies worked hard to *prevent* colonized countries from pumping oil, which could have reduced oil prices. Britain fought to keep oil producers from selling in a currency other than pounds sterling, while the United States tried to keep Soviet oil off the market.
America and Europe’s post-World War II economic boom was built on a steady, controlled flow of oil. (As the book shows, the Marshall Plan was structured to make Europe switch from coal to oil.) As long as energy seemed like an infinite resource, it was possible to imagine infinite growth. At the same time, oil and technologies based on oil slowly transferred power from labor unions to technocrats.
And as long as energy was traded in U.S. dollars, America would be the center of the global economy. U.S. policy in the Middle East makes a lot more sense in that context. Washington hasn’t been able to establish a stable order in the region because it has not *wanted* stability. The strategy has been to limit oil supplies from rival countries, and to keep friendly oil producers spending their money on American-made weapons. Chaos is good for business.
That role in the global system also prevented the rise of Middle Eastern democratic movements. Even when countries managed to wrest control of their oil resources from foreign imperialists, the nature of oil helped prevent the development of a powerful working class, and instead put power in the hands of government elites. American and Soviet weapon sales helped keep it there, as did Saudi Arabia's co-opting of Islamist movements.
The whole oil order started to break down in the 1970s. Global labor unrest, the rise of Arab nationalism, U.S. dollar inflation, declining American oil production, and rising environmental concerns caused what we now call the “energy crisis.” Oil companies and the Nixon administration did manage to rescue the system from collapse, but with permanently higher oil prices and a totally different relationship to debt.
Now the oil-based order is falling apart again. Prices have wildly swung up, down, and up again in recent years. Each time, it’s caused global political chaos. The truth is that no one really knows how much oil is left, because each oil company and oil-producing country closely guards its data.
The switch to renewable energy may make oil irrelevant. Some experts had predicted that in the 1970s, but the response to the “energy crisis” bought oil a new lease on life. Now that U.S. dollar dominance is falling apart and the world is starting to take climate change the least bit seriously, the change is much harder to stop. We’re entering a brave new world with a new relationship to carbon.
Carbon Democracy blows all that literature out of the water. Instead of an isolated basket case, the Middle East is just one end of a larger system, the global carbon-powered economy. And while oil has caused much of the chaos in the region, it has also helped undo democracy in the United States and Europe.
The book focuses on two important milestones in modern economic life. First, the Industrial Revolution allowed coal to replace muscle power as the main energy source of civilization. With that change came working-class power. The large crews who mined fuel and transported it to factories had the power to shut down European society, which allowed them to force elites to accept democratic change.
But then oil created a global market for energy. Unlike coal, oil and petroleum products was extracted by small, specialized crews in specific locations, then shipped around the world. Energy production was now separated from energy consumption by thousands of miles of supply chains. Oil companies and petroleum engineers took the reigns of civilization.
And oil brought war, although not in the way people expect. For most of the 20th century, the problem was *too much* oil in the world, which threatened oil companies’ high profits and imperial powers’ control over the resource. Companies worked hard to *prevent* colonized countries from pumping oil, which could have reduced oil prices. Britain fought to keep oil producers from selling in a currency other than pounds sterling, while the United States tried to keep Soviet oil off the market.
America and Europe’s post-World War II economic boom was built on a steady, controlled flow of oil. (As the book shows, the Marshall Plan was structured to make Europe switch from coal to oil.) As long as energy seemed like an infinite resource, it was possible to imagine infinite growth. At the same time, oil and technologies based on oil slowly transferred power from labor unions to technocrats.
And as long as energy was traded in U.S. dollars, America would be the center of the global economy. U.S. policy in the Middle East makes a lot more sense in that context. Washington hasn’t been able to establish a stable order in the region because it has not *wanted* stability. The strategy has been to limit oil supplies from rival countries, and to keep friendly oil producers spending their money on American-made weapons. Chaos is good for business.
That role in the global system also prevented the rise of Middle Eastern democratic movements. Even when countries managed to wrest control of their oil resources from foreign imperialists, the nature of oil helped prevent the development of a powerful working class, and instead put power in the hands of government elites. American and Soviet weapon sales helped keep it there, as did Saudi Arabia's co-opting of Islamist movements.
The whole oil order started to break down in the 1970s. Global labor unrest, the rise of Arab nationalism, U.S. dollar inflation, declining American oil production, and rising environmental concerns caused what we now call the “energy crisis.” Oil companies and the Nixon administration did manage to rescue the system from collapse, but with permanently higher oil prices and a totally different relationship to debt.
Now the oil-based order is falling apart again. Prices have wildly swung up, down, and up again in recent years. Each time, it’s caused global political chaos. The truth is that no one really knows how much oil is left, because each oil company and oil-producing country closely guards its data.
The switch to renewable energy may make oil irrelevant. Some experts had predicted that in the 1970s, but the response to the “energy crisis” bought oil a new lease on life. Now that U.S. dollar dominance is falling apart and the world is starting to take climate change the least bit seriously, the change is much harder to stop. We’re entering a brave new world with a new relationship to carbon.
October 18, 2023
Written in 2011, nearly a decade after the beginning of the U.S.-Iraq war, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy set out to analyze the relationship between oil and democracy. Mitchell’s research into the construction of the Middle East oil industry showed how fossil fuels shape particular forms of democracy and non-democracy, leading him to coin the term “carbon democracy.” Now, over another decade later, as unrest in the Middle East continues and the world faces the perils of climate change, Mitchell’s ideas of how fossil fuels shape social and political outcomes are more relevant than ever. This text appeals explicitly to contemporary energy humanities scholars as it highlights how technical shifts in energy systems can have profound socio-political outcomes. Carbon Democracy retells historical events of the 20th and 21st centuries with a watchful eye on fossil fuels and their critical role in developing modern democracy and its limitations.
Mitchell begins the book by contrasting the qualities of coal and oil and the infrastructure required to extract, transport, and use each carbon-based fuel. Mitchell then extrapolates these differences into the social, political, and economic spheres by analyzing the impacts of coal use and later oil use on labor dynamics, power distribution, and democracy. While coal is physically hard and brittle and requires manual labor to extract, transport, and use, oil is fluid, easy to drill for with machinery, and moves about with minimal human contact via pipeline, fuel tanker, and carrier. Mitchell argues that these differences in form have consequential outcomes on the concentration of power across the energy system and labor’s ability to express a political voice. It may be tempting to view Mitchell’s arguments as stemming from vital materiality; however, he aims to illustrate that the human participants within the coal and oil energy systems have different options due to technical differences in the industries and their infrastructure. He shows that the age of coal more evenly distributed political power amongst the middle class as they were critical to the supply chain. Laborers mined coal underground and were necessary to load coal aboard ships at seaports, creating opportunities to form unions, organize strikes, and leverage their political voice. Oil, by comparison, eliminated various choke points and vulnerabilities from the coal-based energy system by removing the number of hands on the supply chain, thereby shifting political power from the middle class to oil firms.
