2. Sucro, Carbo, Petro, or What Made This World That Needs to Be Remade

I wanted to write this short book because I’ve long wondered about the “fossil” in “fossil fuels.” What historical relations and actions are ambered in today’s petroculture? Could more clarity about what fossilizes us today open paths toward better futures? It turns out we are petrified in many ways. The concept “fossil fuel,” as noted above, is a child of European modernity. And, talk about sympoietic tangling, fossil fuels have in turn enabled pretty much everything we consider to be European and modern. But beginning our story with fossilized plants is a bit of an overshoot since they have provided energy and heat to human cultures for a very long time and, for the most part, in ecologically unproblematic ways. In China, for example, surface coal mining dates back at least 5,500 years. That means we’ll probably never know exactly how long humans have been making use of coal, tar, and peat to warm hearths and light ways. Quite possibly for as long as they have used firewood. Interestingly, the same can be said of many energy forms glossed as “renewable” today. How long have humans used the sun to warm themselves? Forever. How long have they sought to harness wind and water? Who knows. No one can tell us exactly where and when the sailboat was invented. It was probably invented in many different places on separate timelines.

How fossilized plants became fossil fuels has very little to do with fossils themselves and much more to do with the fossilization of sugar politics (what I’ll call “sucropolitics” from now on) within European colonial civilization. Those sucropolitics were a decisive accelerant for European modernity in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries and their legacies are now mineralized in the ecocidal trajectory of global capitalism. Our story begins with sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum).

Humans and sugarcane share an ancient tangle. Saccharum officinarum was first domesticated in New Guinea around 8000 BCE and then spread through several waves of diffusion across much of Asia in the millennia that followed. The army of the first great European colonist, Alexander of Macedon, is reputed to have encountered sugarcane in the Indus River valley. They gave it the name saccharon meaning a reed that could “bring forth honey without the help of bees.”1 Persia and India pioneered the making of sugar from sugarcane in the centuries before Islamic and Christian empires spread across the world. Though pleasing for its sucrose, sugar was an exotic curiosity. When Europeans encountered it in the centuries that followed, sugar was more often medicinal than culinary, and where culinary it was a precious spice rather than a staple. In his marvelous book, Sweetness and Power, anthropologist and historian Sidney Mintz writes that “Sucrose was practically unknown in northern Europe before perhaps AD 1000, and only barely known for another century or two.”2 Southern Europe had a different timeline of encounter because the Arab conquest of North Africa and Spain also brought sugarcane cultivation and sugar production to the Mediterranean from Morocco to Sicily. The Crusades put northern Europeans into sustained contact with sugar-making for the first time; religious warriors and opportunistic merchants discovered that sugar was a very lucrative commercial venture. Northern European port cities like Antwerp, Bristol, and Bordeaux established refineries for improving Mediterranean sugar as early as the thirteenth century. Even the plagues that killed half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century indirectly benefited sugar makers by driving up the commodity’s price due to labor shortages.

The table was laid out for a European sugar boom in the fifteenth century. In Iberia, where Islamic technological and economic influence had predominated for several centuries, Portugal and Spain became the leading edge of an expanding and modernizing sugar industry. The Iberians used new ship designs like the caravel to island hop from the Mediterranean out into the Atlantic, seeding new sugar ventures wherever they could along the way. The Iberians eventually migrated sugarcane as far south as São Tomé off the coast of West Africa. Founded in 1493, São Tomé became the model for the sugar plantation that the Iberians would spread westward across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and Brazil over the next century. “In terms of plantation size, the universality of slave labor, and production techniques, [São Tomé] was the Atlantic island closest to what would become the American norm. By the 1550s there were some sixty mills in operation on the island producing over 2,000 tons per annum and some 5,000 to 6,000 plantation slaves, all of whom were Africans.”3

The search for new places to grow sugarcane played a decisive role in the expansion of European exploration and colonialism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is true, of course, that the Iberians (and later the English and Dutch) sought many things from the so-called New World, including precious metals, trade routes, exotic spices, and new land to claim in the names of their monarchs. But, practically speaking, it was pursuit of the “white gold” of sugar that drove the first phase of European colonial land occupation and development. From the Madeiras to the Canaries to the West Coast of Africa to Brazil and the Caribbean, the Iberians moved from island to island in search of places where sugarcane could flourish. It is undeniable that the pursuit of sugar was a major driver of the expansion of trans-Atlantic trade. It was thus no accident that Columbus, the son-in-law of a wealthy Madeira sugar grower, carried sugarcane plantings with him on his second New World voyage in 1493. By 1516, sugarcane was being harvested, thanks to enslaved African labor, on the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo, the first sugar plantations of the western Atlantic. By 1526, Brazilian plantations were shipping commercial quantities of sugar back to Europe.

As it became more widely available, demand for sugar increased, especially among European elites. The seeming inexhaustibility of demand—much like fossil fuels today—made sugar a very attractive venture for investment, even though the capital needed to found a sugar plantation was substantial (as were the speculative risks of bankruptcy). Sugar plantations were thus something more than agricultural enterprises. From the very beginning they serviced translocal markets in the name of massive (for its time) wealth accumulation. Sugar plantations were the birthplace of industrialized agriculture and an incubator for global capitalism. As Mintz puts it, “the plantation was an absolutely unprecedented social, economic and political institution, and by no means simply an innovation in the organization of agriculture.”4 Historians have described sugar making as the most industrialized form of human activity anywhere in the world in the early modern period.5 Industry chased the seemingly inexhaustible demand for sweetness, seeking new sites and methods to expand the production of sugar and to make it more efficient and profitable.

European colonization in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was thus a sucropolitical venture. And, to truly appreciate the intensity of early modern sucropolitics one has to understand how much power was needed to convert sugarcane into sugar. There were many steps involved in the process: sugarcane had to be planted, weeded, and manured until the stalks reached maturity after about fifteen months. Then, the cane had to be cut by hand and rapidly processed within a day or two. Time was of the essence because the cane soured quickly—this meant a large labor force, roughly 100 workers per plantation. The thick, bamboo-like cuttings had to be crushed in a mill to extract juice. Workers next boiled the juice to purge impurities and to cure and crystallize it, creating molasses, muscavado, and white sugars through varying degrees of clarification. As compared with other kinds of colonial agriculture—tobacco, coffee, indigo, and even cotton—this was hard and dangerous work, especially the cutting and milling phases, where limbs were frequently lost or mangled. Deadly fires were common, as was scalding from boiling liquid.

