Working Nature offers a history of the energy economy and its representations over the 19th and 20th century. Russ argues that ‘Energy’ is not a thing nor an ability, but a social relation to nature forged in capitalist industrialisation. The concept of energy mediates the appropriation of diverse natural forces – water, steam, coal, electricity – altering the way these forces would naturally behave to perform work in production. From the valuation of coal and crafting of the current to the formalization of the substitution of energy commodities, it asks how engineers, scientists and economists achieved the production and circulation of nature’s work against social and natural resistance. In so doing, they undermined the very purpose of the energy economy – to emancipate humanity from nature. Can there be a human reconciliation with nature’s resistance for our time?