Mitchell connects this concentration of power in fewer hands to forms of democracy that are common today. He contests stories of pioneering heroes searching for oil in the Middle East in the early 20th century with a more cynical account of emerging oil firms seeking to delay the discovery and production. He introduces the notion of sabotage and contends that oil firms bought discovery and drilling rights without intending to develop the area for exports until it later served their purposes, and further that in doing so, these oil firms began to form a sort of international cartel to maintain artificial scarcity and, thereby, a monopolistic price. Mitchell claims central world governments subjugated themselves to the oil cartel as they transitioned from coal to oil. World powers increasingly depended on securing oil production abroad but faced domestic and international pressures to reject imperial pursuits. Mitchell argues that this demand on world powers to democratize imperial powers devolved into neoimperialist tactics to maintain a foothold and a “legitimate government” in strategic territories under the guise of “self-determination,” or “native rule,” and later “the consent of the governed.” Oil companies alone could not act with the required force to maintain control over production in the Middle East, so they banded neoimperialist aims, persuading agencies such as the C.I.A. to overthrow troublesome Middle Eastern governments and establish more cooperative regimes. Mitchell’s background in colonialism shines clear in this section as he identifies power mechanisms of imperial nations disguised as civilizing or modernizing peoples for their best interests.
After establishing a retold history of the rise of the Middle East oil industry, Mitchell highlights oil’s role in shaping the modern conception of “the economy” as another imperial control mechanism. He demonstrates the shift in economic consciousness by tracing key events that instantiated the U.S. dollar as a proxy gold standard and the primary currency for oil trade. Mitchell claims this “economy,” backed not by finite resources but by conceivably infinite oil reserves, eroded democracy as oil firms and imperialist powers mechanized the idea of “the market” to their ends. Oil firms, for example, manufactured an oil crisis to spike prices in the 1970s in response to their control in the Middle East to preserve profits; however, this ultimately led to the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement and contributed to the U.S. bankruptcy. Imperial powers, such as the U.S., thwarted attempts at grassroots democratic movements in Middle Eastern countries to maintain market stability of petroleum and contributed to a perpetual conflict in the region by selling arms to flow more U.S. dollars into federal reserves. Mitchell invents the term “McJihad” to describe these limitations on democracy by the coalescing of oil firms, imperial powers, and conservative Islamic regimes. Mitchell draws the book to a close by stating that his concern for our collective human future lies not in the exhaustion of oil resources but in the potential failure of this fragile socio-political system that has emerged from the age of oil and the planetary effects of carelessly polluting our world.
While Mitchell creates solid arguments for the impacts of fossil fuels on socio-political outcomes throughout his book, there are times when his arguments would benefit from more cohesion as he toes the line between historian, political commentator, and anthropologist. For example, a chronological construction of events would prevent readers from popping in and out of over a century of complex history as he builds topic-oriented arguments. On the other hand, Mitchell successfully avoids criticisms of material determinism by elucidating the role of fossil fuels as one of many contributors to political and economic change. For example, on page 12, Mitchell acknowledges that while modern politics were made possible partly by the fossil fuel energy system, human action was required, stating, “democratic political claims, however, [are] not just a by-product of the rise of coal. People forged successful political demands by acquiring a power of action from within the new energy system.” Mitchell expertly builds on the foundations of thinkers like Vaclav Smil (page 6), who acknowledge energy’s effects on society and culture while rejecting a purely deterministic relationship.
Overall, Mitchell delivered on his task of writing a book on “democracy as oil” and did well to manage the book’s scope. While the conclusion offers no methods for engagement, he does end with a clear call for action and awareness of global citizens to be cognizant of the impacts on democracy that changes in energy systems may have. As the world looks towards new technologies and modes of being to address climate change, Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy is a critical read to add a perspective on energy systems’ influence on socio-political and economic outcomes.
Mitchell begins the book by contrasting the qualities of coal and oil and the infrastructure required to extract, transport, and use each carbon-based fuel. Mitchell then extrapolates these differences into the social, political, and economic spheres by analyzing the impacts of coal use and later oil use on labor dynamics, power distribution, and democracy. While coal is physically hard and brittle and requires manual labor to extract, transport, and use, oil is fluid, easy to drill for with machinery, and moves about with minimal human contact via pipeline, fuel tanker, and carrier. Mitchell argues that these differences in form have consequential outcomes on the concentration of power across the energy system and labor’s ability to express a political voice. It may be tempting to view Mitchell’s arguments as stemming from vital materiality; however, he aims to illustrate that the human participants within the coal and oil energy systems have different options due to technical differences in the industries and their infrastructure. He shows that the age of coal more evenly distributed political power amongst the middle class as they were critical to the supply chain. Laborers mined coal underground and were necessary to load coal aboard ships at seaports, creating opportunities to form unions, organize strikes, and leverage their political voice. Oil, by comparison, eliminated various choke points and vulnerabilities from the coal-based energy system by removing the number of hands on the supply chain, thereby shifting political power from the middle class to oil firms.
Mitchell connects this concentration of power in fewer hands to forms of democracy that are common today. He contests stories of pioneering heroes searching for oil in the Middle East in the early 20th century with a more cynical account of emerging oil firms seeking to delay the discovery and production. He introduces the notion of sabotage and contends that oil firms bought discovery and drilling rights without intending to develop the area for exports until it later served their purposes, and further that in doing so, these oil firms began to form a sort of international cartel to maintain artificial scarcity and, thereby, a monopolistic price. Mitchell claims central world governments subjugated themselves to the oil cartel as they transitioned from coal to oil. World powers increasingly depended on securing oil production abroad but faced domestic and international pressures to reject imperial pursuits. Mitchell argues that this demand on world powers to democratize imperial powers devolved into neoimperialist tactics to maintain a foothold and a “legitimate government” in strategic territories under the guise of “self-determination,” or “native rule,” and later “the consent of the governed.” Oil companies alone could not act with the required force to maintain control over production in the Middle East, so they banded neoimperialist aims, persuading agencies such as the C.I.A. to overthrow troublesome Middle Eastern governments and establish more cooperative regimes. Mitchell’s background in colonialism shines clear in this section as he identifies power mechanisms of imperial nations disguised as civilizing or modernizing peoples for their best interests.
