What does it mean to study energy and empire? For many scholars, empire naturally implies the ways in which states coercively subjugate territories outside their sovereign jurisdiction. It seems obvious, then, that the study of empire must explain how such subjugation of actual people (often indigenous people) is achieved whether through violence or through the production of consent. Peter Shulman's well-written and exhaustively researched account of the study of empire is directed toward different questions. Empire is examined as a logistical problem. Specifically, in the nineteenth-century era of steamships powered by coal, imperial states not only jostle over access to coal itself, but also attempt to create a network of coaling stations where ships can refuel. In this drama of inter-imperial conflicts over resources and territory, the concerns of the actual people living there are swept aside.

As Schulman points out, steam power is often seen as creating the technical conditions for increased global reach of information and material supplies, or the “annihilation of space and time” (69, a quote he forgets to attribute to Karl Marx). The achievement of Coal and Empire is to show how such annihilation is incredibly difficult to achieve – bad-quality coal, lack of energy efficiency, imperial rivalry, and ambivalent political will all frustrated American attempts to create a global imperial network of coal and coaling stations for its steam fleet. It is striking to read chapter after chapter and find that most often efforts to secure extraterritorial space for coal or coaling stations (whether for commercial or military purposes) most often fail. In the end, rather than simply seek more coal, Schulman shows, American imperialists more often sought other solutions – traditional sails, more efficient engines, and better navigational techniques. It was a perspective oriented toward the “economy” of time and space, and logistics that dominated the imperial worldview.

Schulman's main argument seems to be that the geopolitical concerns about energy, security, and the national interest pre-date the twentieth-century geopolitics of oil. He successfully shows that the US state saw coal and steam as critical not only to the expansion of military power, but also, in the first chapter, to the flow of information via mail steamers. The US became alarmed in the mid-nineteenth century when they realized that steam lines and mail cargo were onerously controlled by the British.

Schulman doesn't really address the fact that the nature of the nineteenth-century global coal market is vastly different than the global oil market of today: bulky, and hard to transport, coal has never achieved the global market of liquid oil. Twentieth-century discourses about oil and geopolitics often assume “scarcity” as a reason for geopolitical struggles over oil (or what Michael Klare sensationally calls “the race for what's left”). Yet the problem of oil in the twentieth century is more often that of abundance and low prices for producers (as I write this the global oil market is glutted, and oil tankers are forced to idle at ports without customers). After all, OPEC was created to limit the production of oil (they followed other US institutions like the Texas Railroad Commission, with the same purpose). Yet, during the nineteenth century, steamships really did struggle to gain access to coal. Scarcity was real. Schulman recounts the painstaking efforts of Commodore Matthew Perry's journey across the Pacific (79–91). When the steamship consumes more coal than he expected, his efforts to acquire low-cost coal are thwarted at almost every turn. When he finally acquires some and tries to stash it in Shanghai the coal is taken by the Russians.

In the end, like many scholars of energy geopolitics before him, Schulman narrowly studies empire only from the perspective of the powerful. Time and time again he skips over the perspectives and interests of those subjugated by empire. Perhaps the most egregious example is in the midst of a painstakingly detailed chapter on the efforts of Ambrose W. Thompson to lobby the American and Latin American governments for access to coal on the Isthmus of Chiriquí in modern-day Panama. Schulman briefly mentions that “the indigenous population was considerable” (95). End of story. Completely focussed on Thompson's commercial quest for coal, and other wild ideas about creating a coal-mining colony for freed slaves, the concerns of the considerable indigenous populations are never returned to. This happens throughout the text. Bizarre racial theories of island purity (131), coal miner labor struggles (114, 191–93), and the other more sinister aspects of empire are skimmed over. In fact, one could read this book and imagine that empire has very little to do with violence and/or resistance, but is mostly a question of logistics and “economy.”

All that said, Schulman studies the perspective of the powerful very well. His use of primary sources is impressive. The book is jam-packed with interesting, sometimes riveting, stories. Those who know little about coal and steam power will learn a lot about this complicated sociotechnical system. My political concern is what readers will not learn.