Shellen Xiao Wu World History Books Empires sku-43959389

Shellen Xiao Wu's Empires of Coal: Fueling China's Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860-1920 is a hardcover in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute series. It is listed under World History Books as sku-43959389. From 1868-1872, German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen traveled through China. His reports drew Western attention to its coal reserves.

By the 1890s, European and American powers, the Qing state and local elites were competing for mineral rights. As coal became essential to industrialization, control of those resources became part of the struggle for political control.

Geology aided European imperialism and Chinese resistance to Western encroachment; foreign powers and Chinese officials alike saw mineral resources as important to modernization. By the time the first China Geological Survey began work in the 1910s, ideas about natural resources had shifted.

Qing control over mining rights set a precedent for later Republican and People's Republic of China governments. Wu places these late-Qing changes within global nineteenth-century trends in science, industrialization and political unrest.