After establishing a retold history of the rise of the Middle East oil industry, Mitchell highlights oil’s role in shaping the modern conception of “the economy” as another imperial control mechanism. He demonstrates the shift in economic consciousness by tracing key events that instantiated the U.S. dollar as a proxy gold standard and the primary currency for oil trade. Mitchell claims this “economy,” backed not by finite resources but by conceivably infinite oil reserves, eroded democracy as oil firms and imperialist powers mechanized the idea of “the market” to their ends. Oil firms, for example, manufactured an oil crisis to spike prices in the 1970s in response to their control in the Middle East to preserve profits; however, this ultimately led to the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement and contributed to the U.S. bankruptcy. Imperial powers, such as the U.S., thwarted attempts at grassroots democratic movements in Middle Eastern countries to maintain market stability of petroleum and contributed to a perpetual conflict in the region by selling arms to flow more U.S. dollars into federal reserves. Mitchell invents the term “McJihad” to describe these limitations on democracy by the coalescing of oil firms, imperial powers, and conservative Islamic regimes. Mitchell draws the book to a close by stating that his concern for our collective human future lies not in the exhaustion of oil resources but in the potential failure of this fragile socio-political system that has emerged from the age of oil and the planetary effects of carelessly polluting our world.
While Mitchell creates solid arguments for the impacts of fossil fuels on socio-political outcomes throughout his book, there are times when his arguments would benefit from more cohesion as he toes the line between historian, political commentator, and anthropologist. For example, a chronological construction of events would prevent readers from popping in and out of over a century of complex history as he builds topic-oriented arguments. On the other hand, Mitchell successfully avoids criticisms of material determinism by elucidating the role of fossil fuels as one of many contributors to political and economic change. For example, on page 12, Mitchell acknowledges that while modern politics were made possible partly by the fossil fuel energy system, human action was required, stating, “democratic political claims, however, [are] not just a by-product of the rise of coal. People forged successful political demands by acquiring a power of action from within the new energy system.” Mitchell expertly builds on the foundations of thinkers like Vaclav Smil (page 6), who acknowledge energy’s effects on society and culture while rejecting a purely deterministic relationship.
Overall, Mitchell delivered on his task of writing a book on “democracy as oil” and did well to manage the book’s scope. While the conclusion offers no methods for engagement, he does end with a clear call for action and awareness of global citizens to be cognizant of the impacts on democracy that changes in energy systems may have. As the world looks towards new technologies and modes of being to address climate change, Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy is a critical read to add a perspective on energy systems’ influence on socio-political and economic outcomes.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 9, 2021
Mitchell argues that Western democracy and Middle Eastern instability developed not because of particular ideas and cultures, but because of how workers, companies and politicians leveraged technical vulnerabilities in the physical foundations of power, and he uses history of the fossil fuel economy to prove it. Recommended if you like lasers: thematically narrow, but narratively dense accounts.
Too dense to summarize, but some bits I would like to remember:
i) When industrialization in W-Europe dependend on coal, it also depended on mining and transport by teams of workers, so strikes and sabotage were effective means to win more rights. Oil's transportability and location in colonialised territories allowed governments to limit democratic power in their countries. When democratic power in oil producer countries became an issue, it was quenched with doctrines of protectorates, separate development, self-determination (often, meaning replacement of foreign dictatorship with local dictatorship) and eventually, maintenance of conflict and political instability.
ii) Oil companies built an oligopoly and maximised their profits by manufacturing scarcity (buying potential oil fields and restricting supply), positioning their business as a national strategic and security interest, creating and promoting lifestyles dependent on fossil energy, and throughout the process, working closely with the colonialist empire and later, national governments; ironically, a lot of oil wealth has been invested into neoliberal think tanks, promoting a free market that the oil industry never operated in.
iii) Furthermore, oil production transferred expertise from workers to their managers and engineers while also requiring new expertise for exploration, political arrangements, international finance, PR, marketing of energy-intensive lifestyles etc. - so, oil companies ended up extremely well equipped to "define the nature of the crisis and promote a particular set of solutions.” (129)
iv) Abundance of oil/energy in the 20th century helped shape a new economics of material limitlessness and infinite growth.
v) Benjamin Barber's 'Jihad vs. McWorld' (capitalist globalisation vs. tribalistic opposition) framework is replaced by Mitchell with 'McJihad', where capitalism works "in certain critical instances, only by adopting the social force and moral authority of conservative Islamic movements" (203), as illustrated by several cases of oil companies and Western governments funding coups against democratic and secular leadership in the Middle East in order to maintain control over oil and/or financial flows.
Missing: what has been happening in the rest of the world, voices from the ground, politics of 21st century energy transitions.
Too dense to summarize, but some bits I would like to remember:
i) When industrialization in W-Europe dependend on coal, it also depended on mining and transport by teams of workers, so strikes and sabotage were effective means to win more rights. Oil's transportability and location in colonialised territories allowed governments to limit democratic power in their countries. When democratic power in oil producer countries became an issue, it was quenched with doctrines of protectorates, separate development, self-determination (often, meaning replacement of foreign dictatorship with local dictatorship) and eventually, maintenance of conflict and political instability.
ii) Oil companies built an oligopoly and maximised their profits by manufacturing scarcity (buying potential oil fields and restricting supply), positioning their business as a national strategic and security interest, creating and promoting lifestyles dependent on fossil energy, and throughout the process, working closely with the colonialist empire and later, national governments; ironically, a lot of oil wealth has been invested into neoliberal think tanks, promoting a free market that the oil industry never operated in.
iii) Furthermore, oil production transferred expertise from workers to their managers and engineers while also requiring new expertise for exploration, political arrangements, international finance, PR, marketing of energy-intensive lifestyles etc. - so, oil companies ended up extremely well equipped to "define the nature of the crisis and promote a particular set of solutions.” (129)
iv) Abundance of oil/energy in the 20th century helped shape a new economics of material limitlessness and infinite growth.
v) Benjamin Barber's 'Jihad vs. McWorld' (capitalist globalisation vs. tribalistic opposition) framework is replaced by Mitchell with 'McJihad', where capitalism works "in certain critical instances, only by adopting the social force and moral authority of conservative Islamic movements" (203), as illustrated by several cases of oil companies and Western governments funding coups against democratic and secular leadership in the Middle East in order to maintain control over oil and/or financial flows.
Missing: what has been happening in the rest of the world, voices from the ground, politics of 21st century energy transitions.
