Powering Colonialism explores the history of electrification and its relationship to colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand. In the 1880s, the Phoenix Mine in Otago installed a hydroelectric system to power its mining equipment, making gold mining one of the first industries in the colony to harness the potential of electric power. By the twenty-first century, hydropower still provided more than half the country's electricity. While it is now lauded as a renewable energy source, advocates for the earliest hydroelectrification schemes were more concerned with extracting greater profits and highlighting British technological superiority. Settlers, miners, and politicians saw electricity as a tool for achieving modernity, wealth, and self-sufficiency, and Aotearoa New Zealand’s vast river system, once a barrier to colonial expansion, was now used to justify it. The electrification projects Nathan Kapoor examines in this book―from hydroelectric power for gold mining to Māori-led geothermal energy plants―illustrate how, from the very beginning of Aotearoa New Zealand’s transition to electric power, settlers designed and used electric power systems in service to their colonial mission. Exploitative electric infrastructure, Kapoor argues, was not inevitable, and it was not determined by geography or a coincidence of colonization. It was by design. Nathan N. Kapoor’s lively book fills a welcome gap in scholarship on electrification in Aotearoa New Zealand. It reveals the legacy of colonial development projects in shaping the country’s current electricity generation system, and that there was nothing inevitable or natural about the emergence of such infrastructure. His work also points to the losses―environmentally, socially, and to the Māori―of such grandiose projects of modernity and cautions current decision-makers to be cogniscent of avoiding past mistakes. -- James Beattie, Sun Yat-sen University Explores How Electric Power Facilitated the Creation of a Modern State Nathan N. Kapoor is an assistant professor of history at Illinois State University.