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Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis
A panoramic historical account of India’s ascent in the global fossil economy
India is today one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of fossil fuels, driving new investments in the global fossil economy and achieving record-breaking levels of coal extraction at home. As the planet burns from the climate crisis, this entrenchment of fossil fuel dependency has left many wondering how we arrived at this point. Until the Last Ton provides a sweeping new appraisal of this planetary dilemma, uncovering how India became part of an emerging fossil capitalism that continues to shape the present.
Matthew Shutzer traces the origins of the country’s fossil economy to the early nineteenth century, when India’s coal-bearing lands in the forests of the Chotanagpur Plateau became frontiers of energy production under the British Empire. Investments in coal anchored global capital in this remote landscape, transforming the forest into the center of imperial overseas coal production across a century of colonial rule. Shutzer shows that at the heart of these shifts was a colonial legal framework of subterranean property, one that European firms and Indian landowners used to dispossess Indigenous cultivators living on the land, and which forged mining property through the progressive ecological destruction of this highland agrarian world.
Following these dynamics into the postcolonial period, Until the Last Ton reveals the enduring impacts of colonial property in the remaking of India’s fossil economy after empire, shedding new light on the rise of energy-intensive development in a postwar era defined by escalating crises of energy, capitalism, and the environment.
India is today one of the world’s largest producers and consumers of fossil fuels, driving new investments in the global fossil economy and achieving record-breaking levels of coal extraction at home. As the planet burns from the climate crisis, this entrenchment of fossil fuel dependency has left many wondering how we arrived at this point. Until the Last Ton provides a sweeping new appraisal of this planetary dilemma, uncovering how India became part of an emerging fossil capitalism that continues to shape the present.
Matthew Shutzer traces the origins of the country’s fossil economy to the early nineteenth century, when India’s coal-bearing lands in the forests of the Chotanagpur Plateau became frontiers of energy production under the British Empire. Investments in coal anchored global capital in this remote landscape, transforming the forest into the center of imperial overseas coal production across a century of colonial rule. Shutzer shows that at the heart of these shifts was a colonial legal framework of subterranean property, one that European firms and Indian landowners used to dispossess Indigenous cultivators living on the land, and which forged mining property through the progressive ecological destruction of this highland agrarian world.
Following these dynamics into the postcolonial period, Until the Last Ton reveals the enduring impacts of colonial property in the remaking of India’s fossil economy after empire, shedding new light on the rise of energy-intensive development in a postwar era defined by escalating crises of energy, capitalism, and the environment.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published August 18, 2026
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August 31, 2026
A much anticipated read that was well worth the wait. Shutzer gives an account of India's fossil fuel history that grounds its development in the system of agrarian property relations established by the British rule in India. In doing so, he productively destabilizes our political-economic categories of "land" and "capital", showing how in the Indian context land came to be complicated beyond its agricultural connotations and how capital reproduced itself through extra-market labour coercion. One of the features of this book that I appreciated the most was its ability to walk us through the broader history that its arc traces (roughly 1793 to 1970, although emphasis varies). Even though this is a period of history which I'm familiar with there was a lot to learn in the way it connected events in the Chotanagpur Plateau to the rest of the world. I liked how it stayed "close to the ground" for much of the book, although that focus was somewhat attenuated towards the end as the work moved from the specificities of agrarian property to the conditioning effect it had on the colonial and postcolonial state. I thought (though I am by no means an expert) that Shutzer contributed to the broader historiographical debates of modern energy history in an interesting way. The attention to property as a social relation that has its own inertia and conditioning logic felt marxian in a good way and I thought the account remained archivally plausible throughout. Shutzer writes with a strong sense of empathy for those marginalized and displaced by the history he unearths, and does well to keep the human cost front and centre. I was pleasantly surprised by how much time Pakistan gets in this book, and that information was very informative as well.
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