Faculty Spotlight - Elizabeth Chatterjee, Autumn 2025

Assistant Professor of Environmental History Elizabeth Chatterjee answered several interview questions about the climate crisis and the role of historians in addressing it, her recent academic projects (including her forthcoming book), and teaching. Her research focuses on the energy history of twentieth-century India, including an award-winning article comparing energy protests in India and the United States. In her interview responses, she emphasizes the necessity of not only understanding the history of energy infrastructures but also making use of the insights that history provides in order to inform moves towards more sustainable and equitable energy systems. 

Energy consumption is at an all-time high and its consequences are profound. Scholars across disciplines have been working to not only explain but also effect change and reduce dependence on carbon-emitting energy sources. What is the historian’s role in understanding energy systems? 

From almost any angle, energy lies at the heart of the planetary-scale ecological problems we’re currently facing. The generation of electricity—the focus of much of my current work—is the single largest source worldwide of the carbon emissions that are driving climate change. Energy extraction is also a leading cause of habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, air pollution, and freshwater consumption. The obstacle to meaningful environmental action is hardly a lack of knowledge about these impacts. It’s instead that carbon-intensive energy systems are proving extremely difficult to dislodge. 

Here, historians have a crucial role to play. In contemporary societies, we live encased within the sedimented layers of energy infrastructures that have accreted over decades. Past decisions and compromises continue to reverberate decades later; a thermal power station typically operates for forty years or more, transmission pylons or big hydroelectric dams for as long as a century. As difficult to alter are less tangible features, like consumers’ everyday habits of energy consumption or the economic and political interests that have grown up around cheap power. Through the electric grid, the past subtly intrudes into the present and constrains our possible futures.

In a sense, I treat energy infrastructure as a kind of archive that the historian can read. Exploring the pivotal moments at which the form of a particular energy system was shaped—in my case, looking at the origins of India’s heavy dependence on coal—becomes crucial to analyze what locks it in place today. It’s a bit like reverse-engineering, analytically taking apart the energy system in order to understand how it works, so that it can be radically transformed. Only when we accurately recognize the forces that hold carbon-intensive energy regimes in place can we begin to see how they might be dismantled. At the same time, historical studies can reveal how and why earlier windows of opportunity for shifts towards more sustainable and equitable modes of energy use opened up. By looking backwards, we can learn to recognize the points at which carbon-intensive energy systems may be most vulnerable to change.

Can you tell us about your current book project, Late Acceleration: An Energy History of India from Colonialism to Climate Change? 

Late Acceleration is my first academic book, and thankfully now almost finished. It marks the first attempt to provide the full story of how India became the world’s third-largest carbon emitter, tracing the fateful moments when the country tied its economic and ecological fate to the dirtiest of fossil fuels: today coal generates three-quarters of all India’s electricity. The book covers the long arc from the initial arrival of electricity in the late colonial period through to the rise of renewable energy in the twenty-first century. Along the way, it provides new interpretations of famous episodes in Indian history, including the Green Revolution, the authoritarian Emergency of the 1970s, and the much-vaunted economic opening of 1991. 

This history matters because India’s energy path provides new thematic insights into the history of our entry into the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch when humans have become the dominant driver of geophysical disturbances at a planetary scale. The book argues for rethinking the relative emphasis we place on different time periods in seeking to explain the Anthropocene. Earth System scientists tend to point to an undifferentiated global “Great Acceleration” in human ecological impacts after about 1950, while social scientists instead point to the genocidal colonization of the New World or the invention of the steam engine as the key turning points. Most of the world beyond the North Atlantic gets forgotten in either account. Half of all anthropogenic carbon emissions have been generated just since the Earth Summit in 1992 and the majority of global emissions annually are now generated in Asia, but historical scholarship hasn’t caught up with either fact. I argue for greater attention to what I see as an Asian-centric and coal-focused phase of the Great Acceleration since about 1980—the Late Acceleration. 

The “lateness” of this acceleration in India brought its own dynamics, which look quite different to the US story of consumer capitalism and private corporate power that tends to dominate the frame. I especially highlight the primacy of political factors. Electrification became a state-led moral project in postcolonial India. But the state had to contend with a novel and complex kind of energy politics. By the mid-century, its legitimacy became bound up with new expectations from their citizens. In precociously democratic India, societal mobilization threatened to outstrip the economic resources necessary to electrify. This gulf between competing demands and the state’s capacity to meet them plunged the Indian power sector into a series of intertwined fiscal, political, and ecological crises, as the book documents. Climate change is just the latest and, in some ways, the most morally challenging of these crises.

In your prize-winning article, “Towards an Energetics of Class: Comparing Energy Protests in India and the United States” you make a striking comparison between a notable US trucker protest in the 1970s and one in India staged by farmers in the late 1980s. What made this comparison salient to you?

The article actually began as a special lecture for UChicago History majors. For years I’ve been a little bit obsessed with what political scientists have branded “fuel riots,” a problematic term for consumer protests over the price and availability of energy. Peruse newspapers from around the world and you’ll realize they are ubiquitous, from Iran and Venezuela to France’s Gilets jaunes. I was particularly familiar with the long and storied history of farmers taking to the streets to protest electricity tariff rises in India. But such “fuel riots” are hardly a phenomenon unique to the supposedly badly behaved energy consumers of the global South, as the famous trucker protests over gas and diesel in the United States during the 1970s and early 1980s well showed. Once I found the hook that could neatly entwine Indian farmers and US truckers in my opening (via Bruce Springsteen!), I took the plunge into the counterintuitive comparison. 

