Powered by the sun: energizing empire in the age of solar

Journal article

Scholars within the Environmental Humanities, literary studies, and the history of science have depicted the origin and spread of the fossil fuel regime as a process from the West to the Rest, unfolding from the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, in the forty years spanning Augustin Mouchot’s debut of his solar steam engine at the 1878 Universal Exhibition to Frank Shuman’s 1913 solar plant in Maedi, Egypt, the global ideation and experimentation on solar energy were at an all-time high. The conceivable shift from a coal-based to a solar-based energy system created ideological conflicts and rifts on a global scale, causing different speculative responses, such as British author H. G. Wells’s dystopia, The War of the Worlds (1895), and Indian author Rokeya Hossain’s utopia, “Sultana’s Dream” (1905). Populating the potential transition with intersecting ecological and political systems, the fictions portray not just the technology but worlds of solar energy. Making hitherto unnoticed connections between the two literary texts from the “age of solar,” the article shows that the turn of the twentieth century represents a sidetrack to what scholars from diverse fields understand as a smooth global highway of fossil capitalism, demonstrating that energy periodization can complicate our understanding of historical energy regimes as more intermingled than usually assumed.

Authors: Lund, S

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Journal: Comparative Literature
• Acceptance date: 2026-01-07
• EISSN: 1945-8517
• ISSN: 0010-4124
• Language: English
• Keywords: solar; India; speculative fiction; energy; thermodynamics; empire; H. G. Wells; world literature; Rokeya Hossain