November 13, 2018
Timothy Mitchell’s book attempted to deconstruct the idea of democracy as it applied to the world in the twentieth century, specifically how countries that depended on carbon as an essential resource (coal, then oil) used the idea and concept of democracy to control that resource. He began his argument with the nineteenth century in Britain and the importance of coal to the rise of working-class demands for political rights before moving to an analysis of the development of the oil industry in the Middle East and the uncertain future the industry faces today. Mitchell argued that the fight to dominate this resource did more to shape the twentieth century than almost any other factor, and that the United States, as well as other Western countries, twisted the idea of democracy to fit their demands for oil.
This book takes on way too many topics over too long a period to be succinctly and well argued in two hundred and sixty-seven pages. Mitchell took on not only the rise of the working class demands of the nineteenth century, but two world wars, the creation of the post-war order, and the crisis (conjured or not) of the 1970. The relationship between either coal and oil in any of these topics could have constituted a volume of research of their own. Because Mitchell attempted all of them, none of these topics are given any space to breathe. As a result, his analysis is superficial at best, and often, skewed to make his point.
There is no doubt that coal and steam engines fundamentally changed the British world, creating conditions for the first Industrial Revolution, but to suggest that it is this development that accounts for the rise of the working class ignores all the foundation laid by earlier generations. Great Britain’s evolution in the area of representation is unique in the developed world—over a long period of three hundred years, they reformed their own government and relocated power from aristocracy to the common people without a civil war, without organized violence. It had taken those things to wrest control from the monarchy (half a century of turmoil in the English Civil War, the Restoration of 1660, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688). After 1688, however, Parliament fought an internal battle to keep the power for themselves. They fought against the idea of representation, against the idea that the power in the country flowed from the people who put them into office (at least in the commons). For Parliament, sovereignty was theirs. It was not given to them. By the end of the eighteenth century, common men who lacked the right to vote were vociferously arguing that the power came from them, and they deserved parliamentary reform.
When studying British history, it is incredibly reductive to simply point to the Industrial Revolution as the pivotal turning point that led to the demand for political rights and mass politics in the nineteenth century. Yes, steam engines created the conditions for factories and increased the rate of urbanization that been happening more slowly over time, but it is a mistake to give so much of the credit of the working-class consciousness to industrial capacity because all that did was create low-paying jobs and poverty on a larger scale. A more influential development was the trading revolution a century earlier. By the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain had become a trading power, and it was merchants who benefited first. Rich merchants and traders acquired a new way of life with new paths to education and new opportunities. Some merchants married into the aristocracy, some were given titles of their own, and still others stayed common and agitated for something they did not yet have—representation in Parliaments. The boroughs of Parliament had not kept up with increase and many larger cities went unrepresented while uninhabited places had two representatives. This was the key to demanding political rights because once merchants began demanding their share, those who worked for them began to think of themselves as deserving as well. In Mitchell’s own words, the importance of coal was not felt until the end of the eighteenth century, but political conscious already existed. The French Revolution did not just happen in France—it transformed the Western world, and Britain had already been thrust into ideas of representation and equality thanks to writings of the American War for Independence.
It would be easy to for many to say that Mitchell was talking about the Western world, and Britain’s unique position makes it the exception, not the rule. But that doesn’t hold up either. The political consciousness he pointed still begins in the eighteenth century with merchants in France and members of the Third Estate. The Industrial Revolution didn’t come to France for another century, but by 1789, the Third Estate was already demanding political power. Those ideas traveled throughout the Western world, laying the crucial foundation for the transformation of class and power that happened in the period Mitchel analyzed. The Industrial Revolution increased the rate and amplified those demands, but I think it’s a mistake to simply say that it “enabled new forms of mass politics” without talking about those mass politics in more depth. (14)
That was the major weakness of this book—it began with a flawed premise of the importance of coal and then carried that thread throughout his analysis of modern history. Coal and oil have an important relationship to democracy, one that deserves to be studied and analyzed, but to divorce those commodities from the world in which they were traded, mined, and developed left this book without any depth or lasting value.
This book takes on way too many topics over too long a period to be succinctly and well argued in two hundred and sixty-seven pages. Mitchell took on not only the rise of the working class demands of the nineteenth century, but two world wars, the creation of the post-war order, and the crisis (conjured or not) of the 1970. The relationship between either coal and oil in any of these topics could have constituted a volume of research of their own. Because Mitchell attempted all of them, none of these topics are given any space to breathe. As a result, his analysis is superficial at best, and often, skewed to make his point.
There is no doubt that coal and steam engines fundamentally changed the British world, creating conditions for the first Industrial Revolution, but to suggest that it is this development that accounts for the rise of the working class ignores all the foundation laid by earlier generations. Great Britain’s evolution in the area of representation is unique in the developed world—over a long period of three hundred years, they reformed their own government and relocated power from aristocracy to the common people without a civil war, without organized violence. It had taken those things to wrest control from the monarchy (half a century of turmoil in the English Civil War, the Restoration of 1660, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688). After 1688, however, Parliament fought an internal battle to keep the power for themselves. They fought against the idea of representation, against the idea that the power in the country flowed from the people who put them into office (at least in the commons). For Parliament, sovereignty was theirs. It was not given to them. By the end of the eighteenth century, common men who lacked the right to vote were vociferously arguing that the power came from them, and they deserved parliamentary reform.
When studying British history, it is incredibly reductive to simply point to the Industrial Revolution as the pivotal turning point that led to the demand for political rights and mass politics in the nineteenth century. Yes, steam engines created the conditions for factories and increased the rate of urbanization that been happening more slowly over time, but it is a mistake to give so much of the credit of the working-class consciousness to industrial capacity because all that did was create low-paying jobs and poverty on a larger scale. A more influential development was the trading revolution a century earlier. By the mid-eighteenth century, Great Britain had become a trading power, and it was merchants who benefited first. Rich merchants and traders acquired a new way of life with new paths to education and new opportunities. Some merchants married into the aristocracy, some were given titles of their own, and still others stayed common and agitated for something they did not yet have—representation in Parliaments. The boroughs of Parliament had not kept up with increase and many larger cities went unrepresented while uninhabited places had two representatives. This was the key to demanding political rights because once merchants began demanding their share, those who worked for them began to think of themselves as deserving as well. In Mitchell’s own words, the importance of coal was not felt until the end of the eighteenth century, but political conscious already existed. The French Revolution did not just happen in France—it transformed the Western world, and Britain had already been thrust into ideas of representation and equality thanks to writings of the American War for Independence.
