Essay examines oil's origins in colonial contexts, linking it to slavery and literary representations.
This essay shatters the myth of the oil era's birth in the antebellum US by recuperating prior imperial writings that constructed oil as a global resource. The essay shows how oil was born alongside its territorial twin, the oil field, in British literary, scientific, and economic discourse. Of particular importance was Trinidad's Pitch Lake, where writers imagined oil's ontology and distribution vis-à-vis local slave plantations. While Charles Kingsley's West Indian travelogue At Last: A Christmas in the West Indies (1871) consolidated this tradition for lay readers, Alfred Mendes's novel Pitch Lake: A Story from Trinidad (1934) offers a contrapuntal riposte that anticipates a future beyond oil.
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Michael Tondre (2025) studied this question.
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