In his 2006 monograph Children of the Sun, historian Alfred Crosby analyzes the global history of human energy dependence, arguing that one of the prime movers of earth’s history has been the quest for more energy sources. Divided into three parts, Crosby’s text starts with three chapters on “The Largess of the Sun.” He argues that all early energy, whether through burning biomass for heat, or using solar energy to grow food, all human activity depended on the sun. The Columbian Exchange also relied on the sun since it is through the sun that wind its created with which to travel the globe. Additionally, the sun allowed certain plants to thrive or die in different environments, in directly causing the Great Potato famine of Ireland and then mass immigration to the US. This was one of his strongest sections, and drew heavily from his earlier and more famous books The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism. The second portion of his text, titled “Fossilized Sunshine,” addresses the history of fossil fuels and traditional non-renewable resources. Arguing that wind and water mills did not provide enough energy for the growing demand of the late sixteenth century Europe and Asia, with growing wood shortages, people turned to coal for production and heat. Using coal for rail travel also allowed for vast shipping networks of goods. The internal combustion engine and petroleum was an even more efficient medium for energy use and management. He ends this section with a discussion of electricity and its evolution from an entertainment device to a means of execution. His final section, “Energy at the Turn of the Third Millennium,” discusses fusion and fission energy. He concludes with a discussion of the limitations of our energy sources and suggestions that we may need to reexamine our usages.
Crosby’s text is interesting in many ways. First, it is a brief and well-written work on the history of energy usage. Each chapter served as an interesting and uncomplicated introduction to the history of a variety of non-human actors. In fact, whole books can, and have been written on the subjects of his individual twenty page chapters. He actually devotes little energy into creating a sophisticated argument, opting for a very straightforward narrative. Like Stephen Pyne, he addresses these forms of energy in terms of Bruno Latour’s hybrids though in a slightly less effective way than Pyne. For example, despite being a work that expands into pre-history, he does examine the sun and energy in strictly anthropocentric terms. Also like Pyne, his work does threaten to be reductionist, as he essentially asserts that the sun and its various sources of energy are the source of all human history. He is correct in that technically life would not exist on earth without the sun, but it is still a problematic historical claim as there are many other human motivations besides a quest for energy. Additionally, he heavily utilizes the first person plural, which while aiding in accessibility, is also problematic. For example, asserting that “we seized species of wild potatoes”[1] is very imprecise and even ahistorical as there is no way to know who seized those tubers and when and why. However, he does create a nice synthesis of contemporary historical theories, linking environmental history with the history of science and technology similar to that of Joy Parr’s Sensing Changes and Sarah Pritchard’s Confluence. Therefore this could be a useful text for introducing students to envirotechnical history but would not be useful for a serious study of energy history.
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