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Speaking for the ‘world power economy’: electricity, energo-materialist economics, and the World Energy Council (1924–78)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 June 2020

Daniela Russ
Daniela Russ*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Ave, Toronto, ONM5S 2J4, Canada Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, N1G 2W1, Canada
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: daniela.russ@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

The emergence of a field of global energy policy is usually traced back to the events around the 1973–74 oil embargo. This article provides a prehistory to this by tracing the genealogy of the ‘global energy economy’. This genealogy is reconstructed through the lens of the World Power Conference (WPC, today the World Energy Council, WEC), a non-governmental international organization founded by a British electro-technical engineer in 1924. In a comparison with the engineering of ‘natural forces’ in the nineteenth-century steam economy, I argue that electricity, and particularly large electrical systems, not only changed the meaning of power and institutionalized a regular documentation of the ‘power economy’, but enabled and concentrated ownership of the ‘forces of nature’ as a productive factor. This more comprehensive view of the role of electricity in the economy gave rise to an energo-materialist economics among the electro-technical engineers, technicians, and planners whom the WPC assembled. The WPC imagined itself as the centre of calculation of this ‘global energy economy’, initiating international standardization and complementing the statistics of international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. As the integration of all ‘energies’ in one statistical model required conversion factors across very different technical processes, it took the urgency of the oil crisis for the WEC to compile a global energy balance, thus statistically ‘representing’ the state of the ‘global energy economy’.

Keywords

economic thoughtenergy historyengineering organizationsinternational non-governmental organizationstechnocratic internationalism
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , July 2020 , pp. 311 - 329
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© Cambridge University Press 2020

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Footnotes

†

I thank Vincent Lagendijk, members of the ‘World politics’ workshop at Bielefeld University, and two anonymous referees for kind and helpful comments on a previous version of this text; Thomas Turnbull’s input has been invaluable for the part on energo-materialist economics. Parts of this research were funded by the Comité d’histoire de l’électricité et de l’énergie, Fondation EDF.

References

1 I thank Vincent Lagendijk, members of the ‘World Politics’ workshop at Bielefeld University, and two anonymous referees for kind and helpful comments on a previous version of this text; Thomas Turnbull’s input has been invaluable for the part on energo-materialist economics. Parts of this research have been funded by the Comité d’histoire de l’électricité et de l’énergie, Fondation EDF.

2 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon democracy: political power in the age of oil, London: Verso, 2011, p. 176.

3 The organization changed its name to the World Energy Conference in 1968, before becoming the World Energy Council in 1989. The abbreviation WPC is used for references to the body before 1968, WEC thereafter.

4 Michel Foucault, The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences, London: Routledge, 2002. Notable exceptions are Anson Rabinbach, The human motor: energy, fatigue, and the origins of modernity, New York: Basic Books, 1990; Thomas Turnbull, ‘From paradox to policy: the problem of energy resource conservation in Britain and America, 1865–1981’, PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 2017; Cara New Daggett, The birth of energy: fossil fuels, thermodynamics, and the politics of work, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

5 Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a history of epistemic things: synthesizing proteins in the test tube, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

6 Akira Iriye, Global community: the role of international organizations in the making of the contemporary world, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004, p. 23.

7 Daniel Dunlop, ‘World unity and world problems’, World Survey, 1, 1, 1935, p. 4.

8 In contrast to the neoliberals, who emerged at the same time, see Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: the end of empire and the birth of neoliberalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018.

9 Thomas S. Kuhn, ‘Energy conservation as an example of simultaneous discovery’, in Marshall Clagett, ed., Critical problems in the history of science, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959, pp. 321–56; Herbert Breger, Die Natur als arbeitende Maschine: zur Entstehung des Energiebegriffs in der Physik, 1840–1850, Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1982; Crosbie Smith, The science of energy: a cultural history of energy physics in Victorian Britain, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

10 Max Planck, Die Einheit des physikalischen Weltbildes: Vortrag gehalten am 9. Dezember 1908 in der naturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät des Stundentenkorps der Universität Leiden, Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1909, pp. 8, 19; Daan Wegener, ‘De-anthropomorphizing energy and energy conservation: the case of Max Planck and Ernst Mach’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 41, 2, 2010, pp. 146–59.

11 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world, New York: Free Press, 1997, p. 100.

12 Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith, Engineering empires: a cultural history of technology in nineteenth-century Britain, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 35.

13 Peter Lundgreen, ‘Engineering education in Europe and the USA, 1750–1930: the rise to dominance of school culture and the engineering professions’, Annals of Science, 47, 1, 1990.

14 Cited in Marsden and Smith, Engineering empires, p. 52.

15 Ibid., p. 57.

16 Jennifer Tann and M. J. Breckin, ‘The international diffusion of the Watt engine, 1775–1825’, Economic History Review, 31, 4, 1978, pp. 543–5; Charles P. Kindleberger, ‘Technological diffusion: European experience to 1850’, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 5, 3, 1995, pp. 229–42.

