New Perspectives in Energy History (2024)

Panel 1: Cultures of Energy

 

 

Abstract: In 1887, fleeing prosecution for polygamy, a party of Mormon exiles planted their church’s first settlement in Southern Alberta. They hoped to create a prosperous farming colony where they could hold common land and practice plural marriage without interference. As they built an agrarian economy over the next two decades, their coreligionists in Utah engaged in a wave of mining booms and railroad construction, each driving demand for coal. Literature on Latter-day Saint coal extraction focuses uniformly on the Saints’ Utah heartland during this period’s industrialization. Mormon economic histories have highlighted corporate operations and policies of church and state, while labor historians have added discussion of the Saints’ role in union organizing. But while Latter-day Saint settlers had energy needs both before they entered heavy industry and outside of their religious metropole, there is no academic history of Mormon artisanal fuel extraction or small-scale energy production. 

 

This paper turns to the Alberta colonies to start this discussion. The Saints sought energy independence from the “Gentile” world, beginning with their first year on the prairie. They attributed spiritual significance to nearby fuel sources and organized their extraction through two sacred institutions: the church and the family, often equated rhetorically. Both the practical need for fuel and creating jobs “in the family” sacralized woodcutting and coal mining. Nonetheless, pragmatic Mormon settlers accepted the need to engage transcontinental industries for some of their energy needs, sourcing much of their fuel from the railroads. They also advertised their principal town’s hydropower potential in a bid to attract commercial investment. Alberta’s Latter-day Saint settlements illustrate the intimate networks and religious devotion behind Mormon colonial energy regimes as well as the tensions of the faith’s economic integration with North American nation-states.

 

 

Abstract: This paper explores the relation between electrical infrastructure and the seemingly ambiguous concept of culture from the then-popular future-oriented slogan “Towards a Socialist Cultural Village,” which we can see as the relation between the ideological/cultural and the material in rural North Korea, to understand the everyday politics in the countryside. Examining how central electrical infrastructure was to the discourse on the socialist cultural village – through the process of constructing small and medium-sized local power plants and the meaning of tractors as the vanguard of agricultural mechanization – I argue that electrical infrastructure was an important channel through which rural populations experienced this discourse in their everyday lives. I further argue that their material and immaterial encounter with electrical infrastructure was an important medium for experiencing state power, but also the state’s limits, because rural electrification was a process that relied on the spontaneity of rural populations (not to be confused with Juche) under the name of culture. Since many socialist states, including the USSR and the PRC, also used the concept of culture in various ways, especially in the term cultural revolution, focusing on the different ways North Koreans used “culture” through the discourse of the socialist cultural village can add another layer in our understanding of the varieties of socialist experiences within the context of the global Cold War.

 

 

Abstract: This paper addresses the twentieth-century art patronage of British petroleum company Shell Oil’s to argue that their work in the cultural sector was an early, and consequential, expression of the mutual influence of art and energy production.1 Acknowledging the contemporary activism of groups like Liberate Tate and Just Stop Oil, who agitate against contemporary fossil patronage in cultural institutions, I historicize petrocapitalist involvement with the arts as part of a longstanding project of corporate myth-making that used modernist art to extoll and defend oil regimes. 

 

I begin in the interwar period, when Shell Oil commissioned modernist advertising posters from prominent British artists. The slogans read “See Britain First on Shell,” the text set against painted backgrounds of rivers, fields, churches, and castles. These large posters traversed the nation stuck to the sides of the trucks that delivered Shell Oil, an environmentalist format, Shell emphasized, that left the rural landscape unsullied by unsightly billboards. I show that, instead, the extreme visual and physical violence of extractive industry, from which the British countryside was protected, was wrought on foreign soil. Domestic motorized exploration was predicated on Shell’s exploitation of a vast system of foreign oil fields, a new privatized imperialist network that materialized during the slow collapse of the British Empire. 

 

After World War II, Shell shifted its representational approach to normalize industrial infrastructure in the domestic sphere, a response to the newly globalized conditions of oil production. In 1955, Shell commissioned young British artists to travel to UK refineries. The resulting images, exhibited in a show titled The Artist’s View of an Industry, depicted the infrastructure that contained petroleum: oil tankers, pipes, and storage tanks. This visual approach, though purportedly more industrially focused than the earlier advertisements, still obscured the human and environmental impact of global petroleum production. Oil itself—a sticky, dark, and messy substance—along with the dispersed systems of power that supported its extraction and circulation, were occluded in these images. Instead, petroleum’s environmental impact might be more fully glimpsed in the abstract bitumen paintings created by artist William Green, who had an exhibition contemporaneously with The Artist’s View of an Industry that was documented by Shell Magazine. In Green’s exhibition, the magazine wrote, “An interesting and slightly startling new use for bitumen was on display.” How, I ask in closing, does the incursion of an actual petroleum byproduct—which was encrusted and burnt onto Green’s canvases—into the artwork challenge the fantasy of petroleum that was established by decades of Shell’s artistic commissions? 