It would be easy to for many to say that Mitchell was talking about the Western world, and Britain’s unique position makes it the exception, not the rule. But that doesn’t hold up either. The political consciousness he pointed still begins in the eighteenth century with merchants in France and members of the Third Estate. The Industrial Revolution didn’t come to France for another century, but by 1789, the Third Estate was already demanding political power. Those ideas traveled throughout the Western world, laying the crucial foundation for the transformation of class and power that happened in the period Mitchel analyzed. The Industrial Revolution increased the rate and amplified those demands, but I think it’s a mistake to simply say that it “enabled new forms of mass politics” without talking about those mass politics in more depth. (14)
That was the major weakness of this book—it began with a flawed premise of the importance of coal and then carried that thread throughout his analysis of modern history. Coal and oil have an important relationship to democracy, one that deserves to be studied and analyzed, but to divorce those commodities from the world in which they were traded, mined, and developed left this book without any depth or lasting value.
August 15, 2020
Way to look at the history specially the history of the middle east from the presepective of Oil. I believe history of the middle east is very complex and we cannot study it from one prospective. However, oil is an outstanding source of energy with it's abundance in the middle east alot of forces fight for it. With their fighting the middle east was shaped in the way we see it now. As oil for Western countries was a blessing it was a curse for the middle east. Countries could not develop a system that could harvest the benefits of the oil for the sake of its citizens. Meanwhile USA, Britain and France established regimes in the middle east that only ensures the flow of oil to them. The book also highlights the role of Oil in the dominance of dollars and how the current economic system is based on cheap oil and unlimited growth.
As usual the Islamists were used by external powers to spoil any democratic transition. The books briefly gone through that. It happened and will happen and looks like they will never learn.
The best part in my opinion was the part of history during the first decades in the 20th century and how the state of Israel was formed as an agent and then strengthed to help maintaining the global order. Also highlights the Ottoman empire ambitious to conquer this oil which helps now to understand the fight for the new energy source (natural gas) in the east mediterranean sea.
I sea that for a central ahead we will be cursed for wars in the middle east until the era of Oil and natural gas is over and switch to sustainable energy occurs.
I really recommend this book.
As usual the Islamists were used by external powers to spoil any democratic transition. The books briefly gone through that. It happened and will happen and looks like they will never learn.
The best part in my opinion was the part of history during the first decades in the 20th century and how the state of Israel was formed as an agent and then strengthed to help maintaining the global order. Also highlights the Ottoman empire ambitious to conquer this oil which helps now to understand the fight for the new energy source (natural gas) in the east mediterranean sea.
I sea that for a central ahead we will be cursed for wars in the middle east until the era of Oil and natural gas is over and switch to sustainable energy occurs.
I really recommend this book.
December 6, 2025
Easy to get lost in the sauce a little because of how sweeping it is but overall it’s great
October 29, 2017
An interesting alternate history to the twentieth century, centring on fossil fuels as its main actor.
September 10, 2021
Reading this book—having access to a sweeping yet bracingly simple long-view of modern civilization in its entirety, as seen through the fundamental dynamics of how carbon fuels have shaped the process of both politics and economics, leaving you with both a deep abiding sense of superhuman clarity but god-like deep pessimism —must be what it feels like to be Dr. Manhattan.
Read
June 26, 2025Journey thought many months of my life
December 25, 2018
Seeking to explore the emergence of what Mitchell calls ‘Carbon Democracy’, this book is both more ambitious and less refined than Rule by Experts, which remains Mitchell’s most important work. Still, like in Rule by Experts, Mitchell successfully puts forward a wholly new way of understanding major themes: democracy, the economy, the environment. Eschewing all forms of simple determinism, Mitchell reveals the intricate techno-scientific networks linking democracy and growth in the ‘West’ and colonialism, religious conservatism, and poverty in the Middle East since the end of the 19th century. In this way, Mitchell challenges critical approaches to capitalism which have granted it a lamentable but single logic, and instead shows that there is little logic in a system built on tenuous ‘science’ and even more tenuous alliances. Most importantly, Mitchell argues that the uncertainty brought about by the end of an era of abundant oil, challenged by both scarcity and climate change, opens up new space for reimagining the distinctions between society and nature and between different forms of knowledge- distinctions which were born out of the natural properties, technologies, and methods of calculation of the oil age.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 18, 2023
Written in 2011, nearly a decade after the beginning of the U.S.-Iraq war, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy set out to analyze the relationship between oil and democracy. Mitchell’s research into the construction of the Middle East oil industry showed how fossil fuels shape particular forms of democracy and non-democracy, leading him to coin the term “carbon democracy.” Now, over another decade later, as unrest in the Middle East continues and the world faces the perils of climate change, Mitchell’s ideas of how fossil fuels shape social and political outcomes are more relevant than ever. This text appeals explicitly to contemporary energy humanities scholars as it highlights how technical shifts in energy systems can have profound socio-political outcomes. Carbon Democracy retells historical events of the 20th and 21st centuries with a watchful eye on fossil fuels and their critical role in developing modern democracy and its limitations.
Mitchell begins the book by contrasting the qualities of coal and oil and the infrastructure required to extract, transport, and use each carbon-based fuel. Mitchell then extrapolates these differences into the social, political, and economic spheres by analyzing the impacts of coal use and later oil use on labor dynamics, power distribution, and democracy. While coal is physically hard and brittle and requires manual labor to extract, transport, and use, oil is fluid, easy to drill for with machinery, and moves about with minimal human contact via pipeline, fuel tanker, and carrier. Mitchell argues that these differences in form have consequential outcomes on the concentration of power across the energy system and labor’s ability to express a political voice. It may be tempting to view Mitchell’s arguments as stemming from vital materiality; however, he aims to illustrate that the human participants within the coal and oil energy systems have different options due to technical differences in the industries and their infrastructure. He shows that the age of coal more evenly distributed political power amongst the middle class as they were critical to the supply chain. Laborers mined coal underground and were necessary to load coal aboard ships at seaports, creating opportunities to form unions, organize strikes, and leverage their political voice. Oil, by comparison, eliminated various choke points and vulnerabilities from the coal-based energy system by removing the number of hands on the supply chain, thereby shifting political power from the middle class to oil firms.