There were many sources of power on a sugar plantation including animal labor and hydropower, where available. But mass human labor was crucial everywhere and European plantation masters relied almost exclusively upon slaves and bound servants to make sugar because few would work voluntarily in such an arduous and life-threatening environment. In Brazil, the first seventy years or so of sugar making depended upon the enslavement of Indigenous peoples. But as they retreated away from the coastal plantations, the Iberian and later Dutch, British, and French plantation masters shifted wholly to imported African slaves, whom they viewed as a kinless and landless labor force who could not escape their situation. Plantation slaves represented, in this respect, a forerunner of the mobile and expendable industrial labor force desired by modern capitalists. As one foreign observer of a Brazilian engenho (sugar mill) described, “they use their slaves very strictly in making them work immeasurably, and the worse they use them, the more useful they find them.”6 Geographer Kathryn Yusoff puts it well: in their colonization of the New World, Europeans violently organized “human property as extractable energy properties.”7

Among its lesser-known inventions, the sugar plantation may also have birthed the “bullshit job,” make-work aimed simply at keeping workers busy, exhausted, and docile. As historian Richard Dunn explains, “The planter needs a large labor force at crop time, but not during the slow six months of the year from July through December. Yet the seventeenth-century slave-owning planter had to keep his laborers fully occupied in the slow months, as well as in crop time, to forestall mischief and rebellion. So he put them to work in the fields with hoes instead of horse-drawn plows . . . Men did the work of animals. Such tasks as planting and cultivating performed on English or North American farms by horse-driven plows and harrows, were carried out in the Indies entirely by hand.”8

Alongside the constitution of a modern labor force, the engenhos stimulated the use of mechanical technology in the conversion of natural resources into wealth. In the early 1600s the ancient, or at best medieval, technology borrowed from the Mediterranean sugar industry saw New World innovations like the vertical three-roller mill that as much as tripled sugar production per worker.9 Like its Spanish cognate, ingenio, the word engenho meant both machine and ingenuity. As historian John Crowley writes, Europeans consistently deflected attention away from the predominant role of slavery in sugar making, preferring to conceptualize it instead as one of Europe’s great technological achievements: “Sugar fascinated many early modern Europeans because machines made it, and they loved machines.”10 Sugar machinery became a universal spectacle of European technological prowess and superiority.

Sucropolitics thus played its part in solidifying the idea that technology was the leading edge of progress, thereby discounting the contributions of human and animal labor to productivity and profit. As the Dutch and British became involved in sugar making in Brazil and the Caribbean in the seventeenth century, they brought with them artists who produced highly detailed representations of the machine works of engenhos. More than just artworks, these were technical illustrations and industrial blueprints, creating portable modes of knowledge that could be utilized by would-be entrepreneurs to expand the plantation complex to new sites.11

And spread they did. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, every European country with a navy sought its place on the sugar frontier. Intra-European rivalries, military interventions, and political intrigue spun like cotton candy around the sugar boom. First the Dutch, and later the British and French, featured sugar centrally in their imperial ambitions. Technical and economic innovations multiplied. The Dutch West India Company helped pioneer vertical integration as a capitalist strategy in the mid-seventeenth century, controlling all aspects of sugar making from production to transportation to commercialization.12 But the expansion of British colonial ventures in the Caribbean was pivotal. As Mintz puts it, “England fought the most, conquered the most colonies, imported the most slaves . . . and went furthest and fastest in creating a plantation system.”13

The British colony of Barbados overtook Brazil as the epicenter of sugar production in the latter half of the seventeenth century. English planters joined the vanguard of European scientific, technological, and economic innovation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.14 An experimental steam engine was designed and put to work in a Jamaican sugar mill in 1768. This was the first known application of steam power to the operation of machinery in manufacturing.15 And it happened almost a decade before the Watt engine was commercialized in Europe. Early “fire engines,” as they were then called, replaced mules rather than human labor, but the logic of intensifying production was everywhere consistent. Barbadian plantations were larger and more capital intensive than their Iberian forebears and they pioneered a system of “gang labor with its lock-step discipline and liberal use of the whip to force slaves to work as hard as possible.”16 The systematic violence of field and mill labor extended to every aspect of slave life, which was more often than not filled with hunger, abuse, and torment at the hands of plantation masters and overseers.17

The aim of the violence succeeded. Productivity in the British West Indies far outpaced Iberian plantations in a matter of decades, more than doubling exports in the 1660s alone. The price of sugar began to drop as it became more readily available. European per capita sugar consumption more than quadrupled across the eighteenth century, establishing it firmly in the diets of every European social class. Colonial sucropolitics crested in the late eighteenth century and united political and economic power within the British and French empires. As Mintz explains:

The English people came to view sugar as essential; supplying them with it became as much a political as an economic obligation. At the same time, the owners of the immense fortunes created by the labor of millions of slaves stolen from Africa, on millions of acres of the New World stolen from Indians—wealth in the form of commodities like sugar, molasses, and rum to be sold to Africans, Indians, colonials and the British working class alike—had become even more solidly attached to the centers of power in English society at large. Many individual merchants, planters, and entrepreneurs lost out, but the long-term economic successes of the new commodity markets at home were never in doubt after the mid-seventeenth century. What sugar meant, from this vantage point, was what all such colonial production, trade and metropolitan consumption came to mean: the growing strength and solidity of the empire and of the classes that dictated its policies.18

Mintz argues that Caribbean sugar plantations constituted the first truly modernized societies in the world where people, mobilized through violence and oppression, were “thrust into remarkably industrial settings for their time.”19 The sugar industry also created the economic basis for the European merchant and commercial classes to challenge, gradually, the monolith of the feudal aristocratic order. Many historians have depicted plantations as a curious blend of industrial and agricultural, capitalist, and feudal logics.20 The contradiction disappears when one considers plantations as homunculi of the industrial-capitalist order that would flourish in the nineteenth century. This argument has been elaborated recently by Haraway, who sees the plantation as a herald of many aspects of modern economic life, from monoculture to exploitative labor and machinic relations, “The plantation really depends on very intense forms of labor slavery, including also machine labor slavery, a building of machines for exploitation and extraction of earthlings. . . . it is also important to include the forced labor of nonhumans—plants, animals, and microbes—in our thinking.”21 Plantation masters commensurated these various forms of labor through the machinic metaphor of clockwork. Samuel Martin’s famous mid-eighteenth century plantation manual was explicit: “Negroes, cattle, mules, and horses are the nerves of a sugar-plantation, for the success of the whole consists chiefly in this, as in a well-constructed machine, upon the energy and right disposition of the main springs, or primary parts.”22 The machine infrastructures of European modernity owed as much if not more to the New World than to the Old.