Informed by these two cases, the article marks an attempt to think through how energy usage shapes class formation. It traces how the livelihoods of Indian farmers and US truckers have become completely embroiled in the state-mediated flows of commercial energy. I experimented with a twin approach that examined both the material, technological basis of this energy dependence—the farmers’ reliance on electric or diesel-powered irrigation pumps and the truckers on diesel-guzzling big rigs—and the subjectivities this dependence shaped. 

At the same time, the article is an argument for broadening energy history beyond the conventional focus on labor directly involved in energy production, like coalminers or oil derrickmen. I’m trying to draw attention to quite different class fractions who have played an equally significant role in the recent political history of energy. I talked about some possible further applications and implications in a recent interview with Comparative Studies in Society and History, which published the article. Historians can’t be content with remaining at the pit head or power station: to really understand fossil fuel dependence, we need to follow the flows of energy throughout society. 

I understand that you are part of a working group that is seeking to better understand the antecedents to the Great Acceleration through the novel concept of the Long Acceleration. How does this working group change the conversation around human-induced climate change and what is your specific contribution? 

Ah, I can’t take much credit there! The Long Acceleration is the brainchild of my dear UChicago colleague Fredrik Albritton Jonsson and the Basel-based historian Moritz von Brescius. 

I mentioned the Great Acceleration above. Back in 2004, Earth System scientists first put together what became an iconic dashboard of socioeconomic and geophysical indicators at the planetary scale. They were surprised to find a clear pattern. Indicators from global GDP growth and human population to average global temperature or biodiversity loss all rose sharply upwards around the same moment, about 1950.  They named this postwar intensification of human-driven planetary transformation the Great Acceleration. But, as many historians and other social scientists have pointed out, this synchronized surge is a descriptive finding: it doesn’t tell us much about why this takeoff occurred. The Long Acceleration project seeks to offer a historically informed diagnosis of the causal processes driving this intensification, which necessarily means looking backwards to the decades and centuries well before 1950—arguably as far back as the Sugar Revolution of the 1640s, which the project takes as its starting point.

To this end, Fredrik and Moritz have brought together an exciting group of historians to explore these longer processes from different angles. I’m tackling electrification. Other chapters cover phenomena from the plantation to plastics, consumerism and changing diets, even the invention of the idea that infinite economic growth is possible and desirable. It’s been an interesting experiment in collaborative scholarship—still relatively rare among historians, but very fruitful when studying something as multifaceted as the ways that humans have transformed ecologies at a planetary scale. 

Together the chapters draw attention to dynamics and drivers that are obscured in the simple graphs of the original dashboard: to the significance of colonialism, geopolitical competition, and the developmental state. My own chapter particularly highlights, first, organizational innovations in the capitalist mode of production between the 1870s and 1920s, especially in the United States and Germany: firms like General Electric and Siemens pioneered a mode of managerial capitalism (manifested in, for example, the rise of the corporate research laboratory and consumer demand generation through advertising) that would influence many of the most ecologically momentous developments of the later twentieth century. Second, I draw attention to the expanding mandates of modern states to deliver cheap energy to their citizens. Both are underappreciated parts of the causal story.

How does your teaching intersect with your research? What do you find most rewarding about being in the classroom?

One of the things I appreciate most about UChicago is that teaching and research here are in constant conversation. As faculty, we are able to design at least some of our courses to reflect our current research. So we have the great privilege of getting to road-test some of our emerging questions and ideas with ridiculously smart and theoretically sophisticated students. 

In Spring 2026, for example, I’m really looking forward to teaching a brand-new course called “Into the Unquiet Woods: The Environmental History of South Asia.” With the Indian historian Arupjyoti Saikia, over the next few years I’ll be editing a big fat handbook on the environmental history of the region. So I can’t wait to read classic and new works with the students, and to think with them about what the region’s most significant contributions have been to the field. These contributions have been intellectual, like the exciting ways that historians of South Asia have sought to write water and the monsoon into the very heart of social and economic history. But they’ve also been eminently practical, including forms of environmental protest that center the livelihoods of the poor, with women at the forefront. I know that the students will push me to see all sorts of other patterns and connections that I hadn’t even imagined.

You are clearly quite busy right now, so forgive me if this is a ridiculous question, but are you working on any other interesting projects that you’d like to share? 

As the professional wit Robert Benchley declared, “Anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” I always keep up a Ponzi scheme of side projects to bounce between. That way there’s always another exciting task or looming deadline to compel me to the writing desk every day, even if work on the book briefly stalls. 

Right now, I’m finishing up revisions on an article about the development problem that cow dung posed in postcolonial India. Across much of the country, it was—and in many places still is—the crucial cooking fuel. Policymakers fretted about the waste of organic fertilizer they saw in this, but other Indian thinkers used bovine energy to challenge what they perceived as the thoughtless profligacy of the fossil fuel-addicted West. Cow dung even became the prime fuel for a major state-sponsored renewable energy program, the attempt to promote biogas plants for rural households around the country in the 1970s and 1980s.

I’m also currently writing a couple of essays reflecting on how infrastructure shapes history. One surveys a recent materialist turn in international history, considering the interesting ways that scholars have begun to analyze the transforming physical sinews of geopolitical power, from telegraphs and shipping to banking. With a friend, too, I’ve just started thinking about writing a piece that will outline a kind of conceptual toolkit for historians to study the path dependence of infrastructure. We historians ritually repeat that our discipline is the study of continuity and change over time. But we have much better theoretical vocabulary for some kinds of change (say, revolutions) than we do for talking about the durability of infrastructure or the strange kind of momentum—or even agency—that it seems to possess. Hopefully we’ll have a draft ready for colleagues to lovingly demolish at a workshop sometime soon.