Mitchell connects this concentration of power in fewer hands to forms of democracy that are common today. He contests stories of pioneering heroes searching for oil in the Middle East in the early 20th century with a more cynical account of emerging oil firms seeking to delay the discovery and production. He introduces the notion of sabotage and contends that oil firms bought discovery and drilling rights without intending to develop the area for exports until it later served their purposes, and further that in doing so, these oil firms began to form a sort of international cartel to maintain artificial scarcity and, thereby, a monopolistic price. Mitchell claims central world governments subjugated themselves to the oil cartel as they transitioned from coal to oil. World powers increasingly depended on securing oil production abroad but faced domestic and international pressures to reject imperial pursuits. Mitchell argues that this demand on world powers to democratize imperial powers devolved into neoimperialist tactics to maintain a foothold and a “legitimate government” in strategic territories under the guise of “self-determination,” or “native rule,” and later “the consent of the governed.” Oil companies alone could not act with the required force to maintain control over production in the Middle East, so they banded neoimperialist aims, persuading agencies such as the C.I.A. to overthrow troublesome Middle Eastern governments and establish more cooperative regimes. Mitchell’s background in colonialism shines clear in this section as he identifies power mechanisms of imperial nations disguised as civilizing or modernizing peoples for their best interests.
After establishing a retold history of the rise of the Middle East oil industry, Mitchell highlights oil’s role in shaping the modern conception of “the economy” as another imperial control mechanism. He demonstrates the shift in economic consciousness by tracing key events that instantiated the U.S. dollar as a proxy gold standard and the primary currency for oil trade. Mitchell claims this “economy,” backed not by finite resources but by conceivably infinite oil reserves, eroded democracy as oil firms and imperialist powers mechanized the idea of “the market” to their ends. Oil firms, for example, manufactured an oil crisis to spike prices in the 1970s in response to their control in the Middle East to preserve profits; however, this ultimately led to the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement and contributed to the U.S. bankruptcy. Imperial powers, such as the U.S., thwarted attempts at grassroots democratic movements in Middle Eastern countries to maintain market stability of petroleum and contributed to a perpetual conflict in the region by selling arms to flow more U.S. dollars into federal reserves. Mitchell invents the term “McJihad” to describe these limitations on democracy by the coalescing of oil firms, imperial powers, and conservative Islamic regimes. Mitchell draws the book to a close by stating that his concern for our collective human future lies not in the exhaustion of oil resources but in the potential failure of this fragile socio-political system that has emerged from the age of oil and the planetary effects of carelessly polluting our world.
While Mitchell creates solid arguments for the impacts of fossil fuels on socio-political outcomes throughout his book, there are times when his arguments would benefit from more cohesion as he toes the line between historian, political commentator, and anthropologist. For example, a chronological construction of events would prevent readers from popping in and out of over a century of complex history as he builds topic-oriented arguments. On the other hand, Mitchell successfully avoids criticisms of material determinism by elucidating the role of fossil fuels as one of many contributors to political and economic change. For example, on page 12, Mitchell acknowledges that while modern politics were made possible partly by the fossil fuel energy system, human action was required, stating, “democratic political claims, however, [are] not just a by-product of the rise of coal. People forged successful political demands by acquiring a power of action from within the new energy system.” Mitchell expertly builds on the foundations of thinkers like Vaclav Smil (page 6), who acknowledge energy’s effects on society and culture while rejecting a purely deterministic relationship.
Overall, Mitchell delivered on his task of writing a book on “democracy as oil” and did well to manage the book’s scope. While the conclusion offers no methods for engagement, he does end with a clear call for action and awareness of global citizens to be cognizant of the impacts on democracy that changes in energy systems may have. As the world looks towards new technologies and modes of being to address climate change, Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy is a critical read to add a perspective on energy systems’ influence on socio-political and economic outcomes.
Mitchell begins the book by contrasting the qualities of coal and oil and the infrastructure required to extract, transport, and use each carbon-based fuel. Mitchell then extrapolates these differences into the social, political, and economic spheres by analyzing the impacts of coal use and later oil use on labor dynamics, power distribution, and democracy. While coal is physically hard and brittle and requires manual labor to extract, transport, and use, oil is fluid, easy to drill for with machinery, and moves about with minimal human contact via pipeline, fuel tanker, and carrier. Mitchell argues that these differences in form have consequential outcomes on the concentration of power across the energy system and labor’s ability to express a political voice. It may be tempting to view Mitchell’s arguments as stemming from vital materiality; however, he aims to illustrate that the human participants within the coal and oil energy systems have different options due to technical differences in the industries and their infrastructure. He shows that the age of coal more evenly distributed political power amongst the middle class as they were critical to the supply chain. Laborers mined coal underground and were necessary to load coal aboard ships at seaports, creating opportunities to form unions, organize strikes, and leverage their political voice. Oil, by comparison, eliminated various choke points and vulnerabilities from the coal-based energy system by removing the number of hands on the supply chain, thereby shifting political power from the middle class to oil firms.
Mitchell connects this concentration of power in fewer hands to forms of democracy that are common today. He contests stories of pioneering heroes searching for oil in the Middle East in the early 20th century with a more cynical account of emerging oil firms seeking to delay the discovery and production. He introduces the notion of sabotage and contends that oil firms bought discovery and drilling rights without intending to develop the area for exports until it later served their purposes, and further that in doing so, these oil firms began to form a sort of international cartel to maintain artificial scarcity and, thereby, a monopolistic price. Mitchell claims central world governments subjugated themselves to the oil cartel as they transitioned from coal to oil. World powers increasingly depended on securing oil production abroad but faced domestic and international pressures to reject imperial pursuits. Mitchell argues that this demand on world powers to democratize imperial powers devolved into neoimperialist tactics to maintain a foothold and a “legitimate government” in strategic territories under the guise of “self-determination,” or “native rule,” and later “the consent of the governed.” Oil companies alone could not act with the required force to maintain control over production in the Middle East, so they banded neoimperialist aims, persuading agencies such as the C.I.A. to overthrow troublesome Middle Eastern governments and establish more cooperative regimes. Mitchell’s background in colonialism shines clear in this section as he identifies power mechanisms of imperial nations disguised as civilizing or modernizing peoples for their best interests.
After establishing a retold history of the rise of the Middle East oil industry, Mitchell highlights oil’s role in shaping the modern conception of “the economy” as another imperial control mechanism. He demonstrates the shift in economic consciousness by tracing key events that instantiated the U.S. dollar as a proxy gold standard and the primary currency for oil trade. Mitchell claims this “economy,” backed not by finite resources but by conceivably infinite oil reserves, eroded democracy as oil firms and imperialist powers mechanized the idea of “the market” to their ends. Oil firms, for example, manufactured an oil crisis to spike prices in the 1970s in response to their control in the Middle East to preserve profits; however, this ultimately led to the abandonment of the Bretton Woods agreement and contributed to the U.S. bankruptcy. Imperial powers, such as the U.S., thwarted attempts at grassroots democratic movements in Middle Eastern countries to maintain market stability of petroleum and contributed to a perpetual conflict in the region by selling arms to flow more U.S. dollars into federal reserves. Mitchell invents the term “McJihad” to describe these limitations on democracy by the coalescing of oil firms, imperial powers, and conservative Islamic regimes. Mitchell draws the book to a close by stating that his concern for our collective human future lies not in the exhaustion of oil resources but in the potential failure of this fragile socio-political system that has emerged from the age of oil and the planetary effects of carelessly polluting our world.