This is true for the philosophical infrastructures of European modernity too. Sucropolitics fed into the European Enlightenment and modern liberal philosophy in a variety of ways. John Locke’s liberalism, for example, preached industry and rationality as the basis of property claims. This equation created a rather convenient philosophical pretext for dispossessing non-Europeans of their lands and resources for failing to develop those lands and resources properly. For all its discourse on the necessity of liberty, European liberal philosophy was aggressively silent on the topic of New World slavery despite its obvious impact on European society from wealth through to diet. Slavery was a moral dilemma, unless one could somehow convince oneself that the slaves were subhuman. The eighteenth-century French liberal philosopher Montesquieu mordantly commented, “It is impossible for us to assume that these people [African slaves] are men, because if we assumed they were men, one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christians.”23

Yet, as political theorist Susan Buck-Morss writes, there is no way that the European political discussions of freedom and slavery in the eighteenth century were disconnected from “the economic practice of slavery—the systematic, highly sophisticated capitalist enslavement of non-Europeans as a labor force in the colonies—[which] was increasing quantitatively and intensifying qualitatively to the point that by the mid-eighteenth century it came to underwrite the entire economic system of the West, paradoxically facilitating the global spread of the very Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to it.”24

These contradictions came to a head in the Haitian Revolution. Saint-Domingue had, by the mid-eighteenth century, exceeded Barbados and every other Caribbean colony in terms of its sugar productivity. Beating the British at their own game of brutal economies of scale, the French colony had more sugar mills (450) and more enslaved Africans (117,000) and was exporting more sugar than the British West Indies combined.25 The sugar juggernaut grew and grew and, by the 1780s, Saint-Domingue had nearly 800 sugar plantations and 425,000 slaves, exporting nearly 50 percent of all sugar consumed in the entire world. Saint-Domingue was considered to be the wealthiest and most productive European colony anywhere, generating an annual tax base of 1 billion livres (about $1.5 billion in today’s currency). The wealth of much of the French middle and upper classes depended directly or indirectly upon colonial trade with Saint-Domingue.26 When news of the French Revolution reached Saint-Domingue in 1789, the wealthy slave colony’s days were numbered. In 1791, after much secret planning and networking, an uprising of some 50,000 plantation slaves and the burning of hundreds of plantations signaled the beginning of the end of colonial sucropolitics.

The Haitian republic took shape with all the might and desire of Europe mustering to reclaim dominion over its wealthiest of territories. Despite its existential precarity, the first Haitian constitution of 1801 not only abolished slavery but any distinction between men “other than those based on virtue and talent.”27 In this, Buck-Morss comments, “the black Jacobins of Saint-Domingue surpassed the metropole in actively realizing the Enlightenment goal of human liberty.”28 The Haitian anthropologist and historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot observes though that the Haitian achievement was ignored by Europeans and their colonists: “The Haitian Revolution was the ultimate test to the universalist pretensions of both the French and the American revolutions. And they both failed.”29 There was no debate in 1791 of the right of Black slaves to achieve self-determination. Quite the contrary, the events of 1791 to 1804 proved “unthinkable” in the framework of contemporary European thought.

As punishment for its audacity, Haiti was subjected by European governments and bankers to what was likely the longest and most intensive campaign of odious debt bondage in human history. That punishment explains how Haiti transformed from the wealthiest colony to the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere. But the depth of Haitian sacrifice fundamentally disrupted the political tolerance for plantation slavery and abolitionist forces on both sides of the Atlantic grew in strength throughout the nineteenth century.

The plantation overlords sensed that the end of their mobile, expendable workforce was coming. Their response was partly defensive; as with fossil fuel overlords today, they sought to delay change for as long as possible through every conceivable rearguard action, including investing heavily in those plantation colonies like Brazil and Cuba where slavery endured the longest (until the 1880s). But they also prepared for a slaveless future by experimenting with technologies that could reduce the human labor power needed for sugar making and other forms of industrialized agriculture. Cuba in particular became highly intensive and innovative in terms of the application of steam-powered technology to sugar production. By the mid-nineteenth century, “one of the largest markets of machinery makers and engineering firms in Europe and the United States was in the Cuban sugar plantations.”30 And technological innovations in the Caribbean—steam evaporation for example—circulated back to Europe and modernized industry there.31 The nature of sugar making had changed profoundly. It remained a high energy enterprise, but one that was defined increasingly by engineering and technology. The role of human labor changed too, shifting from “being viewed as a metabolic resource alongside the planter’s pack animals to an industrial reserve modeled on the power of James Watt’s steam engine.”32

Here is the first inflection point in our fossil hunting. The sucropolitics that had enabled so much of the making of European modernity mutated in the early nineteenth century, both catalyzing and then being absorbed by, a new world of industrial machinery. Much of that machinery was steam-powered and much of that steam was generated by burning coal. I call this new arrangement of fossil energy and machinic powers, “carbopolitics.” Carbopolitics inherited much from colonial sucropolitics—not least an emphasis on efficient industrial productivity and relentless growth. But the fossil-machine complex was by no means limited to the production of agricultural commodities. Carbopolitics swelled to involve the industrial production of a dizzying variety of things; indeed, making more and new commodities became its dominant mode of operation. Machines provided the power of mass productivity without the nuisance of having to manage masses of unruly humans who seemed increasingly inclined and able to liberate themselves from master-slave relationships.

