ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how economic history and the history of ideas have been recursively intertwined. It integrates physicalist and constructivist approaches to phenomena conventionally categorised as ‘labour’ and ‘energy’ by unravelling how the two entangled concepts reflect nineteenth-century modernity’s increasingly instrumental approach to both society and nature. The establishment of neoclassical economic theory in the 1870s was as inspired by physics as physics had been inspired by economics in identifying energy as an analogue to the economic concept of work. Energy technologies became understood as the efficient harnessing of nature’s powers in much the same way as economists focused on the efficient harnessing of human labour-power. Although seemingly neutral in their references to objectively measurable, physical phenomena, concepts of labour and energy remain geared to maximum exploitation of humans and nonhuman nature, propelled by money and capitalism. The historical progress of energy technologies is consistently intertwined with political economy. No less than slavery, such technologies are strategies for displacing work and environmental loads onto less powerful segments of world society.
