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Crosson, J.B. A Caribbean Genealogy of "Energy". Encyclopedia. Available online: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/57792 (accessed on 17 February 2025).
Crosson JB. A Caribbean Genealogy of "Energy". Encyclopedia. Available at: https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/57792. Accessed February 17, 2025.
Crosson, J. Brent. "A Caribbean Genealogy of "Energy"" Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/57792 (accessed February 17, 2025).
Crosson, J.B. (2025, January 30). A Caribbean Genealogy of "Energy". In Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.pub/entry/57792
Crosson, J. Brent. "A Caribbean Genealogy of "Energy"." Encyclopedia. Web. 30 January, 2025.
A Caribbean Genealogy of "Energy"
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The story of the rise of “energy” usually centers on the Industrial Revolution and the coal-powered steam engine in nineteenth-century Western Europe. Although it often escapes notice, the Caribbean was actually the site of the first known use of a steam engine to power industrial manufacturing (on a sugar plantation) and the world’s first oil well (drilled by a US company in southern Trinidad). These “firsts” point toward energy’s roots in colonial and imperial projects of extraction in the Caribbean, revealing the centrality of race and the plantation in understanding energy capitalism and the current climate crisis. This article traces a Caribbean-attuned genealogy of “energy”. Today, energy is taken for granted as an abstract universal, but the concept was bound to specific forms of racial governance during the transition from sugar to fossil fuels as apex capitalist commodities. In tracing this genealogy, I rewrite the first two “laws of energy” as ethico-political statements on racial governance rather than descriptions of a pre-existing natural order. Adding to scholarship that has laid bare the relationship between biological sciences and race, I argue that energy sciences have also been central to sustaining (while occluding) racialized hierarchy. I then look at conceptions of energy in perhaps the world’s oldest petro-state (Trinidad, with brief comparisons to neighboring Venezuela) to elaborate Caribbean-attuned, speculative alternatives to the “laws of energy”.

energy humanities Caribbean modernity plantation race Carnival ritual anthropology of oil Petro-State history of science
If, as Szeman and Boyer (2017, p. 3) have argued, the task of the energy humanities is “nothing less than to reimagine modernity”, this reimagining has already been achieved, in different ways, by Caribbean and Caribbean-focused thinkers. The Caribbean, in these thinkers’ estimations, is the center of the making (and potential reimagining) of the modern world (e.g., James [1938] 2001; Mintz 1966, 1985, [1974] 1989; Williams 1944; Wynter 2003). Building on this well-established scholarship, I will argue that the Caribbean is also absolutely central to the making of energy as a modern concept. If both energy and the Caribbean are pivotal to any imagining of modernity, then what we need is a Caribbean-attuned genealogy of energy as a global concept. Such a genealogy shows that energy, while taken for granted today as an abstract universal, was bound to specific forms of racial governance and a longer history of environmental crisis in the Caribbean.
The rise of the modern energy concept is usually narrated as an effect of the Industrial Revolution and the coal-powered steam engine in nineteenth-century Europe (e.g., Daggett 2019; Malm 2013, 2016). Yet, if the Caribbean was the modern world’s first world, presaging the rationalization of energy in Europe’s Industrial Revolution, then a less Eurocentric story of energy is necessary. Although it often escapes notice, the Caribbean was the site of the steam engine’s first industrial implementation (Boyer 2023, 2024; Deerr and Brooks 1940), and by the late eighteenth century, Caribbean sugar plantations were the second-largest buyers of steam engines in the world (only British cotton mills consumed more coal-powered engines) (see Tann 1998). While the history of the modern world’s reliance on the next apex fossil fuel (oil) most often begins with the 1859 Drake Oil Well in the US (e.g., Wilson et al. 2017, p. 5), a US company drilled the world’s first commercial oil well in the southern Caribbean (in Trinidad) two years earlier (Jobson 2024, p. 13). By the early 1900s, extractive oil economies were firmly entrenched in the southern Caribbean, in both Trinidad and Venezuela (ibid., p. 14; Coronil 1997).1 If the rise of the modern energy concept is indelibly bound to fossil fuel-powered machines (Daggett 2019), then the Caribbean has played a central, if underacknowledged, role in this story. The commodification and quantification of energy were brutally implemented first in the Caribbean through plantation necropolitics. Subsequent European biopolitical regimes of energy, which asserted that the consumption of greater quantities of energy was necessary for the flourishing of (certain) humans, owe an uncancellable debt for this brutal exploitation. Rather than receiving reparative justice for this debt, the Caribbean today bears some of the most brutal climate effects of Northern-led energy capitalism.