It was neither obvious nor inevitable that the age of machines would be dominated by steam power, however. Britain, by far the most advanced industrial economy of its time, opened the nineteenth century with waterwheels established as the primary source of machine energy for industrial manufacture, particularly textile mills. British textiles were already fully interwoven into global trade networks by that point. No cotton grew in Britain itself, but Britain became an industrial epicenter for creating cloth and clothing from cotton grown in its American, Egyptian, and Indian colonies and then exporting those goods to its colonies and elsewhere in Europe. The artisanal spinning and weaving cultures of mid-eighteenth century Britain, expansive though they were, constituted a cottage industry whose limits to productivity inhibited the expansion and intensification of global trade. So, just as they had in seventeenth-century Barbados, the owners of capital and land sought new machines and forms of labor discipline to extract more product out of their resources. The spinning jenny was invented in the 1760s by James Hargreaves, who had to keep the machine secret for some time to avoid being mobbed by angry spinsters rightly foreseeing the jenny’s destruction of their way of life. An even more powerful invention was Richard Arkwright’s water frame that used a water wheel to spin cotton in a fraction of the time required by the jenny, let alone hand tools. When Arkwright founded his first hydropowered cotton spinning mill at Cromford in 1771, it was quite literally a watershed moment in what we retrospectively call the “industrial revolution.” Not only was Cromford the first fully machine-powered mill, but it was also the first to operate continuously, round the clock in two twelve-hour shifts.

Water machines massively impacted the value and organization of labor, eroding the economic basis of cottage textiles in a few decades and creating a new class of industrial workers whose lives would be intimately tangled with the working and management of machines. Later dubbed by Karl Marx “the proletariat,” these wage laborers often lived in factory colonies and struggled with the machine world of industrial production, engaging in frequent acts of sabotage and strike to wrest back power from the industrial apparatus and the “greater sense of time-thrift among the improving capitalist employers.”33 The Luddite rebellion from 1811 to 1816 exemplified the uneasy labor-capital relations of the period. Luddites were a group of textile workers who recognized how machines negated their craft skills, allowing artisans to be replaced by less skilled workers. They radicalized and organized; at night they would descend upon factories to destroy equipment and occasionally assault mill owners. Eventually, British soldiers had to be called away from fighting Napoleon to suppress the rebellion, which gives one a sense of its ferocity and depth of popular support.

Waterwheels had advantages over steam engines in that while both involved significant capital outlays for construction, waterwheels ran for free while steam engines needed a constant supply of coal to burn. Plus, waterwheels ran cleanly without the nuisance of smoke. Coal smoke was very familiar to Britons, especially Londoners, who had been burning it to heat homes since the 1560s. Coal smoke contributed to the legendary, deadly smog that enveloped London—the world’s first anti-smog treatise (Fumifugium) was penned by John Evelyn in 1661 to deplore the atmospheric conditions of the British capitol, “That this Glorious and Antient City . . . should wrap her stately head in Clowds of Smoake and Sulphur, so full of Stink and Darknesse, I deplore with just Indignation.”34 Yet, watermills had to be built where rivers were most advantageous and these were often in areas far removed from labor supply, necessitating the costly building and maintenance of company colonies. Steam engines, comparatively, could be situated anywhere and when they were positioned near dense urban settlements, they brought labor and capital into a convenient proximity that drove down labor costs dramatically. Moreover, whereas rivers both run dry and flood, “coal was utterly alien to seasons,”35 allowing capital to disentangle itself from natural limits and variations, guaranteeing productive powers that could match the round-the-clock ethos of productivity that waterwheels had pioneered. Coal thus proved advantageous to capitalism in its flexibility in both time and space.

It was not until the 1830s that steam engines gained the advantage over waterwheels in Britain. But once they did, European industrial capitalism did not look back at hydropower for several decades. The fossil fuel era was truly born. By pairing machine labor with the impressive energy density of coal, carbopolitics created the infrastructure for new scales, speeds, and intensities of productive growth. Plus, they offered a new form of revenue, as fossil fuels are a rent in addition to an energy source. While the sun and wind and water cannot be commodified, with fuel one can both sell the machine itself and then the means to power the machine separately.

The productive bounty of this expanding machine world left no aspect of daily life in the mid-nineteenth century untouched. Ian Barbour writes of a new “democracy of things” suffusing the American standard of living during this period:

The yardstick of a superior standard of living included not only basic necessities, but increasingly items that made life convenient, comfortable, and “progressive.” Items unimagined in 1800, or extremely expensive in 1815, were soon taken for granted as the rightful possessions of a large middle class. Bent pieces of iron were replaced by safety pins, wax paper was superseded by large cheap panes of window glass. The traditional flint and steel fire starter was replaced by the newfangled safety match. Machinery now turned out cotton textiles, carpeting, shoes, “patent” furniture, and table-ware; wallpaper became the style instead of paint or leather wall covering. To the list must be added cast-iron stoves, spring mattresses, flush toilets, gaslights, silver-plated tableware, and even rollershades for windows. Americans of all classes came to believe they were entitled to these benefits produced by machines run by steam and water, and they wanted more.36

A feeling of entitlement to more and better machine-produced commodities has characterized modern northern life ever since. This feeling is closely allied with the idea that massive expenditures of energy are both necessary and desirable to allow the machine world to produce more and improved commodities.

If a single machine could epitomize the revolutionary impact of carbopolitics, it was the locomotive. The first experimental steam-powered locomotives were developed by the Cornish miner and inventor Richard Trevithick in the first decade of the nineteenth century. With attention-grabbing names like “Puffing Devil” and “Catch me if you can,” the first generation of “traveling engines,” as they were then called, exploded not seldom; and when they functioned, it was mostly for entertainment or publicity purposes. A few years later though, Trevithick’s engine would be successfully put to work in the first paddle wheel steamboat. Meanwhile, the first terrestrial locomotive put to industrial work was invented by George Stephenson in 1814 to haul coal at the Killingworth mine in Northeast England. It was named for the fiery Prussian general Blücher who helped defeat Napoleon, ran at only four mph and was scarcely more efficient than using horses. Still, in just a few years, improved designs made traveling engines an increasingly essential technology for collieries. The original purpose of locomotives was to move coal not people; locomotive engines burned coal to move coal, to burn more coal, in an endless cycle.

