Powering empire: how coal made the Middle East and sparked global carbonization

concepts like “union”, “progress”, “equality” and “freedom” is here compressed into a view of transnational linkages between coal mines. Across the longer sweep of the book’s eight chapters, such analytical choices result in a peculiar winnowing of the possibilities available to those who found reason to challenge coalonialism’s steep inequalities and structures of domination: either direct confrontations with the material conditions surrounding coal’s extraction and combustion or modes of critique emanating from the shifting currents of Islamic thought. In showing how fear of disaster could serve as “an ethical force directing man to the righteous path” (191) or how the shar’i designation of coal as rikaz or “buried treasure” could underwrite Ottoman uses of fossil wealth for charity (218), Barak’s nuanced excavation of Islamic knowledge production around coal technologies and their hazards in the book’s fifth and sixth chapters is clearly intended to unearth elements of a usable past. In the book’s moving conclusion, through a daring leap into the present, he makes explicit the sense of urgency attending this search for alternative lifeways and imaginaries that might inform the “painstaking political work” of decarbonizing the world (226). But such compelling arguments about the messy and complex entanglements of global carbonization are undercut by the markedly narrower criteria according to which specific actions, concepts and movements appear to “count” as part of that political work within the book itself. Even if, in places, Barak’s methodological commitments thus serve to obscure the full range of political forces and ideas that might be directed against the powers of fossil fuel, he has written a magnificent study that reveals the breath-taking magnitude and sweep of the struggles that remaking a world forged out of coal’s blazing flames will entail.