17 The Institution of Mechanical Engineers was founded in 1847, the Verein deutscher Ingenieure (open to all fields and ranks of engineering) in 1856, and the American Society for Mechanical Engineers only in 1880.

18 Sadi Carnot, Refléxions sur la puissance motrice du feu et sur les machines, Paris: Bachelier, 1824, p. 2. See also Andreas Malm, ‘The origins of fossil capital: from water to steam in the British cotton industry’, Historical Materialism, 21, 1, pp. 15–68.

19 Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike, Communication and empire: media, markets, and globalization, 1860–1930, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007; Simone M. Müller and Heidi J. S. Tworek, ‘“The telegraph and the bank”: on the interdependence of global communications and capitalism, 1866–1914’, Journal of Global History, 10, 2, 2015, pp. 259–83.

20 Douglas Howland, ‘An alternative mode of international order: the International Administrative Union in the nineteenth century’, Review of International Studies, 41, 2015, pp. 161–83.

21 William J. Hausmann, Peter Hertner, and Mira Wilkins, Global electrification, multinational enterprise and international finance in the history of light and power, 1878–2007, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008; Thomas P. Hughes, ‘The electrification of America: the system builders’, Technology and Culture, 20, 1, 1979, pp. 124–61; Jeremiah D. Lambert, The power brokers: the struggle to shape and control the electric power industry, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015, pp. 1–49.

22 Samuel Parr, ‘The classification of coal’, University of Illinois Bulletin, 25, 48, 1928, pp. 6–7.

23 Charles H. Merz and William McLellan, ‘Power station design’, Journal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, 33, 167, 1904, pp. 696–742; Georg Klingenberg, Der Bau großer Elektrizitätskraftwerke. Band I: Richtlinien für den Bau großer Elektrizitätswerke, Berlin: Julius Springer, 1913; Samuell Insull, Central station electric service: its commercial development and economic significance as set forth in the public addresses (1897–1914) of Samuell Insull, Chicago, IL: privately printed, 1915. See, for the connection of these three, Thomas Hughes, Networks of power: electrification in Western society, 1880–1930, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 228.

24 Jonathan Coopersmith, ‘When worlds collide: government and electrification, 1892–1939’, Business and Economic History On-Line, 1, 2004, pp. 1–31; Hausmann, Hertner, and Wilkins, Global electrification, pp. 125–89; Julie Cohn, Matthew Evenden, and Marc Landry, ‘Waterpowers: the Second World War and the mobilization of hydro-electricity in Canada, the United States and Germany’, Journal of Global History, 15, 1, 2020, pp.

25 WPC, Transactions of the World Power Conference, sectional meeting, volume 2, section C: the economic relation between electrical energy produced hydraulically and electrical energy produced thermally, Basel: Birkäuser & Cie, 1927; Thomas Hughes, ‘The culture of regional systems’, in Networks of power, pp. 363–403.

26 Heiko Haumann, Beginn der Planwirtschaft: Elektrifizierung, Wirtschaftsplanung und gesellschaftliche Entwicklung Sowjetrusslands 1917–1921, Düsseldorf: Bertelsmann, 1974; Alex G. Cummins, ‘The road to NEP, the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia (GOELRO): a study in technology, mobilization, and economic planning’, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1988; Jonathan Coopersmith, The electrification of Russia, 1880–1926, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992; David Ekbladh, ‘“Mr. TVA”: grass-roots development, David Lilienthal, and the rise and fall of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a symbol for U.S. overseas development, 1933–1973’, Diplomatic History, 26, 3, 2002, pp. 335–74; Lambert, Power brokers, pp. 1–49.

27 Friedrich Kittler, ‘Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900 – Vorwort’, Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaften, 6, 1, 2011, pp. 117–26.

28 Hugh Quigley, ‘Electricity as an index of industrial production and employment’, in World Power Conference (henceforth WPC), ed., The transactions of the Second World Power Conference, volume 16: world problems of power economics, Berlin: VDI Verlag, 1930, pp. 95–127; Maria Fal’kner-Smit, ‘The motor power outfit of labour and its economic efficiency’, in ibid., pp. 60–71.

29 Arthur Wilke, Die Elektrizität, ihre Erzeugung und ihre Anwendung in Industrie und Gewerbe, Berlin: Springer, 1893, p. 633 (my translation).

30 Marsden and Smith, Engineering empires, p. 44.

31 Hugh Quigley, Electrical power and national progress, London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1925, p. 31.

