Is there anything new to say about the 1973 oil shock or Indira Gandhi’s India? Here’s hoping so. At long last, my article is out in the AHR: “Late Acceleration: The Indian Emergency and the Early 1970s Energy Crisis.” 1/.

RT @CarlZha:

A historic day. Good riddance to coal-fired power in Britain after 142 years!.

Freebie of the day: my new colleague Sam Daly’s exciting new book on militarism as an ideology and a (counterintuitive) legal culture, helping to explain the troubling persistence of military rule across Africa. Ft. oracles, Fela Kuti, and a lot of men in uniform.

"LIFE PUNISHES THE THRIFTLESS." Subtle thoughts on banking in/on the art deco Trustees System Service Building, Chicago (1929-30), ft. red marble from Oran, Algeria

Guilty as charged. I see epigraphs like montages over the opening credits, a bit of mood music for what’s to come. But totally agree that they’re secretly more for the author than the reader, a little hoard of shiny magpie things displayed with all the charm of a rock collection.

This great new paper by @adityaramesh11 complicates cliches about big multipurpose dams reinforcing state power. At Mettur, he shows that hydroelectricity ran up against the irrigation interest of "an older extractive apparatus, that of agrarian property" .

RT @AmHistReview: During the 1970s, rising popular expectations in India collided with the energy crisis to impel a state-led embrace of co….

Georgia O’Keeffe paints the fossil fuel city (1927-8). Current exhibition “My New Yorks” is well worth visiting at @artinstitutechi

Happy to see @MeeraMahadevan's superb article—which already has dozens of citations as a pre-print—out at last. Her innovative methodology exposes data manipulation and systematic politicization of electricity in India, and its long-term costs, proving what's long been suspected.

RT @LukeTryl: To give you an idea of how significant Labour’s challenges with Muslim voters has been here is the swing in the seats where o….

"I look forward to voting these incompetent, hubristic grifters out and I hope they spend a very long time in the wilderness." AMEN.

RT @seantankerous: Justice Gorsuch's opinion refers five times to "nitrous oxide" (aka laughing gas) rather than the entirely different che….

Bush Jr. called Enron's CEO & long-term Houston pal "Kenny Boy." Defenders argued they weren't that close, Dubya just really loved nicknames. Some of his others:."Pootie-Poot" = Vladimir Putin."Saint Jim" = James Comey."Balloon Foot" = Colin Powell."Turd Blossom" = Karl Rove.

Alt-fossil fuel lobbying."Mr. President. I urge you to attend the upcoming UN Conference on Environment & Development. and to support. establishing a reasonable, non-binding, stabilization level of carbon dioxide".—Enron's Ken Lay to his buddy George H.W. Bush, 3 April 1992

RT @RochonaMajumdar: An important thread on the relentless heatwave.

There was some Discourse on here about why early career historians aren’t submitting journal articles. Here I argue against calls for writing "slow history" given the climate emergency… in an article (my pandemic project) that ironically took 3 years+ to get published 🙃.

Life too short for a monstrous 38-page article? There’s also a podcast version, miraculously edited into shape by Matt Hermane from my jetlagged ramblings

So we may have missed one of the most important outcomes of the 1970s energy crisis. It may have birthed Northern neoliberalism, but also propelled a major leap forward for coal-fueled Asian state capitalism - with its v different & much more morally complex political economy. 8/

The early 1970s was the moment when New Delhi policymakers explicitly committed to coal, for political as much as practical reasons. Encouraged by aid donors, they built the major institutions that would lock India into carbon dependence for the next half-century. 7/

This provides new context for Indira Gandhi’s suspension of democracy between 1975 and 1977. The Emergency was not only a product of Indian dynamics or her personality. Other NOPECS (e.g. Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka) saw authoritarianism and coups during these years. 6/.