Yet, once the carbopolitical infrastructure of rail was laid, it adapted to a thousand other purposes of transport, travel, and trade. More than this, historian Leo Marx emphasizes, the steam-powered “iron horse” had an enormous cultural impact, incarnating public awareness of “modernity.” It gave voice to a new “rhetoric of the technological sublime” that distributed powers, previously only accorded to God, to technology’s powers of progress in the mastery of nature.37 Contemporaries waxed eloquent about steam’s ability to annihilate space and time, opening the possibility of fast travel to the masses. Some even pondered the moral dilemmas that would arise as steam power gradually relieved humanity of the necessity of physical labor.38 Could humanity be virtuous without labor? The cult of the mechanical inventor that flourished in the nineteenth century partly addressed this problem by holding forth the idea that mental labor would become the future of human productive activity, an early premonition of late twentieth-century talk of a post-industrial “knowledge economy” and paeans to digital culture and the genius of Silicon Valley.

But the moral problem of work in the era of industrial steam power was a thorny question. Political theorist Cara Daggett argues that coal and its steam machines helped shape a new science, thermodynamics, whose foundational reconceptualization of the universe in terms of energy and entropy challenged the authority of Christian religious doctrine.39 The scientific roots of thermodynamics stretch back to the seventeenth century and engineering research on how to make the safest and most efficient use of steam pressure began in the eighteenth century. But it was not until the proliferation of steam-powered machines in the second quarter of the nineteenth century that thermodynamics came into its own as a science of energy systems. “Energy,” a term which in its Aristotelian origin meant a sense of dynamic virtue, came to be equated with the capacity for a system’s work upon its environment, not unlike a machine engaged in some industrial activity.

It was a sensibility fitting for a time in which coal-powered machines were coming to do a lot of work in the world. But the first law of thermodynamics—the constancy of energy within a closed system less the work done upon its surroundings—was complemented by a second law that held that it was a natural tendency of energy systems to dissipate, a phenomenon known as entropy. Systems were not actually as closed to their environments as an engineer might hope; they needed constant new energy inputs—fuel—to maintain their operation. Daggett explains that the new science of energy offered a cosmological reimagination hitherto restricted to religious doctrine. It was a vision of the universe in which the course of work and progress was challenged by the propensity of decay: “Entropy speaks of limits, of the march of time, and of lost opportunities; it is a reminder that the Sun itself, the fuel for the Earth, will indeed run down. Entropy underlined the promise of technological progress with a certain pessimism, a darker sensibility.”40

Victorian culture eventually reconciled thermodynamics and religion, energy and entropy, by embracing the fight against entropy as a divine energetic mission for humanity in much the same way that Lockean liberalism understood private property and industry as divine-willed moral goods. “If Earth’s energy was running down—a tragic vision—then the planet could not be a reflection of God’s perfection, nor a stable backdrop for human dramas. Rather the Earth was a flawed system to be worked upon and improved by humans.”41 Humanity had a job to do, not unlike an engineer’s; we were to work together with our machines to bring a less entropic world into being. Science, industry, and Protestant faith converged in cultural support for improving productivity, efficiency, measurement, and standardization, while everywhere opposing leisure and waste. Coal was considered a divine tool and sign of grace that enabled the machinic improvement of the world. The onward advance of industry and the spread of machinic European civilization were necessary to make good use of all the coal in the world. The last quarter of the nineteenth century in particular saw British carbopolitics reorienting itself toward globalization and coal exports, following the spread of steam machines and imperial power across the world, in a process that historian On Barak aptly calls “coalonialism.” By 1900, 85 percent of British international trade was in coal.42

If sucropolitics achieved its most advanced form in Saint-Domingue then peak carbopolitics arrived in a coalition of steam, steel, and electricity that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the “second industrial revolution.” The difference between iron and steel is the addition of carbon, but too much carbon and the metal becomes brittle. To find the sweet spot between strength and ductility that gives steel its massive material advantage, the management of carbon and other impurities is necessary. This was an expensive undertaking until Henry Bessemer and Robert Mushet developed a process for the mass production of (relatively) low-cost steel in the 1850s by speeding up the iron-to-steel conversion time from a day to under twenty minutes. Bessemer’s explicit objective was to improve the quality of metal used in guns and artillery. Indeed, Bessemer steel led to a revolution in weapons manufacture that gave the British a decisive military advantage in their imperial expansion in the late nineteenth century. In the United States, Bessemer steel was first used more often for ship building and railways, and by the 1880s, for the structural beams of skyscrapers. Still, the carbopolitical nexus of coal and steel enabled the rise of new industrial and imperial powers in the United States and Prussia. Industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and Alfred Krupp pioneered the vertical integration of steel industry and the creation of a new wave of company towns reminiscent of the communities tied to British hydropower at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Late carbopolitics saw industrialization and militarization expanding hand in hand, creating a new world order occupied by Euroamerican coal, machines, and steel.

Electricity had a more ambivalent relationship to coal than steel did, but became just as world-shaping over time. Industrial hydroelectric facilities appeared in Europe and the United States a few years before Thomas Edison opened his coal-powered thermoelectric Pearl Street Station in New York City. Although the “war of the currents” between DC and AC power systems has been well documented, a geographic competition between thermoelectrics and hydroelectrics guided the spread of electrical systems across the world. In the United States, for example, over a quarter of electricity supply came from hydropower until the Second World War. In many countries in Latin America, hydropower became, and remains to this day, the dominant mode of electrical supply. Yet, the carbopolitical infrastructures already in place by the time electrification began to spread in the 1880s drew electricity into their web as well, guaranteeing coal a strong stake in electricity generation, a partnership that endures today.

