Powering Colonialism: Electrification, Extraction, and Empire in Aotearoa New Zealand (Intersections, 18) - Couverture rigide

Name: Powering Colonialism: Electrification, Extraction, and Empire in Aotearoa New Zealand (Intersections, 18)
Author: Kapoor, Nathan N.
ISBN: 9780822948872

Kapoor, Nathan N.

9780822948872: Powering Colonialism: Electrification, Extraction, and Empire in Aotearoa New Zealand (Intersections, 18)

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0822948877 ISBN 13 : 9780822948872

Editeur : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026

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Powering Colonialism explores the history of electrification and its relationship to colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand. Exploitative electric infrastructure, Nathan N. Kapoor argues, was not inevitable, and it was not determined by geography or a coincidence of colonization―it was by design. By the twenty-first century, hydropower provided more than half the country’s electricity. Although it is now lauded as a renewable energy source, advocates for the earliest hydroelectrification schemes were more concerned with extracting greater profits and highlighting British technological superiority. Settlers, miners, and politicians saw electricity as a tool for achieving modernity, wealth, and self-sufficiency, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s vast river system, once a barrier to colonial expansion, was now used to justify it. The electrification projects Kapoor examines in Powering Colonialism―from hydroelectric power for gold mining in the 1880s to Māori-led geothermal energy plants in use today―illustrate how, from the very beginning of Aotearoa New Zealand’s transition to electric power, settlers designed and used electric power systems in service to their colonial mission.

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� propos de l'auteur

Nathan N. Kapoor is assistant professor of history at Illinois State University. He is the editor of Electric Power in Victorian Britain and coeditor of volume 8 of The Correspondence of John Tyndall.

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� 2026 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. Not for distribution. Provided by the publisher University of Pittsburgh Press for review copy purposes only.

From the Introduction

In a press release for the Labour Party in 2019, Aotearoa New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, “We are committed to taking the next steps to get to 100 percent renewable with support for projects like pumped hydro at Lake Onslow, removing the barriers to development of new renewable electricity projects, advancing green hydrogen and other green technologies and supporting businesses to decarbonise. Our plan for clean energy and lower carbon emissions will help us seize the economic opportunities of being the clean, green country that New Zealanders see ourselves as being and that we can market ourselves as.”1 As suggested by some of Ardern’s claims, electric power issues occupy people’s attention in New Zealand, including grid security after Cyclone Gabrielle in 2023 and concerns about the fate of New Zealand’s Zero Carbon Act 2019. The company Emrod, founded in 2019, plans to kickstart a global shift toward wireless electric power technology.2 Beyond the work of firms like Emrod, New Zealand’s electric power initiatives and projects feature in electrification programs around the world.

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