Of Fossil Fuels and Families

Please join us for the first lecture in our Spring 2025 series "Poverty in the Twentieth Century" at the German Historical Institute Washington.

Chelsea Shields: Of Fossil Fuels and Families - How the Oil Industry Shaped Ideas of Race and Poverty in Caribbean Europe
In this talk, historian Chelsea Schields examines the intersections of fossil fuels, race, and social scientific conceptions of poverty between Europe and the Caribbean. In the early twentieth century, the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao became home to one of the world’s largest oil refineries. Even as corporate and colonial elites drafted the industrial labor of local men, they blamed the persistence of poverty and racial inequality on the structure of Afro-Caribbean working-class family life—a racist assumption echoed in contemporaneous social scientific research. When oil economies in the Caribbean collapsed decades later, and thousands migrated to the Dutch metropole seeking relief, a new wave of social scientific studies—commissioned by the state—again shifted blame for structural inequality onto individual reproductive practices and family life, leading to cuts in vital public services. Traversing the South Atlantic, this talk examines how racialized notions of poverty and family life became fossilized not only along the commodity chain of oil but also in social science.
Chelsea Shields is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, where her research and teaching focus on the histories of energy, sexuality, and empire. She is the author of the prize-winning book Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (University of California Press, 2023) and co-editor with Dagmar Herzog of The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (Routledge, 2021).
About the Spring 2025 Lecture Series "Poverty in the Twentieth Century" at the German Historical Institute Washington:

In his bestseller Poverty, by America, the Pulitzer Prize–winning sociologist Matthew Desmond highlights systemic reasons for the persistence of widespread poverty in the United States. Desmond argues that it is in the interest of many affluent Americans to keep some people poor and calls for a social movement to abolish poverty. The GHI’s 2025 Spring Lecture Series addresses the ongoing debates about the causes and persistence of poverty with a historical perspective, featuring four lectures that will trace how European and North American societies treated poverty over the course of the twentieth century.

Throughout the twentieth century, poverty remained a social concern, a political talking point, and an often devastating lived reality. Industrialization had given rise to precarious urban living conditions well before the turn of the century, but even after crises like the Great Depression and the devastation of the World Wars were overcome, the economic deprivation of significant parts of the population endured. In the propaganda battles of the Cold War, economic hardships were identified as products of either socialism or capitalism. Up to today, poverty challenges the legitimacy of political leadership by contradicting their promises of prosperity.

These talks will feature leading scholars offering new perspectives on precarious living in modern society. Going beyond established narratives, the lectures highlight how migration decisions, non-profit organizations, social science research, and the financial industry have all shaped the crises and opportunities those living on the economic margins have faced.

The lecture will begin promptly at 6:30pm ET. A light reception will preceed the talk from 6:00pm to 6:30pm ET. The lecture will be recorded and made available for viewing.

Organized by Raphael Rössel and Atiba Pertilla of the in cooperation with the

Please be aware that this event or conference, or a portion of it, could be live-streamed to registered participants watching remotely via ZOOM or a similar platform, or could be videorecorded for publication. By participating in-person, you understand that it is possible that you could be seen by registered participants watching the stream, that your comments may be seen/heard by participants watching the stream, and that a recording of the live stream could be made available on a video sharing service such Vimeo.

Host or Publisher German Historical Institute