While early electrical systems tended to be local, supplying a community or even just a single factory, the military build-up to the First World War in Europe and North America led to the creation of regionally interconnected power grids to increase the availability and resilience of electricity supply. After the war, those large grids constituted an infrastructural surplus that needed increased demand to function. “The extremely large electric generating stations that were built to fill the pressing and unusual needs for electric power during the World War I survived the war and became, in a sense, a solution in search of a problem.”43 That meant expanding domestic consumption alongside industrial consumption. The price per kilowatt hour of electricity dropped nearly 80 percent between 1900 and 1920 in the United States, meaning that the artificial lighting that had once been restricted to public displays could now spark a domestic revolution in artificial lighting too, replacing gas lamps and allowing access to a widening variety of electric appliances and conveniences in the 1920s and 1930s. Public buildings, particularly theaters, came to be cooled by electrified air conditioning systems. Artificial lighting and air-conditioning together extended the appearance of human control over time and space. Practically speaking, they made it easier to develop the productive powers of humans and machines without regard to environmental conditions. Whole new cities swelled on the basis of carbopolitical cooling systems. And, predictably, bright lights and climatized rooms became new symbols of advancing modernity and its conquest of nature.44

The mid-twentieth century saw the second inflection point in our story: the decline of carbopolitics and the rise of petropolitics. As with the previous transition a century beforehand, petropolitics did not simply replace carbopolitics any more than carbopolitics replaced sucropolitics. Each energopolitical regime helps infrastructure the next, and the successor absorbs and extends certain logics of its predecessor, even as it develops its own distinctive qualities and means of world-making. Petro contains within itself active residues of carbo and sucro, just as eukaryotic cells contain within themselves endosymbionts like mitochrondria and chloroplasts, lifeforms that were absorbed by other lifeforms and developed generative roles within them. The analogy is apt, I think, because it is important to recognize petroculture operating at the cellular level of modern life.

Yet there was no teleology in the passage from carbo to petro in the sense that the expanding dominion of petropolitics coincided with the emergence of a genuine rival in the form of nuclear-powered electricity. Atomic energy was greeted with enormous cultural enthusiasm and imagination in the early 1940s.45 Yet, after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear power was inevitably intertwined with immense fear as well as promise, especially in the militarized context of the Cold War and its constant threat of nuclear annihilation. Nonetheless, the 1950s and 1960s saw serious efforts to reimagine nuclear energy in terms of safety and reliability, even for household use. Military applications continued to predominate though; and a wave of high-profile nuclear accidents in the 1970s and 1980s, including Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, stirred public opinion against nuclear energy. Although a few countries like France embraced nucleopolitics, its advance was stalled for decades in most, allowing petropolitics to further extend and solidify its hold over modern life.

As with coal, humanity’s use of petroleum had humble, ancient origins. As the second most abundant liquid on the planet after water, petroleum was no secret in antiquity. It doubtless came to human attention at first through natural oil seeps and tar balls. Asphalt and bitumen were put to use across the world as adhesives, caulk and mortar, in shipbuilding and architecture. Lighter oils were burned for light and heat, notably in China. A remarkable number of cultures found medicinal benefits in consuming petroleum.

Yet modern petropolitics began to take shape in the late 1850s when the world’s first commercial oil wells were dug by James Miller Williams in Ontario and Edwin Drake in Pennsylvania. No one appears to have imagined that oil would supplant coal as the dominant fuel for steam machines. At the time, petroleum was burned in lamps and used for lubricants as a partial replacement, alongside kerosene, for dwindling supplies of whale oil. Things remained much the same for the next forty years, until the Spindletop gusher at Beaumont, Texas in January 1901 and the discovery soon thereafter of massive oil reserves in other salt dome formations in the region. As a Texan energy boom took shape, it became conceivable that oil could be made available in quantities and costs that could lead to its mass consumption as a fuel. Nonetheless, reading newspapers of the early boom era, it is clear how even oil boosters felt saddled with the inevitable continuity of carbopolitics. An executive of a newly founded oil company wrote to the Houston Daily Post in March 1901 to express his opinion that, even with the rich Texan finds, the idea that oil could ever supplant coal was “nonsensical”: “The ideality of oil as a fuel can not be denied, but the statement that it will finally displace coal to any extent is a mere delusion.”46 The same article advised against trying to shovel oil into a stove, a sign of just how deeply fuel use was defined by expectations and practices associated with coal.

What ultimately turned petropower from fantasy into reality was another carbopolitical invention: the automobile. The automobile has a surprisingly deep and complicated history, one that intertwined with the locomotive for many decades. A rail-less automotive machine was a serious aspiration of inventors no later than the end of the eighteenth century. The locomotive won out for both engineering and infrastructural reasons and was safeguarded by inconvenient legal measures like the British Locomotive Act of 1865 that required that non-rail automobiles travel at a maximum speed of four mph and be preceded by a man waving a red flag. Still, the aspiration of automobility endured; the liberation of fast machinic travel beyond pre-determined routes was a perfect expression of carboliberalism and its thirst for machinic freedoms. A wide variety of experimental automobility technologies evolved in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Many were steam-powered, some burned a variety of kinds of oil; there was even a hydrogen fuel prototype. These early vehicles were slow—the winner of the first city-to-city U.S. automobile race in 1878 won with an average speed of six mph, a human jogging pace. And they frequently broke down. The first internal combustion engines appeared in the 1870s and these often utilized gasoline, which until then had been little more than an unwanted by-product of making kerosene for lamps. In the late 1880s the first functional electric car prototypes arrived and ushered in a lively competition between steam-, electric-, and gasoline-powered vehicles over the next twenty years.

The first U.S. national automobile show—with 160 different models on display—took place in Madison Square Garden in November 1900 just two months before the Spindletop gusher. At the time, most American automobiles were steam-powered and industrialists like Albert Pope believed that electric vehicles offered the safest, most reliable, and cleanest mode of travel. Pope was especially skeptical about the prospects of gasoline vehicles; “you can’t get people to sit over an explosion,” he said.47 Yet, by 1917, of the 3.5 million registered automobiles in the United States, less than 2 percent of them were electric. And steam-powered vehicles had all but vanished from American streets. In the intervening years, the combination of Henry Ford’s mass production system and technical improvements in gasoline engines made them the cheapest and most powerful automobiles on the market. Still, Ford’s wife herself drove an electric car. Electric cars were simpler, safer, and cleaner to operate, but their lead-acid batteries limited them to local use; gasoline cars meanwhile could travel three times faster and five times farther before refilling. Their seemingly limitless capacity for travel was more fitting for a society obsessed with expansion. Plus, with the abundance of Texas crude, gasoline fuel cost a fraction of what it had in 1900. Another sympoietic tangle took shape. Oil helped bring the automobile into the democracy of things; the popularity of automobiles created a growth market for oil that justified further expansion of supply. And so it has gone ever since.

