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This volume aims at providing nuanced and multi-layered understandings of historical choices regarding, and perceptions of, electric supply and electrical technologies, by taking into consideration diverse groups, actors, agencies, and communities in distinct historical and regional settings. It also aims at rethinking energy systems, practices, and transitions through questions of gender, religion, race, design and architecture, material culture, colonialism, nationalism(s), and varied interpretations of tradition and modernity. This issue insists on the need to decentre our gaze to examine electricity within incumbent energy regimes and sources, to historicize and problematize its place within complex approaches to energy transitions, understood in the broad sense as processes of crisis, change and uncertainty, beyond linear narratives of progress and modernization.