While Mitchell creates solid arguments for the impacts of fossil fuels on socio-political outcomes throughout his book, there are times when his arguments would benefit from more cohesion as he toes the line between historian, political commentator, and anthropologist. For example, a chronological construction of events would prevent readers from popping in and out of over a century of complex history as he builds topic-oriented arguments. On the other hand, Mitchell successfully avoids criticisms of material determinism by elucidating the role of fossil fuels as one of many contributors to political and economic change. For example, on page 12, Mitchell acknowledges that while modern politics were made possible partly by the fossil fuel energy system, human action was required, stating, “democratic political claims, however, [are] not just a by-product of the rise of coal. People forged successful political demands by acquiring a power of action from within the new energy system.” Mitchell expertly builds on the foundations of thinkers like Vaclav Smil (page 6), who acknowledge energy’s effects on society and culture while rejecting a purely deterministic relationship.
Overall, Mitchell delivered on his task of writing a book on “democracy as oil” and did well to manage the book’s scope. While the conclusion offers no methods for engagement, he does end with a clear call for action and awareness of global citizens to be cognizant of the impacts on democracy that changes in energy systems may have. As the world looks towards new technologies and modes of being to address climate change, Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy is a critical read to add a perspective on energy systems’ influence on socio-political and economic outcomes.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 1, 2024
I started reading this book because I misunderstood the blurb to mean that the author would convince me that it was carbon energy that lead to democracy, and I was curious about how that could be and what that would mean as we move away from carbon energy to renewables as a society.
It turns out that the book is not about that, actually, or at least, it doesn't tie a causal link between all democracy and carbon energy, but it does closely look at how carbon energy shaped both the democracy of the UK and the US, and the lack of democracy in the Middle East.
This was a challenging read for me. I don't really read or even know a lot about economics (it's an area I look to understand better), and while this was more of a history than an economics book, it was very much about how the economics of carbon energy shaped history, and so it frequently dove into economic details. It was also written in very dry, dense language with very little attempt at 'storytelling'. Just, 'this happened in this year, so this happened next, so this happened next. Let us examine the impact of that on this things. It lead to this, which caused this, and in response this happened in this year'.
There were certain facts in the book that were obvious in retrospect, but that I hadn't really thought about, and these were what made wading through the dense and challenging content rewarding to me.
It mostly covers history starting with the industrial revolution and going until Obama's era as president. At the beginning, it talks about how coal shaped the world, but rather than diving into the common narrative about technology, it notes how the unique properties of how coal is produced and distributed enabled general strikes to be remarkably effective, resulting in those in power having no choice but to cede democratic power to the people (which was a specific subset of people at the time, of course).
The book also dove into what a huge change the existence of coal was to human well-being. As the author put it, prior to that, energy was limited to what the sun could give us annually, as absorbed + made available through plant life, and human labour was limited by this physical reality. With the discovery of coal and how to change burning it into usable energy, allowing us to have access to solar energy stored over millions of years under the ground. To me, thinking about fossil fuels as gaining access to time rather than energy was a big aha! moment and really helped me contextualize the before and after.
I didn't realize that oil had already been discovered when coal was the dominant form of energy. Wild to think that back then the only thing they knew to use it for was lamp oil, and to see how over a hundred years the oil industry worked to find use cases and insinuated themselves in governments to try and make sure that society depended on oil instead of coal as their source of energy. (Also wild to realize that back then, gasoline was just a waste product of oil, and now it powers vehicles all over the world).
The way the author described the way that international oil companies more or less were vehicles of colonialism, and how the US/UK continued to use them after both the 'great' wars to push their own agendas. It's not like I've had illusions that oil companies are these shining beacons of morality, honestly quite the opposite, so this more provided additional historical context to the way power 'corrupts' (as it were) rather than convincing me of something new.
Another thing that surprised me was when the book talked about how in the post-WWII era, the idea of 'the economy' was born. 'The economy' has been such a hot idea in politics for my entire life that I never considered that it hadn't always been that way. The author convincingly argues that without carbon energy to decouple us from the limits of nature, which was what much of economic thinking prior to carbon energy had been focused on, we wouldn't have a concept of an 'economy' as a thing disjoined from nature that had the potential to grow infinitely. (He also touched, more lightly, on how 'the environment' itself also wasn't really discussed until around the same general era).
The details of how the US in particular sowed dissent in the Middle East in an attempt to weaken the states there after they regained control of their own oil was sad. This part I knew better just from having lived and been aware of world events in general as a millennial adult, but seeing the specifics of how the US largely sowed the seeds that would help the Middle East become the conflicted the way it is today was definitely sobering; seeing moments when the US had a choice to do things one way and didn't, and being able to trace that to matters like the current Israel/Palestine conflict, was sobering.
The end of the book was one of my favourite parts. For most of the book, the author focused so closely on describing what had happened that I didn't really get much from it other than history and a light hint at the themes described in the blurb, but the epilogue took all these ideas, and speculated on what the future may look like. In addition to climate change, he talked about the idea of 'peak oil', and how even without climate change, we may just run out of oil. What then happens to 'the economy'; can it continue to rise up and to the right, and grow forever, as we expect it to and demand of our politicians? The last chapter really asked great questions and got the wheels in my mind spinning.
I think the impacts of that culture have been deeply explored today, all the ways it causes problems, from workers rights to companies that made good products being bought by VC funds and replacing their employees with robots (hello, AI!). But you rarely hear about what if we just can't continue this form of life? Maybe rather than the start of something new, the last couple of centuries are an aberration in human history, and in 2000 years, we'll look more like we did 2000 years ago than we do today.
Or not, there are renewable energies being created, from solar to wind to nuclear. We are capturing more of that solar energy available each year than we were before the industrial revolution.
But definitely this book got me thinking about the past and the future in new ways.
You'd think, living in an area with heavy oil-based economy with parents who live in the oil industry, some of this stuff would be more obvious to me, I suppose, but it's like trying to explain water to a fish - it's just always been there and I've accepted our narratives about it at face value because I was taught them when young enough. So for me the value of this book was largely about challenging and recontextualizing the narratives I've grown up surrounded by.