The first sections of this essay trace the roots of the modern commodification of energy to Caribbean plantations in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Following well-established Caribbean scholarship, which argues that chattel slavery funded and presaged Europe’s industrialization (e.g., James [1938] 2001; Mintz 1966, 1985, [1974] 1989; Williams 1944), I argue that these “necropolitical” (Mbembe 2019) regimes of plantation energy funded and gave birth to biopolitical regimes of energy in the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution of Europe. Thereafter, as Europe’s Industrial Revolution made the emancipation of the enslaved more economically convenient for Europeans (Williams 1944), necropolitical regimes began using the concept of entropy, forged by the new energy sciences, as a rationale for the governance of ex-enslaved people in the Caribbean (Fiori 2020). I argue that the rise of energy science is inextricable from the rise of biopolitics and that both are indebted to the racial necropolitics of plantation and post-plantation regimes.
Incisive accounts by scholars have sought to expose the “bent and broken backs” of racialized humanity, on which the “founding stones of modern industry” rest (Du Bois 1935, p. 15; see also Jobson 2021). While foregrounding the brutality of the plantation system in the Caribbean (and the West’s indebtedness to it), the second part of the essay seeks to go beyond representing Caribbean people as only bent and broken by necropolitical regimes of energy. I do so by looking at how Caribbean people in Trinidad have theorized and lived alternative cosmologies of energy, which mine and parody the logic of work identified as central to stories of the rise of the energy concept (Daggett 2019; Rowe 2023). I focus on Trinidad’s Carnival as a key contested site, where “energy” and “work” are resignified. Like the fossil fuel-powered engine, Trinidad’s Carnival season builds “energy” and “heat” (through forms of masking, parody, political critique, ritual, music, dance, and sociality) to generate “work/wuk”. This work/wuk, however, is constructed in contrast to moral codes that seek to contain energy within wage labor and respectability.
The saturation of Carnival with energy discourses certainly references Trinidad’s long-standing experience with the energy industry and the contested infrastructures of oil money (Jobson 2024, pp. 133–54), but it also presents a counter-discourse on how best to use energy. Against embodied masculinist ideals of containing vital energy for work that have been foundational to a White habitus of energy in the US or Europe (e.g., Daggett 2019; Rowe 2023), Carnivalesque celebrations of energy often conceive of it as a collectively generated, possessing force. Rather than simply a story of the self-possessed individual’s failure, “possessing energies” in the Caribbean tell counter-normative stories of how energy could be reimagined through ritual. I detail how Carnival practices (in devil masquerades or the dance form of “wuk”) parody or subvert the ethics of energy subordinated to work.
Finally, I look at a very different mobilization of the devil in petro-pessimist discourses of being possessed by infernal or unproductive energy in Trinidad and Venezuela. Iconic here is the Venezuelan cofounder of OPEC’s conception of oil as “the devil’s excrement”—a diabolical force that possesses and corrupts the state and society (Pérez Alfonzo 1976). As opposed to the Carnival ethics of energy, which revalue the devil as a symbol of rebellion, these petro-pessimist critiques see the devil as a negative, telluric energy that inspires waste and entropy (see, for example, Coronil 1987, 1997; Kappeler 2024). I look at how this notion of demonic oil draws on Christian moral hierarchies—the very same hierarchies Westerners used to demonize Africana religions and Carnival as associated with the devil and chthonic realms—that are symptomatic of a wider use of the demonic, entropic, or telluric in anti-Black racism (see, for example, Césaire [1969] 2002; Fanon [1952] 1986, p. 146). I argue that discourses of “energy conservation” and “energy waste”, while palatable to Western environmentalist sensibilities, can replay the governing logic of the second law of energy, which racializes (and demonizes) those who (allegedly) cannot use energy properly.
I structure the sections of this essay around the first two seemingly contradictory “laws of energy”: (1) energy is neither created nor destroyed, and (2) energy tends to dissipate into less useful forms. I propose Caribbean-attuned readings of these nineteenth-century “laws” within a global context that does not separate science from racial governance. I then look at how these two laws might be rewritten from the perspective of perhaps the world’s oldest petro-society (Trinidad), with brief comparisons to Venezuela.
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