History and the 19th-Century Petroleum Narrative

In the mid-nineteenth century, as the nascent U.S. petroleum industry boomed in the Oil Regions of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the new genre of the petroleum narrative emerged in reports from the oilfields. This paper... [ view full abstract ]

In the mid-nineteenth century, as the nascent U.S. petroleum industry boomed in the Oil Regions of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the new genre of the petroleum narrative emerged in reports from the oilfields. This paper sketches the contours of the nineteenth-century petroleum narrative as a discrete literary genre. In his recent book on climate change and literature, Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh charges contemporary energy humanities scholars with a Western-centric narrative of the oil industry that begins with the discovery of petroleum in Pennsylvania in 1859 and overlooks, for example, the centuries-old petroleum industry in Burma. With Ghosh’s charge in mind, this paper explores the way that C19 petroleum narratives tell the history of petroleum as an extracted resource. C19 petroleum narratives take an unexpectedly wide view of petroleum extraction, but they inscribe energy extraction into the discourse of colonialism by calling the U.S. industry unprecedented in world history.