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8 - Fire and fuel in human history

from Part I - Historiography, method, and themes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

David Christian
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Sydney
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Summary

This chapter deals with the peculiar bond between humans and fire: what, in the course of history, have we humans done with fire, and what has fire done to us. Four successive phases in human history are distinguished: the phase before domestication; the phase of domestication of fire; the phase that in analogy with the subsequent phase of industrialization may be called agrarianization; and industrialization. A new phase (fifth phase), in which fire and fuel will play a very different role than in the still current phase of industrialization, is discussed. The history of the human bond with fire and fuel has aspects that relate to practically all academic disciplines, in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. Fire is a process of combustion of organic matter. A momentary conjunction of three conditions, Matter, Energy, and Information (MEI), is needed for it to occur.
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Chapter
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

Further reading

Bankoff, Greg, Lübken, Uwe, and Sand, Jordan (eds.), Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Buckminster Fuller, R., Critical Path, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982.Google Scholar
Burton, Frances D., Fire: The Spark that Ignited Human Evolution, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Christian, David, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Mike, Planet of Slums, London: Verso, 2004.Google Scholar
Eden, Lynn, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Elias, Norbert, The Process of Civilization: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2012, vol. iii.Google Scholar
Elias, Norbert, What Is Sociology?, Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2006, vol. v.Google Scholar
Frazer, James George, Myths of the Origin of Fire, London: Macmillan, 1930.Google Scholar
Frierson, Cathy A., All Russia is Burning! A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.Google Scholar
Goudsblom, Johan, Fire and Civilization, London: Allen Lane, 1992.Google Scholar
Goudsblom, Johan, and de Vries, Bert (eds.), Mappae Mundi: Humans and their Habitats in a Long-Term Socio-ecological Perspective, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goudsblom, Johan, Jones, Eric L., and Mennell, Stephen, The Course of Human History: Economic Growth, Social Process, and Civilization, Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996.Google Scholar
Harris, Marvin, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture, New York: Harper & Row, 1968.Google Scholar
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Pyne, Stephen J., Fire: A Brief History, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Sieferle, Rolf Peter, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution, Cambridge: The White Horse Press, 2001.Google Scholar
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