32 Quigley, ‘Electricity’, p. 96.

33 Daniel J. Kevles, ‘Into hostile political camps: the reorganization of international science in World War I’, Isis, 62, 1, 1971, p. 51; Markus Krajewski, ‘Systemökonomie’, in Restlosigkeit: Weltprojekte um 1900, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, pp. 287–336; Thomas Hughes, ‘War and acquired characteristics’, in Networks of power, pp. 285–323.

34 Elisabeth van Meer, ‘The transatlantic pursuit of a world engineering federation: for the profession, the nation, and international peace, 1918–48’, Technology and Culture, 53, 1, 2012, pp. 137–8.

35 Ibid., p. 121.

36 Bruce Sinclair, A centennial history of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1880–1980, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980, p. 15.

37 For an early discussion on naming, see ‘Zweite Weltkraftkonferenz Berlin 1930’, Polytechnisches Journal, 345, 7, 1930, p. 124.

38 WEC records, London (henceforth WECL), WPC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1967, p. 11.

39 Johan Schot and Vincent Lagendijk, ‘Technocratic internationalism in the interwar years: building Europe on motorways and electricity networks’, Journal of Modern European History, 6, 2, 2008, pp. 197–8.

40 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1930, pp. 23–4.

41 WPC, The transactions of the first World Power Conference, London: Lund, Humphries, 1925, p. vii.

42 Ibid., p. viii.

43 Marsden and Smith, Engineering empires, p. 2.

44 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1933, p. 52.

45 WPC, First World Power Conference, p. vii.

46 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1932, p. 43.

47 WPC, First World Power Conference, p. ix.

48 Electrical world (1925), cited in Rebecca Wright, Hiroki Shin, and Frank Trentmann, From World Power Conference to World Energy Council: 90 years of world energy cooperation, 1923–2013, London: World Energy Council, 2013, p. 16.

49 Tim Büthe, ‘Engineering uncontestedness? The origins and institutional development of the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC)’, Business and Politics, 12, 3, 2010, pp. 1–62.

50 Wright, Shin, and Trentmann, From World Power Conference, p. 16.

51 Ibid.

52 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1933, p. 18.

53 Ibid., p. 52.

54 Bruce C. Netschert, ‘The energy company: a monopoly trend in the energy markets’, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 27, 8, 1971, pp. 13–17.

55 Theodore M. Porter, Trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

56 Rabinbach, Human motor, p. 4.

57 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of experts: Egypt, techno-politics, modernity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002, p. 94.

58 Daniel Speich Chassé, ‘Die “Dritte Welt” als Theorieeffekt’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 41, 4, 2015, pp. 580–612; Adam Tooze, Statistics and the German state, 1900–1945: the making of modern economic knowledge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

59 Daniela Russ, ‘Arming labour with energy, Soviet economic planning from GOELRO to energetics (1921–1928)’, Historical Materialism (forthcoming).

60 Wright, Shin, and Trentmann, From World Power Conference, p. 12.

61 Ibid., p. 11.

62 ‘Science and world unity’, Living Age, 332, 4178, 1924, p. 196.

63 Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, ‘Perspektivy elektrifikacii (Perspectives of electrification)’, Planovoe Khozyaystvo (Planned Economy), 2, 1925, p. 13 (my translation); Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, ‘Zadachi energeticheskogo khosyaystva (Tasks of the energetic economy)’, Planovoe Khosyaystvo, 6, 1928, p. 14 (my translation).

64 Krzhizhanovskii, ‘Perspektivy elektrifikacii’, p. 12.

65 World Power Conference, First World Power Conference, p. viii.

66 Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, ‘K peresmotru plana GOELRO (On the revision of the GOELRO plan)’, Planovoe Khozyaystvo, 7, 1925, p. 11.

67 Halford Mackinder, ‘The geographical pivot of history’, Geographical Journal, 23, 4, 1904, p. 422. I thank Thomas Turnbull for pointing me to Mackinder’s work.

68 Gleb M. Krzhizhanovskii, ‘K teorii i praktike planovogo khozyaytva (On the theory and practice of the planning economy)’, Planovoe Khozyaystvo, 3, 1925, p. 14.

69 Krzhizhanovskii, ‘K peresmotru plana GOELRO’, p. 10.

70 Bruno Latour, Science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 215–57.

71 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1930, pp. 15–16.

72 Witold Kula, Measures and men, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014.

73 Clarence A. Seyler, ‘Is classification or nomenclature of coal possible or desirable?’, Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry, 51, 25, 1932, pp. 531–2; O. Mohr, ‘Die Analyse als Grundlage für die Kohlenbewertung und den Kohlenhandel’, Angewandte Chemie, 21, 40, 1908, pp. 2089–94.

74 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1932, p. 43.

75 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1934, pp. 24, 56–7.

76 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1932, p. 19.

77 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1933, p. 19.

