Paper short abstract:

This paper provides historical perspective on the relationship between political legitimacy and energy futures through analyzing the development of the grid in Istanbul. I examine the legacy of coal-powered electrical energy by charting the political and economic networks from which it emerged.

Paper long abstract:

This paper provides historical perspective on the relationship between political legitimacy and energy futures through analyzing the development of the grid in Istanbul, Turkey. Istanbul's electrification involved a process in which various European and Ottoman actors participated, resulting in a decades-long negotiation between private investors and state officials. By examining this process of electrifying both public works and domestic consumption, I shed light on political decision-making practices regarding energy production by engineer-entrepreneurs, financiers, diplomats, brokers and state officials. In doing so, I analyze the legacy of coal-powered electrical infrastructures by charting the political and economic networks from which they emerged across Europe and Turkey. Furthermore, I examine the transition from gas and oil-powered lighting, and from animal-powered urban transport, to coal-powered electrical systems. By doing so, I provide historical perspective on the question of resource transition, showing the complex political and economic operations underlying such a change. These include the work of finance capital, diplomacy and international businesses on the one hand, and the management of coal mines, refugees, urban service workers, and emerging bourgeois consumers by the political sovereigns on the other hand. I show how these operations unevenly distributed the benefits and burdens of electrical modernization and deepened the urban-rural divide. Finally, by drawing on another moment in which world war, political and economic competition between global powers, and rapid technological innovation resulted in dramatic transitions, I show the changes in popular and elite imaginaries of the future as reflected in material infrastructures.