 

 

Abstract: The history of the Soviet consumer movement in the late 1980s demonstrates the huge potential of popular anxieties over waste and wastefulness to mobilize socialist citizens. The Soviet people understood that their economy was not only plagued by shortages, but also suffered from overproduction of low-quality and unnecessary goods, which squandered material resources, capital, and labor. But in the late 1980s, waste acquired a new meaning in popular imagination. It now included not only unwanted goods, but also products that harmed people’s health and worsened ecology. The catastrophe at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 and the subsequent migration of Chornobyl-produced radioactive elements through chains of food supply played a decisive role in this redefinition. As a result, waste ultimately grew into the factor that motivated Soviet people to seek social equality and environmental justice through consumer-initiated lawsuits and a new consumer law. While political leaders contemplated the possibility of market reforms to improve the economy, the Soviet people were reconsidering the social contract between citizens and the state, demanding more consumer and environmental rights. Replacing the socialist economy of waste with capitalist wastefulness hardly constituted a satisfactory solution for perestroika consumer leaders, as public debates about the notion of consumerism clearly demonstrated. The consumer movement activists understood consumerism not so much as preoccupation with the acquisition of consumer goods or the advent of the free market but rather as strong legal protections for consumer rights. By initiating lawsuits against unscrupulous producers and retailers who had perpetuated the economy of waste for decades, consumer advocates sought to expand economic and environmental citizenship within a reformed, law-based Soviet state. For the movement participants, consumerism, together with the environmentalism it engendered, could eradicate poisonous waste and support environmental justice through the organized collective actions of concerned citizen-consumers. This dream of a new consumerism, however, came true only to exist for a few months and then crumbled with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

 

 

Abstract: The post-socialist period in East Central Europe was a period of rapid energy transition. From 1948-1989, states in this region relied almost exclusively on domestic coal for industrial and residential heating and electricity, in the process transforming their mining regions into some of the most toxic environments in the world. After 1989, as newly elected governments and foreign economic advisers privatized state industries through a process of “shock therapy,” wealthy investors bought majority shares in coal mining enterprises and shuttered many mines deemed unprofitable. Using records from the corporate archives of the successor company to the state’s largest coal enterprise, this paper traces the privatization process in Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic as an emblematic case study in social consequences of de-carbonization for energy workers. Under socialism, the state coal mining enterprise was sprawling. It encompassed an entire social infrastructure: hundreds of houses, tens of thousands of apartments, dozens of cafeterias, clinics and hospitals, laundries, recreation centers, hotels, bus depots, dormitories, a travel agency, and even a seaside campground in Bulgaria, all available for free or at extremely low cost to energy workers and their families. The mine’s post-1989 owners concluded that these services must be “converted to a profit-making basis” and, in the process, transformed from rights to commodities.

 

This paper argues that the privatization process forced government officials, foreign economic advisers, and miners to resolve deep ontological questions: What is a coal mine? Who is a coal miner? Each group had a different answer arising from their divergent assumptions of what elements of the economy and human behavior are “natural.” Miners rejected the idea that economic competition is a natural human (and, indeed, manly) endeavor, arguing instead that “every man naturally seeks certainty in all spheres of life.” This paper treats the process of de- carbonization in post-socialist Czechoslovakia as an ambiguous transition. Cleaner energy and a healthier environment came yoked to new and profound uncertainty for energy workers, in which services these workers had long taken as their right—housing, light, heat, leisure, medical care—became governed by the market. In the process, unemployment, homelessness, and poverty, once unimaginable to energy workers, became common. 

 

 

