Energy and Chronopolitical Allegory 

From the 18th century onwards, as Allen MacDuffie argues, Western science began to tap a large, yet non-renewable, capital store of energy.This shift from agricultural production dependent upon the flow of energy cycles (the Sun) to industrial production based on the usage and subsequent depletion of energy stock (burning of fossil fuels, initially coal) roughly coincides with what genocide scholar Dirk Moses dubbed “the racial century,” i.e. the period between the mid 18th century and the mid 19th century. The question Ana is asking is: why does the transition to fossil fuels entail an intensification of (already ongoing) processes of racialization? The answer she puts forth is that both processes work in tandem with, and under the aegis of a chronopolitical schema, Charles Mills dubbed “the racialized time of white modernity.”