While commodities research is well represented in Middle East studies, often focusing on oil, Powering Empire shifts the focus toward coal as the fossil fuel that shaped experiences in the region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite being commodity-focused, On Barak presents a nuanced understanding of energy, which disrupts numerous hard lines within many fields, often by re-entangling topics like imperialism, energy, and labor. He presents a history of science that will appeal well beyond that discipline, advocating for the notion of “energy humanities” (234–35) as a way to bring together these disciplines with the historical flows of “global carbonization” (pp. 8–11, 225–26). The book's narrative is not anchored in specific states or empires, rather it focuses on larger processes and themes. Powering Empire links the history of science, business, trade, technology, anthropology, imperialism, with many other sub-disciplines and will be useful in graduate classrooms and for a wide range of scholars who can incorporate or build on the theoretical insights Barak presents.

With Powering Empire Barak provides an example of how to disrupt the techno-determinism, racism, and imperial positivism that often characterizes historical inquiry. The book moves fluidly from “big history” to microhistory, discussing the Anthropocene and Capitalocene in geological time (195–96) while grounding these periods by highlighting the experiences of workers, pilgrims, and moneylenders in various port towns like Jeddah, Aden, and Port Said. Using the chronology of coal to guide the case studies through various technological, social, and political innovations, Barak organizes the book “tentacularly” (8–11) into six chapters: Water, Animals, Humans, Environment, Risk, and Fossil with each chapter generally sub-divided into three sections that each focus on a specific case. Through these, Barak evaluates coal's utility and its impacts on labor and technology dialectically, recognizing coal's complete dependence on the systems and organisms it sought to displace. This tentacular approach enables him to tie together what, at times, feels like quite disparate topics across time and space. Moving between the budding discussions of nutrition and health in European and Islamic thought, its intersection with European racist ideas, and farmers’ experiences in places like Yemen and Somalia can be occasionally disorienting. The level of detail, however, provides the reader both a richness to the chosen case studies, while also occasionally a mild distraction from his purpose.

This tentacular history is predicated on his theoretical framework, which borrows from both physics and philosophy in ways that appear purposeful and useful. Barak's goal is to shift our conversation about energy. He argues that energy conversations often hinge on the metaphors of energy transitions and energy regimes that tend to draw hard lines within chronologies in both useful and harmful ways. Using the metaphor of thermodynamics and moving it out of its grounding in physics (5–8, 53–56), he argues that the use of coal created new dynamics around the world. He develops the concept of “coalonialism” (3–5, 57–62) to describe the dialectical relationships that coal stimulated, which were multifaceted and multi-vocal. Barak's use of jargon can occasionally be overbearing, as he positions lighthouses within “extraterritorial ecologies” (141–51) and examines the stratigraphies of knowledge in discussions of geology (198–205), but even these can be quite illustrative devices to link the case studies together. Coal-fired machines outpaced animal and wind power but societies still relied on animals for logistical needs like food, thus necessitating an investigation into trade practices and animal transport. He also points out that steamships did not suddenly become immune to climate but were still vulnerable to harsh winds and weather while also requiring significant investment in facilities around the world. If the reader keeps the theoretical framework in mind, the logic holds and this book will be of benefit to many fields as others build on what Barak has modified.

For historians of science, technology, and the environment, Barak offers a truly remarkable example of how to trace a commodity (coal) and/or a piece of technology (the railroad and steamship) through time and space without losing sight of the human element or becoming bound by territory, despite its Middle East focus. It links religion to science in a different context, showing how developments in Europe were quite literally translated into Arabic and Ottoman Turkish and contextualized using prevailing discourses within Islam, both conservative and progressive. He explores the growth of steam travel noting its challenges, failures, and opportunities for transportation and refrigeration, which quite literally changed people's lives through their diets and expectations in places like Britain, as well as throughout the region, as those who worked on ships became more accustomed to eating meat regularly.

For Ottoman specialists, his book draws on the trends in current literature and offers a solid investigation into intended and unintended imperial opportunities and consequences offered by coal and steam, as well as the governmental and social reactions to these. It demonstrates the shifting labor landscape in various parts of the empire and discusses the racism imposed not only from beyond Ottoman borders but also from within them as well.

For historians of Yemen and the Arabian Peninsula, it contextualizes Aden within broader processes of imperialism and its negotiation. It shows the slow growth and changes in the communities that existed and emerged around the ports, the importance of the hajj and how the practices that surrounded it shifted in the nineteenth century. It also provides a grounding in historical antecedents to migrant labor practices and experiences of later centuries, while again tying this region firmly to the transnational and multi-dimensional legal practices in the Indian Ocean.

For Islamic historians, Barak's discussion of insurance and rizq (wealth or livelihood) highlights the human opportunities and tragedies that accompanied coal-powered innovations to hajj transport by both land (railroads) and sea (steamships). He investigates the economic infrastructure that enabled many more to go on hajj. In one discussion of hajj journeys from Southeast Asia, he points out the inherent contradictions in the usury employed by hajj recruitment agents and steamship companies, which often purposefully underestimated the costs for their passengers in order to force them to labor on plantations in Singapore to pay off their debts.

For graduate students and their mentors, this book provides both immeasurable opportunities and challenges. The theoretical framework can be difficult to grasp, and the chapter sections occasionally feel forced. However, virtually every paragraph and section contain a thesis or dissertation waiting to be written, complete with a strong grounding in the literature to help you get started.

For world history specialists, particularly those interested in the nineteenth century, Barak's book both challenges and achieves what for decades others have been attempting. It is disruptive in the best possible way, challenging the reader to think about the complexities of history without the need to untangle every knot. It is a model in many ways that will help move the discipline forward and help its practitioners reconceptualize our fields’ hard jurisdictional, geographical, and temporal boundaries.

With Powering Empire, Barak successfully writes an illustration that seeks to shift approaches in the field, loosening the binds to empires and states, and allowing scholars to see the wider historical processes without using a specific empire as the sole referent or privileging their historiography. His theoretical innovations and adaptations are generally useful both within the book's internal logic and to build upon by others. In sum, this volume has the potential to become the kind of required reading in which layers of insights reward multiple revisits.