From 1868 tp 1872, German geologist Ferdinand von Richthofen went on an expedition to China. His reports on what he found there would transform Western interest in China from the land of porcelain and tea to a repository of immense coal reserves. By the 1890s, European and American powers and the Qing state and local elites battled for control over the rights to these valuable mineral deposits. As coal went from a useful commodity to the essential fuel of industrialization, this natural resource would prove integral to the struggle for political control of China. When the Qing state expanded its control over mining rights, it set the precedent for the subsequent Republican and People's Republic of China regimes. In unearthing this history, Empires of Coal argues that the changes specific to the late Qing dynasty were part of global trends in the nineteenth century, when the rise of science and industrialization destabilized global systems and caused widespread unrest and the toppling of ruling regimes around the world. -- from back cover.