As petroleum became an increasingly essential fossil fuel, new infrastructures of supply and resource frontiers of extraction emerged. Petroleum had certain material advantages over coal. Rather than needing to send humans below ground, often into very dangerous conditions, to acquire fossils and haul them forth as fuel, petroleum seemed eager to reach the surface all on its own. And, even after high pressure geysers subsided, oil could be brought to the surface very effectively using similar kinds of steam-powered pumping technologies to those that hitherto cleared water out of coal mines. By the 1880s, petroleum was harvested mostly by machine labor like pump jacks—in a way, it was even more carbopolitical than coal itself.

Yet oil’s lack of reliance upon human labor distinguished it from the dominant carbopolitics of the era. Political theorist Timothy Mitchell describes how the political activity of coal miners helped catalyze and consolidate social democracy in the late nineteenth century. The life-or-death fraternity that developed underground, far away from managers and owners, translated to incredibly strong political alliances above ground that propelled the union movement forward. The material character of coal helped too. Coal was needed everywhere to run steam machines, but it was only mined in certain areas. Locomotives and rail lines moved coal around the world, but in ways that were susceptible to worker’s control. Mitchell writes, “Great volumes of energy now flowed along narrow, purpose-built channels. Specialised bodies of workers were concentrated at the end-points and main junctions of these conduits, operating the cutting equipment, lifting machinery, switches, locomotives and other devices that allowed stores of energy to move along them. Their position and concentration gave them opportunities, at certain moments, to forge a new kind of political power.”48 Beginning in the 1880s, coal workers exercised this power often and often effectively, becoming a militant tip of the spear for what Mitchell describes as “carbon democracy.” Where coal workers could establish and defend choke points in critical fuel flows, they were able to exert immense pressure on dominant political and capitalist institutions until they eventually acceded to labor and welfare reforms. The social democratic compromise of the period was an effort to stave off a full-blown turn toward unionist socialism.

This uneasy standoff endured until the Second World War when a massive expansion of global petroleum production for the war effort created the possibility of shifting the energetic basis of the machine world from coal to oil once and for all. Mitchell argues that the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 sought to reorganize the global economy on the basis of oil flows and petropolitics after the Second World War, fundamentally linking American (and one might add Soviet) empire to the expansion of the oil industry and the proliferation of petroculture. Mitchell characterizes the post-war understanding of “the economy”—an infinitely expanding field of transactions—as itself a “petroknowledge.”49 It assumed that the world possessed an infinitely cheap and inexhaustible energy resource—oil—capable of fueling the endless expansion of national economies. In this sense, the expectation of constant growth as a bellwether of economic health is equivalently a petroknowledge (although growth is likewise a carboknowledge and a sucroknowledge, as we have seen).

The fantasy of infinite, cheap, consequence-free fuel use in the middle of the twentieth century was short-lived, however. By the 1970s it was challenged by ever more frequent and disastrous oil spills on the one hand and by the disruption of Anglo-American imperial control over the world’s oil supply on the other. After the formation of OPEC and the oil shocks, the volatility of oil soared and petropolitics increasingly militarized on the global stage, drawing the United States and its allies into a forever war to retain control over the energy resources of the Middle East. At the same time, green political movements formed that drew attention to the negative environmental and social externalities of fossil and nuclear energy. A few voices even rose to call for “degrowth” to avoid the ecological overshoot of global industrial civilization.50

But petropolitics were so deeply rooted by then that a little pruning here and there did little to disturb the network as a whole. In the 1950s and the 1960s an “American way of life” had taken shape that was, in the words of Stephanie LeMenager, “ultradeep petroleum culture.”51 In stark contrast to the “oil curse” experienced at many sites of petroleum extraction, American petroculture was all about the joys of easy oil: fast cars, economic growth, military power, and, above all, a glittering sprawl of new commodities and opportunities for consumption. Despite the truly profligate relationship to energy that the post-war American way of life encouraged, there was still more oil available than could be combusted in vehicles, no matter how large and heavy and inefficient one made them. Alongside automobility, an industry of petrochemicals developed as a way of avoiding waste and finding new income streams for fossil fuel derivatives. Petrochemicals began to infiltrate all kinds of product streams in the mid-twentieth century ranging from fertilizers and insecticides to household cleaners and beauty products, leaving little in everyday life untouched.52 Perhaps the most extensive achievement of petrochemicals, though, was its conquest of the domain of plastics.

Where carbopolitics sought strength and ductility, petropolitics enabled plasticity alongside mobility. Petroleum was plastic in two senses: first it combined high energy density with a lighter liquid form, making its routes of movement more flexible and adaptable than with coal. Second, petroleum derivatives were materially polymorphous and able to be reshaped for nearly any imaginable purpose. Petrochemicals created a whole new material substrate for commodities, allowing goods to become cheaper still, more obsolescent, more individualized, and ready to wear and to eat. As petroplastics became widely available in the 1950s, Roland Barthes ebulliently described them as “the stuff of alchemy” and the “very idea of . . . infinite transformation.”53 I remember the thrill of plastic clearly from my own youth in the 1970s. We frankly didn’t have a lot of excess stuff in my family. But when my grandparents handed me a copy of the Sears holiday catalog and told me to choose a few things, I spent days, perhaps even weeks, poring over the colorful images of plastic toys. And what was the antithesis of a beautiful plastic toy at Christmas—the high holiday of American petroculture—other than the lump of coal in the stocking? Coal appeared to possess none of oil’s magical shapeshifting properties.

Yet, as one might expect, the history of plastics has layers. The development of plastics started with the use of natural materials that had intrinsic plastic properties, such as shellac, rubber balls, and chewing gum. Then came the chemical modification of natural materials such as rubber, nitrocellulose, collagen, and galalite. Finally, the wide range of completely synthetic materials that we would recognize as modern plastics started to be developed in the nineteenth century. One of the earliest examples was invented by Alexander Parkes in 1855, who named his invention Parkesine (or celluloid), which became an important material for photography and filmmaking. Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) was first polymerized between 1838–1872. A key breakthrough came in 1907, when Belgian-American chemist Leo Baekeland created Bakelite, the first synthetic, mass-produced plastic. Baekeland used phenol, an acid derived, as fate would have it, from coal tar. His work opened the floodgates to a torrent of now-familiar petrochemically derived synthetic plastics: polystyrene in 1929, polyester in 1930, polyvinylchloride (PVC) and polythene in 1933, nylon in 1935, materials that were considered the height of glamour.

