Toward a Caribbean Genealogy of Energy: Cosmologies of Energy in Modernity’s First World
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...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2025
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| In: |
Religions
Year: 2025, Volume: 16, Issue: 2 |
| Further subjects: | B
Carnival
B plantation B Modernity B Race B Ritual B anthropology of oil B Caribbean B history of science B Petro-State B energy humanities |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | 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”. |
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| ISSN: | 2077-1444 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religions
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3390/rel16020108 |