Jeremy Zallen has written a brilliant book. It examines the processes through which workers made light. It also reveals the strategies entrepreneurs and consumers used to exploit both natural resources and these laborers’ energy in the period between the twilight of Britain's North American empire and the dawning of America's Civil War. This book is a shining example of what the material turn has done and can do for historians of capitalism. On nearly every page, Zallen delights with historical connections that emerge only when we trace the production, distribution, and consumption of things. He reminds us that American labor history can only be understood in the context of the global political economy, that historians must detail the processes whereby capital yoked the energy of humans, animals, and the environment to make and unmake things, that the labor of waged and enslaved people were linked with each other, and that...
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