It turns out that the book is not about that, actually, or at least, it doesn't tie a causal link between all democracy and carbon energy, but it does closely look at how carbon energy shaped both the democracy of the UK and the US, and the lack of democracy in the Middle East.
This was a challenging read for me. I don't really read or even know a lot about economics (it's an area I look to understand better), and while this was more of a history than an economics book, it was very much about how the economics of carbon energy shaped history, and so it frequently dove into economic details. It was also written in very dry, dense language with very little attempt at 'storytelling'. Just, 'this happened in this year, so this happened next, so this happened next. Let us examine the impact of that on this things. It lead to this, which caused this, and in response this happened in this year'.
There were certain facts in the book that were obvious in retrospect, but that I hadn't really thought about, and these were what made wading through the dense and challenging content rewarding to me.
It mostly covers history starting with the industrial revolution and going until Obama's era as president. At the beginning, it talks about how coal shaped the world, but rather than diving into the common narrative about technology, it notes how the unique properties of how coal is produced and distributed enabled general strikes to be remarkably effective, resulting in those in power having no choice but to cede democratic power to the people (which was a specific subset of people at the time, of course).
The book also dove into what a huge change the existence of coal was to human well-being. As the author put it, prior to that, energy was limited to what the sun could give us annually, as absorbed + made available through plant life, and human labour was limited by this physical reality. With the discovery of coal and how to change burning it into usable energy, allowing us to have access to solar energy stored over millions of years under the ground. To me, thinking about fossil fuels as gaining access to time rather than energy was a big aha! moment and really helped me contextualize the before and after.
I didn't realize that oil had already been discovered when coal was the dominant form of energy. Wild to think that back then the only thing they knew to use it for was lamp oil, and to see how over a hundred years the oil industry worked to find use cases and insinuated themselves in governments to try and make sure that society depended on oil instead of coal as their source of energy. (Also wild to realize that back then, gasoline was just a waste product of oil, and now it powers vehicles all over the world).
The way the author described the way that international oil companies more or less were vehicles of colonialism, and how the US/UK continued to use them after both the 'great' wars to push their own agendas. It's not like I've had illusions that oil companies are these shining beacons of morality, honestly quite the opposite, so this more provided additional historical context to the way power 'corrupts' (as it were) rather than convincing me of something new.
Another thing that surprised me was when the book talked about how in the post-WWII era, the idea of 'the economy' was born. 'The economy' has been such a hot idea in politics for my entire life that I never considered that it hadn't always been that way. The author convincingly argues that without carbon energy to decouple us from the limits of nature, which was what much of economic thinking prior to carbon energy had been focused on, we wouldn't have a concept of an 'economy' as a thing disjoined from nature that had the potential to grow infinitely. (He also touched, more lightly, on how 'the environment' itself also wasn't really discussed until around the same general era).
The details of how the US in particular sowed dissent in the Middle East in an attempt to weaken the states there after they regained control of their own oil was sad. This part I knew better just from having lived and been aware of world events in general as a millennial adult, but seeing the specifics of how the US largely sowed the seeds that would help the Middle East become the conflicted the way it is today was definitely sobering; seeing moments when the US had a choice to do things one way and didn't, and being able to trace that to matters like the current Israel/Palestine conflict, was sobering.
The end of the book was one of my favourite parts. For most of the book, the author focused so closely on describing what had happened that I didn't really get much from it other than history and a light hint at the themes described in the blurb, but the epilogue took all these ideas, and speculated on what the future may look like. In addition to climate change, he talked about the idea of 'peak oil', and how even without climate change, we may just run out of oil. What then happens to 'the economy'; can it continue to rise up and to the right, and grow forever, as we expect it to and demand of our politicians? The last chapter really asked great questions and got the wheels in my mind spinning.
I think the impacts of that culture have been deeply explored today, all the ways it causes problems, from workers rights to companies that made good products being bought by VC funds and replacing their employees with robots (hello, AI!). But you rarely hear about what if we just can't continue this form of life? Maybe rather than the start of something new, the last couple of centuries are an aberration in human history, and in 2000 years, we'll look more like we did 2000 years ago than we do today.
Or not, there are renewable energies being created, from solar to wind to nuclear. We are capturing more of that solar energy available each year than we were before the industrial revolution.
But definitely this book got me thinking about the past and the future in new ways.
You'd think, living in an area with heavy oil-based economy with parents who live in the oil industry, some of this stuff would be more obvious to me, I suppose, but it's like trying to explain water to a fish - it's just always been there and I've accepted our narratives about it at face value because I was taught them when young enough. So for me the value of this book was largely about challenging and recontextualizing the narratives I've grown up surrounded by.
April 7, 2018
The first third of this book was compiled by a research assistant. It lacks a narrative for this section, and instead pulls the reader through the shifting oil holdings in the middle east in lists disguised as paragraphs. Furthermore, the argument that coal extraction enabled worker strikes and then that this equates democratic engagement has something very wrong with it. Following this, he argues that oil transported in pipes evades the striking worker's ability to strangle output, and this stifles democratic engagement.
he doesn't say what he means by democracy. If democracy is just striking, then maybe oil stifles it – but if its an electoral process or an ideology then it is hard to see how energy systems relate to it from this book.
Moreover, I believe there are problems with the internal logic of the book in part because the book fails to account for coal and oil energy systems overlapping and what implication that has for energy vs democracy. Frustratingly he does not account for any sort of democratic temporality – what i mean is the book doesn't tie democracy to a place and time, it just uses the word democracy to describe something that the author thinks but doesn't tell the reader.
The most condemning factor, however, is that workers never held the reigns of power and striking did not change power relations, thus it did not increase democratic fortunes, but temporary bargaining positions of a political bloc of workers. It is implausible that their wages or interests relate to democracy.
he doesn't say what he means by democracy. If democracy is just striking, then maybe oil stifles it – but if its an electoral process or an ideology then it is hard to see how energy systems relate to it from this book.
Moreover, I believe there are problems with the internal logic of the book in part because the book fails to account for coal and oil energy systems overlapping and what implication that has for energy vs democracy. Frustratingly he does not account for any sort of democratic temporality – what i mean is the book doesn't tie democracy to a place and time, it just uses the word democracy to describe something that the author thinks but doesn't tell the reader.
The most condemning factor, however, is that workers never held the reigns of power and striking did not change power relations, thus it did not increase democratic fortunes, but temporary bargaining positions of a political bloc of workers. It is implausible that their wages or interests relate to democracy.
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