Abstract

The transition toward low-carbon economies is one of the defining challenges of our time. Yet, human societies have navigated successive energy transitions throughout history, each reshaping their relationship with the environment. The framework of Energy Regimes (ERs) offers a functional, time-independent lens through which these transitions can be identified, compared, and learned from. My doctoral research (VU Amsterdam, 2025) applied the ER framework for the first time to a concrete archaeological case study, reconstructing the succession of Foraging and Agrarian regimes in Cantabrian Spain from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Industrial Revolution. Integrating archaeological, palaeoenvironmental, and palaeoclimatic proxies, I documented the key processes driving ER transitions and the societal responses they triggered. However, this analysis operated at the level of whole societies, leaving the internal social dimension largely unaddressed. This gap is where my postdoctoral research project takes over. Using the IPAT analysis within a spatially explicit geographic information system, I propose to reconstruct and compare the societal and social dynamics of Austria spanning the development of capitalism and industrialisation, between 1500 and 2025 CE. By decomposing IPAT parameters (i.e. anthropogenic impact, human population, affluence in terms of per capita consumption of energy, and technology) across agrarian and industrial regimes and stratifying them by social strata using Gini-type inequality coefficients, the project aims to produce the first quantitative, spatially resolved account of how energy transitions shaped the lives of different social strata in contrasting ways. Together, these two projects trace a continuous arc: from deep-time societal reconstruction, to a historically grounded, socially stratified analysis of how energy transitions were lived differently depending on one's place in the social order.