78 United Nations Archive, New York (henceforth UN ARMS), Charles H. Gray to Lyman C. White, Information supplied for the Handbook of Non-Governmental Organisations, 18 January 1949, S-0441-0048-0005.

79 Speich Chassé, ‘Die “Dritte Welt” als Theorieeffekt’, pp. 580–612.

80 Andreas von Weiss, ‘Die Non-Governmentalen Organizations und die Vereinten Nationen’, Zeitschrift für Politik, 27, 4, 1980, p. 398.

81 Casper Andersen, ‘Internationalism and engineering in UNESCO during the end game of empire, 1943–68’, Technology and Culture, 58, 3, 2017, p. 650.

82 S. N. Gupta, cited in ibid., p. 661.

83 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1953, p. 13. The status changed from direct consultatory status to consultatory status via the UATI, a body designed to channel technical and engineering advice to UNESCO. See also Andersen, ‘Internationalism and engineering’, pp. 650–77.

84 Andersen, ‘Internationalism and engineering’, p. 664.

85 WECL, WPC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1946, p. 16.

86 Mitchell, Carbon democracy, pp. 117–18. The idea of bringing oil resources under international control was brought up again by the International Co-operative Alliance in a request to ECOSOC in 1949.

87 John Gillingham, Coal, steel, and the rebirth of Europe, 1945–1955: the Germans and French from Ruhr conflict to economic community, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Giuliano Garavini, The rise and fall of OPEC in the twentieth century, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.

88 WPC, Fünfte Weltkraftkonferenz Wien, Band 4: Statistische Methoden in der Energiewirtschaft, Vienna: Österreichisches Nationalkommittee der Weltkraftkonferenz, 1957.

89 WECL, WEC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1972, pp. 37–8. The WEC introduced yet another version of this ‘centre for calculation’ in 1998, when it launched its Global Energy Information System (GEIS), an internet database accessible to its members. WEC members themselves acknowledge, however, that the most important sources for energy statistics are today the BP statistics, the US Energy Information Administration, and the International Energy Agency.

90 UN ARMS, Charles H. Gray to Ansgar Rosenborg, special adviser in charge of economic development matters, 22 December 1953, S-0441-0048-0006.

91 Wright, Shin, and Trentmann, From World Power Conference, p. 16.

92 WECL, German National Committee of the WEC, Meeting of the National Executive Council, 1975, p. 3.

93 WECL, WEC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1966, p. 39.

94 WECL, WEC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1972, p. 30.

95 WEC, Transactions of the 11th World Energy Conference, London: World Energy Conference, 1980.

96 R. Freiberger and F. Schulz, ‘Some relations between industrial production and consumption of energy’, in Yugoslavian National Committee of the World Power Conference, ed., Transactions, World Power Conference XIth sectional meeting: power as a factor of development of underdeveloped countries, section A, economic aspects, Belgrade: Jugoslovenski Nacionalni Komitet Svetske Konferencije za Energiju, 1958, p. 162.

97 Freiberger and Schulz, ‘Some relations’, p. 138.

98 Harold J. Barnett and United States Bureau of Mines, Energy uses and supplies, 1939, 1947, 1965, Washington, DC: US Governmental Printing Office, 1950.

99 Ibid., p. 8.

100 Ibid., p. 4.

101 Ibid., p. 8.

102 WPC, Fünfte Weltkraftkonferenz Wien, p. 1107.

103 WEC and International Union of Producers and Distributors of Electrical Energy, Substitutions between forms of energy and how to deal with them statistically: a guide, London: World Energy Conference, 1985, p. 15.

104 J. C. Woodliffe, ‘A new dimension to international co-operation: the OECD International Energy Agreement’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 24, 3, 1975, p. 528; Richard Scott and the IEA, The history of the International Energy Agency, 1974–1994: IEA, the first 20 years, Paris: OECD and IEA, 1994, p. 414; Thijs Van de Graaf and Dries Lesage, ‘The International Energy Agency after 35 years: reform needs and institutional adaptability’, Review of International Organizations, 4, 3, 2009, p. 301.

105 IEA, ‘The International Energy Program, signed on November 18, 1974’, annex, article 2, https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%201040/volume-1040-A-15664-English.pdf (consulted 24 January 2020).

106 WEC, Digest: transactions of the 9th World Energy Conference, September 23–27, 1974, New York: US National Committee of the World Energy Conference, 1975, pp. 25–7.

107 Wright, Shin, and Trentmann, From World Power Conference, p. 42.

108 WELC, WEC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1975, annex 4.

109 Ibid.

110 WELC, WEC, Meeting of the International Executive Council, 1980, p. 9.

111 WEC and International Union of Producers and Distributors of Electrical Energy, Substitutions between forms of energy.

112 Rüdiger Graf, Oil and sovereignty: petro-knowledge and energy policy in the United States and western Europe in the 1970s, New York: Berghahn Books.