Carbon cultures of progress in history of technology museums

Abstract

The way we narrate our industrial heritage and make its energy reliance visible or invisible matters. In this article, we examine how history of technology museums cultivate narratives of progress and what that might mean for rethinking cultural heritage. We ask what it would mean to expose the fossil fuels that power the engines of industrialisation and the environmental damage those fuels have wrought as part of our industrialisation cultural legacy. Using displays of the Industrial Revolution in the National Science Museum, Daejeon, South Korea, and the German Museum of Technology, Berlin, Germany, we demonstrate that the technological narrative of progress covers up the environmental cost of modern dependence on fossil fuels. These technological progress narratives are built on unseen carbon cultures, i.e. the cultural, social, economic and political systems of modern societies which have become dependent upon and imagined through fossil fuels in all aspects of society. We offer three alternative possibilities for the narration of these industrial revolution histories to incorporate environmental history: setting industrial revolution objects into an Anthropocene or climate change frame instead of an industrialisation narrative; reinterpreting objects as material legacies of carbon cultures; and making visible the power behind industrialisation.

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