Abstract: In the early 1970s, American energy consumption increased while an expanded regulatory state and the environmental movement stymied the construction of new power plants. To meet rising demand, PSE&G in New Jersey developed a novel solution to this problem: nuclear plants based on the ocean. Westinghouse Electric partnered with Tenneco to build these massive creations while employing a small army of scientists to adhere to new environmental guidelines. At a time when American energy security seemed in doubt and the Nixon and Ford administrations sought a return to energy ‘independence,’ floating nuclear power plants seemed like a commonsense solution to the energy shortage that could both provide substantial domestic energy and deal with activists’ critiques regarding health and safety. Framed as a “Strong Response to the Energy Crisis,” the project received backing from energy czars William Simon and Frank Zarb, and the prospect of “floating nukes” seemed just over the horizon. But by the decade’s end, through a combination of corporate faltering and grassroots backlash, the program was dead in the water, effectively ending this potential form of power…at least for the time being. This paper examines how political and corporate leaders sought to use patriotism and the environmental zeitgeist of the day to lend support to this venture, ultimately failing in their effort because of a combined, if often bifurcated, campaign waged by environmental groups and New Jersey economic interests. This work adds to a growing scholarship that challenges assumptions about the political shift in the 1970s, finding areas of commonality between conservative and liberal groups in the energy space. In addition, it provides a window into a future environmental issue: in just the last five years, Russia has developed its first floating nuclear power plant, and several Western nations, including the United States, have returned to the idea as a way to transition away from fossil fuels. As the world considers non-carbon-based energy sources, this paper offers insight into the potential pitfalls of such a project. 

 

 

Abstract: In 1829, the Boston Gas Light Company established the waterfront as a space for energy production when the company acquired the wharf on the eastern side of the Charles River Bridge. On top of newly made land between the North End and the Bulfinch Triangle, the Boston Gas Light Company opened headquarters and facilities for manufacturing and distributing coal gas. The waterfront provided ideal space for the Boston Gas Light Company to receive coal shipments from England and Nova Scotia, which proved necessary by the nineteenth century because Boston did not hold significant natural coal reserves. The Boston Gas Light Company Wharf soon teemed with coal sheds, purifying houses, retort houses, and gas holder and condenser facilities and offered jobs to the growing Irish immigrant residents in the North End. By the turn of the twentieth century, additional coal-powered facilities joined the Boston Gas Light Company at the waterfront, including the Boston Elevated Railway’s Lincoln Wharf Power Station in 1901 and the Quincy Market Cold Storage warehouse at Sargent Wharf in 1906. The businesses that thrived at Boston’s North End/downtown waterfront during the long nineteenth century exemplified a “landscape of energy,” an urban pattern of haphazardly arranged works, power stations, and warehouses in proximity to the waterfront to most effectively generate and benefit from gas and electric power.

 

By drawing upon historical maps, business papers and journals, architectural plans, and other written documentation, this interdisciplinary paper discusses three industrial spaces at Boston’s downtown waterfront - the Boston Gas Light Company Wharf, the Lincoln Wharf Power Station, and the Quincy Market Cold Storage warehouse at Sargent Wharf - as case studies in energy extraction and distribution. This paper also considers the expansion of the waterfront and the investment in industrial buildings to interpret the social and economic changes during Boston’s Industrial Revolution. Scholars such as historian Michael Rawson and historical archaeologist Nancy Seasholes documented Boston’s landmaking and industrial growth at the waterfront, but close attention to the waterfront’s role in producing and distributing energy has not received adequate analysis. This paper also offers a new perspective in the history of energy in its environmental and architectural history methodology. In addition, this paper contextualizes Boston’s waterfront as a climate resilient space, emphasizing that the spaces currently threatened by flooding have a long history of contending with environmental manipulation and development. By analyzing Boston’s downtown/North End waterfront as a space where the human and nonhuman dynamically shaped one another, this paper interprets the class and economic growth encoded in the landscape of energy.

 

 

Abstract: This paper is a rough draft of the first chapter of a book I am writing about Caribbean oil refineries and their social and environmental impacts. The book focuses on five case studies, and is based on research carried out at roughly forty archies and libraries across eight countries or territories and four languages. Its first chapter explores oil companies’ motivations for building some of the world’s biggest export refineries on small Caribbean islands that were neither big producers nor big consumers of oil. Starting in the 1910s and 1920s, multinational oil companies built big refineries in Trinidad, Curaçao, and Aruba to refine oil produced in both Trinidad and Venezuela. In subsequent decades, companies expanded these refineries, and all three were vital sources of fuel for the Allies during World War II. Oil companies continued to expand these facilities thereafter, and starting in the 1950s-1960s, other companies built refineries on neighboring islands, such as Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. These facilities produced immense amounts of fuel, and both the Aruban and US Virgin Islands’ refineries were, in the 1950s and 1970s-1980s, respectively, the single biggest refineries in the world. All drew large numbers of migrants from the Caribbean and beyond, creating a diverse sociocultural landscape that one Curaçao historian described as “the world on an island.”1 The Caribbean refining industry reached its high point in the 1970s; in the 1980s, global economic downturn prompted refinery shutdowns and related economic collapse and outmigration. Enticed by the Caribbean’s favorable geographic and natural features, and stable imperial governments that promised lucrative tax exemptions and other privileges, oil companies built a gigantic refining center that came to exact a heavy toll on the health of neighboring environments and communities.