In Energy, Richard Rhodes has taken on the task of telling A Human History of technologies of extra-human power and light. This ambitious subtitle has two possible interpretations. In one, a “human history” is a social history, focused on the quotidian matters of routine, experimentation, and consequences through which human engagements with energy resources have reshaped local livelihoods, landscapes, and ecologies. Alternatively, a “human history” is a universal history, a geohistory in which new energy capabilities create power differentials, enable territorial expansion and conflict, and encourage the spread—through both mimicry and violence—of certain lifestyles over others.

Rhodes has done an exquisite job with the first task, but frustratingly contributed to a broader field-endemic blindness within the second. While certainly not the only historian to do so, he has conflated Western history with “human” history. This is doubly problematic given that the book was written for a general audience, who cannot be assumed to have the historiographical skills to put such claims in context. I will thus use this review to ask how historians of energy can adopt a more equitable approach to human history and provide more justice-oriented narratives in our writing for the public.

But, first, I would be remiss not to celebrate the rich social history of Western energy usage that Rhodes has produced. Energy is organized into three sections, largely chronologically. In “Power,” Rhodes narrates the pervasive challenges and early experiments around coal extraction from the sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. As in much recent writing about the Anthropocene, coal is a lynchpin industry for Rhodes that precipitated a variety of subsidiary innovations, including steam engines, the railroad, and gas lighting. Experiments with the by-products of coal processing provide a satisfying narrative transition from “Power” to “Light,” in which Rhodes traces the wide search for combustible liquids and gases from sperm whales to turpentine-producing longleaf pines to coal oil and petroleum. Finally—and somewhat in contradiction to Rhodes's early claims that the book has few prescriptions—”New Fires” delves into the intricacies of nuclear technology (and, to a lesser extent, the geopolitics of the nuclear age), with the explicit goal of normalizing nuclear power as safe and necessary to decarbonization efforts in the twenty-first century (p. xiv).

In the book's extensive 343 pages, Rhodes luxuriates in attention to the human, personal, and fallible side of invention, bringing the reader into the intimate concerns of scientists, engineers, artisans, and laborers, as well the social relationships that became entangled with their material worlds of energy production. Rhodes does not shy away from the messiness of individual lives, from the frustrations of inventors who struggled to turn their insights into livelihoods to the many family sacrifices and personal tragedies, such as a young daughter dying of consumption, that drove other innovations (p. 115). This intimate social history allows the author to draw connections for the reader that demonstrate the contingencies of global history: for example, how colonial resource networks that commodified Peruvian guano accidentally precipitated the Irish potato famine (p. 215). Rhodes thus constructs an energy history far from a linear story of elite rational thought, but rather one of small-scale experimentation, gradual transitions, and many missteps.

Despite Rhodes's richly textured social history, however, the book's historical gaze is largely limited to Europe and North America. In the rare moments it ventures beyond these boundaries—for example, to the guano islands of Peru or, later, in search of oil in Saudi Arabia—these broadening energy geographies are narrated almost entirely through the lens of European and American investors and scientists (pp. 249–51). While there is nothing wrong with a historian choosing this scale of inquiry, it is an unfortunate oversight for a “story of humanity itself” (as the hardcover jacket claims). And while Western ideas of networked energy have inarguably influenced the rest of the world, other knowledge traditions have also produced a rich variety of extra-human energy techniques and technologies that deserve attention. In fact, I would argue that giving voice to the alternative logics overshadowed by the networked systems that structure our present world is one of the necessary tasks of history. Such important work reminds us that the present was never inevitable.

For a truly universal history of energy, a globally minded reader must therefore read this book in combination with other recent work looking beyond the West. A starting list might include Victor Seow's research on the technopolitical regimes of coal extraction and electricity development in China and Japan; Ute Hasenöhrl's historical and historiographical writing on the history of lighting as a colonial encounter in the British empire; Kate Brown's comparative study of nuclear modernity in the Soviet Union; Bathsheba Demuth's work on arctic energy transitions; and, on different continents, Andrew Needham's and Amitav Ghosh's narratives of indigenous responses to Western energy desires. (This incomplete list only scratches the surface of the vast set of sources on which Rhodes and others could draw.)

Unfortunately, when Western history stands in for “human history,” culturally specific beliefs and definitions become universalized in ways that can blind the historian to the presence of ideology. As one example, Energy takes for granted that certain kinds of suffering are worthwhile for technological advancement and economic efficiency. As Rhodes's nuanced history makes abundantly clear, the working out of shared values and desires over centuries led Western society to implicitly condone a wide array of externalities resulting from energy innovations: the occasional miner shot ballistically from the mouth of a coal mine after a gas explosion, acres of scarred forests drained of sap, “occupational deaths of around 0.019 per TWh” to name a few (pp. 21, 140, 336). If energy history is to help us realize more sustainable ways of engaging with the natural world and each other, such work must also historicize the ideologies that led to our unsustainable practices in the first place. Energy historians are well positioned to shed light on these values as part and parcel of technological innovation, but only when we can separate those parts of humanity that are truly universal from those parts which have universalizing desires.