This book is half essential revisionist history, half worthless Marxian economics.

Chapters 2-10 make a fascinating critique of the standard economic history of the adoption of steam power. The orthodoxy says that steam power from burning coal was adopted because wages were high and coal was cheap. Malm blows this theory out of the water by showing, first, that the greatest expansion of steam power happened at a time of low wages and unemployment (but also strikes) during the 1820s and 30s, and, second, that water power was cheaper than steam. He shows from contemporary discussions that machines were introduced in cloth factories to replace workers (in both factory and putting-out systems) because they increased the discipline that could be imposed on workers (preventing them from slacking or stealing cotton, but forcing their work along at the rhythm of the machine) and so deskilled them that they were easily replaceable in case of strikes. He then shows that water power was plentiful, cheap and efficient, but lost out after a fight to steam because steam was more adapted to private capital: steam engines could be set up without the need to locate on fall-lines or else to construct complex water works on a cooperative or quasi-public basis (there's a very interesting discussion of Greenock's artificial reservoirs and aqueducts built by Robert Thom), and they allowed for the machines to be placed in the centre of urban pools of cheap workers, rather than along suitable rivers in the country (where water mills were sullenly staffed by thousands of orphan so-called apprentices detained there on secondment from the poorhouses). If steam power ended up more financially efficient than water, this was due not to differences inherent in the technologies, but in their relations to labour: urban steam allowed employers to tap the reserve army of unemployed workers, whereas rural water required the use of either coercion of obstreperous juveniles (eventually restricted) or else the provision of attractive homesteads and amenities which still did not suffice to assure abundant and compliant workers. Steam, but not water, also easily allowed the intensity and speed of work to be ramped up in response to laws limiting the length of the working day. Thus the author's argument is that steam power was not adopted because the technology was more energetically or economically efficient for manufacturing, but for its utility to capitalists in their pursuit of their private business plans and in their battle to gain the upper hand over labor.

This promotion of the social relations of production to the role of prime factor over the technology in the rise of steam-powered manufacturing is convincing and important. Unfortunately, Malm then goes on to analyse the modern fossil fuel-based economy from the debunked Marxist surplus-value perspective. Bizarre! Malm calls the surplus-value theory (i.e. the source of profit is the fact that labour can produce more value than it costs to reproduce it day after day) "the most plausible account a around". But this disregards the possibility of profit arising from entrepreneurialism, marketing, productive innovation, patents and copyrights, barriers to market entry, and so on. Think of Apple or Big Pharma or Saudi Aramco, and I doubt it is exploitation of labour that springs first to mind as the source of their profits, but rather marketing, patents and oligopolistic control of scarce resources, respectively. When a production company makes a profitable movie, not only does the labour involved produce more revenue than the cost of procuring that labour, but so too for the machines and legal arrangements involved. Clearly a movie camera can contribute more revenue than it costs, and copyright enables more engrossing of the revenues of the movie than without. Profit is multifarious. ( )

detailed analysis, from a Marxist point of view, of the rise of steam power during the industrial revolution, and the globalisation of steam power after WWII. Why, in the beginning of the 19th century, steam machines (on coal) relaced watermills in the British textile industry. And the innovation of machines to counter demands from workers for better working conditions. ( )

I put off writing my review for too long, because this book was too good and I wanted to say too much. The chapter 'Fossil Capital' is the most gloriously ingenious thing I've read in years, utterly convincing, and horrifying. The climate crisis is undeniably caused by the economic system in which those writing and reading this review have thrived. There is no way for that economic system to solve the crisis without transforming itself at the same time. ( )