The Second World War drove the industry’s growth, as petroplastics were deployed in everything from military vehicles to radar insulation. But at the end of the war the petrochemical industry faced the same glut that the petroleum industry did. The overdeveloped petroplastics industry worked to create a mass plastic consumer goods market, with new products such as Tupperware and materials like polyethylene terephthalate (PET)—what makes up your favorite plastic soda bottle—showing how versatile and useful and cheap these new materials could be. Plastics rapidly became a signature material of petroculture just as petroculture became indelibly plastic.

Plasticity, alongside automobility, remains a definitive aspect of petropower. It is also what makes petroculture so difficult to resist. One is no longer only resisting a fossil fuel but instead a fundamental aspect of one’s material environment. Sixty percent of fibers circulating in the global economy are now synthetic fibers derived from oil. Here is a list of objects you might have in your possession today that likely contain petroleum derivatives: ballpoint pens, football cleats, upholstery, sweaters, boats, insecticides, bicycle tires, sports car bodies, nail polish, fishing lures, dresses, tires, golf bags, perfumes, cassettes, dishwasher parts, tool boxes, shoe polish, motorcycle helmets, caulking, petroleum jelly, transparent tape, xboxes, faucet washers, antiseptics, clothesline, curtains, food preservatives, basketballs, soap, vitamin capsules, antihistamines, purses, shoes, dashboards, cortisone, deodorant, footballs, putty, dyes, panty hose, refrigerant, percolators, life jackets, rubbing alcohol, linings, skis, tv cabinets, shag rugs, electrician’s tape, tool racks, car battery cases, epoxy, paint, mops, slacks, insect repellent, oil filters, umbrellas, yarn, fertilizers, hair coloring, roofing, toilet seats, fishing rods, lipstick, denture adhesive, linoleum, ice cube trays, synthetic rubber, speakers, plastic wood, electric blankets, glycerin, tennis rackets, rubber cement, fishing boots, dice, nylon rope, candles, trash bags, house paint, water pipes, hand lotion, roller skates, surf boards, shampoo, wheels, paint rollers, shower curtains, guitar strings, luggage, aspirin, safety glasses, antifreeze, awnings, eyeglasses, clothes, toothbrushes, ice chests, footballs, combs, dvds, paint brushes, detergents, vaporizers, balloons, sun glasses, tents, heart valves, crayons, parachutes, telephones, enamel, pillows, dishes, cameras, anesthetics, artificial turf, artificial limbs, bandages, dentures, model cars, folding doors, hair curlers, cold cream, movie film, soft contact lenses, drinking cups, fan belts, car enamel, shaving cream, ammonia, refrigerators, golf balls, toothpaste (and thousands more useful things besides). Very little of modern life exists outside of entanglement with petroleum’s many forms. “Oil and its outcomes—speed, plastics, and the luxuries of capitalism, to name a few—have lubricated our relationship to one another and the environment for the duration of the twentieth century.”54

The hunt is over and here we are. We live in a world filled with more fossils than we had ever imagined, forms ancient and recent, mysterious and familiar. We have learned to give them their proper names: sucrofossils, carbofossils, petrofossils. Some of these fossils are relatively inert. Even the once mighty steam-powered locomotive is now little more than a museum curiosity. Many others though—like urban designs that prioritize automobility, the sprawl of single-use plastics, and public faith in the necessity of endless economic growth—belong to a sticky mass that bend the future to the gravity of the past. With this ooze steadily rising, the abundance of the fossil inheritances seems to suffocate any alternative, to make genuine change a hopeless aspiration. But, then again, we must remind ourselves that our final forms are not predetermined teleologically. Experimental decomposition and recomposition is more the way of the world than fossil persistence. Even the stickiest ooze permits ways forward.

A quick PSA: The number one rule of surviving quicksand is to avoid panic. Thrashing around is instinctual but it separates solids and liquids and causes you to sink deeper. Instead, the trick of survival is to move very slowly and deliberately in a specific direction. Buoyancy is on your side; with some patience and care, you can actually wiggle your limbs to the surface and begin to swim in slow motion. To escape quicksand is to know your ooze, its properties, its compositions, and reciprocally, to appreciate your agency even in a seemingly hopeless situation. It means finding patience and purpose in the ambient terror. Eventually, you’ll realize that small, determined actions work, that the ooze is not as capable of drowning you as you fear.

The second rule is to know in which direction you are slowly, steadily paddling. What’s on the horizon past the mire of sucro, carbo, petro? Although other possibilities exist, I would guess that electro is the eventual destination. Robust electropolitical infrastructures already exist and, spurred on by the climate emergency, there has been a distinct and widespread movement toward the fusion of energy and electricity. “Electrify everything” has become a mantra of climate experts the world over.

Yet, by itself, electrical infrastructure cannot disrupt the world made by sucro, carbo, petro. Indeed, if history is any guide, it is more likely that electroculture will emerge deeply shaped by the grooves of petroculture, just as petroculture was heavily influenced by the carboculture and sucroculture that preceded it. We are already seeing many experts demanding more power plants, more grid, and new resource frontiers so that electroculture can meet the needs and exceed the pace of the petrocultural fossils we have inherited.

An electrified petroculture therefore won’t suffice. It will take more, and also less, to accomplish the remaking of a world that breaks in fundamental ways with the ecocidal trajectory we have inherited. Retrofitting the infrastructures bequeathed us by petroculture for non-expansionary, non-extractivist purposes will help. It’s better to have a life raft of sorts than to be treading water. But we are also discovering that not every form can be helpfully reimagined and repurposed. Some things will have to decompose. To discern where necessities and opportunities lie, let’s get to know our ooze a bit better, this fossil gerontocracy that seeks to hold us in place.