At the turn of the twentieth century, the American state played almost no role in the national energy system. By 1945, the federal government was one of the largest electricity producers in the country and had the power to shape other countries’ energy systems. While energy policy is now a taken-for-granted site of state intervention, sociological theories have largely overlooked how and why modern states gained influence over energy production, distribution, and consumption. My dissertation asks why electricity emerged as an object of American state strategy during the 20^th century. More specifically, I ask why the American state worked to increase the supply and consumption of electricity, across various territories, from 1902-1945. Through an historical sociological study, I examine how the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation introduced a model of combined hydroelectric and agricultural development, which spread throughout the country and the world. I analyze how a socio-technological system developed for the arid settler colonial west was transformed in the island colonies, adapted to geopolitical crises, and ultimately mobilized to reorganize the electric energy system on a national scale. Throughout the dissertation, I attend to how the same institutions, legal powers, and actors produced durable patterns of socio-ecological transformation over time, across different spaces, and to seemingly different ends. By tracking the emergence of the American “electric state” during this period, I seek to understand the energy system as a crucial site of political power, intermeshed with processes of territorial control, geopolitical struggle, agricultural simplification, and white domination. I therefore suggest that electrical state formation not only changed the energy system, but also changed the state, with lasting political, social, and environmental consequences.