Trinidad’s eighteenth-century plantations provoked the most profound energy transition yet seen. The Spanish colonial governor, Josef Chacón, invented fuel. A fuel stores energy in a measurable, countable, transportable, and salable form. Fuel is intrinsically disenchanted and deracinated. Laborers, even slaves, did not automatically assume this commodity form either. Some served the master and his family over a lifetime, acting as acknowledged persons in a social field. Other slaves—particularly in the context of plantations—performed the tasks assigned day in and day out with no personal recognition from above. Plantation hands became liquid, one might say. Traders transported labor power over far greater distances than they had done for wood, the Caribbean’s closest contemporary approximation to a modern fuel. Cane cutters, in short, helped Chacón and his successors to imagine energy for the first time as a commodity and as a flow. But, by running away and even killing their masters, they also constantly challenged that understanding. At moments like these, Chacón had to consider them as individuals: a prick of conscience. The first fuel, thus, flowed imperfectly, slowed by the friction of moral scruple. It flowed well enough, nonetheless, to establish the conventions under which we now extract oil and ship it across oceans by the boatload. Without intending to do so, Chacón and other sugar revolutionaries imagined the true energy without conscience that waited in the wings.

Trinidad’s eighteenth-century plantations provoked the most profound energy transition yet seen. The Spanish colonial governor, Josef Chacón, invented fuel. A fuel stores energy in a measurable, countable, transportable, and salable form. Fuel is intrinsically disenchanted and deracinated. Laborers, even slaves, did not automatically assume this commodity form either. Some served the master and his family over a lifetime, acting as acknowledged persons in a social field. Other slaves—particularly in the context of plantations—performed the tasks assigned day in and day out with no personal recognition from above. Plantation hands became liquid, one might say. Traders transported labor power over far greater distances than they had done for wood, the Caribbean’s closest contemporary approximation to a modern fuel. Cane cutters, in short, helped Chacón and his successors to imagine energy for the first time as a commodity and as a flow. But, by running away and even killing their masters, they also constantly challenged that understanding. At moments like these, Chacón had to consider them as individuals: a prick of conscience. The first fuel, thus, flowed imperfectly, slowed by the friction of moral scruple. It flowed well enough, nonetheless, to establish the conventions under which we now extract oil and ship it across oceans by the boatload. Without intending to do so, Chacón and other sugar revolutionaries imagined the true energy without conscience that waited in the wings.

Oil could have developed differently. Absent some contingencies, the substance might have entered history as a moral category—at least, in Trinidad. The man who tipped the scales was the island’s most influential German immigrant. Born in Ulm in 1813, Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer emigrated to the United States, where he became an outspoken abolitionist. To harness the human body at all, Stollmeyer came to believe, was deeply immoral. The utopian established what he called a “paradise without labor” opposite Trinidad, across the Gulf of Paria in Guinimita. On that Venezuelan coast, gullible working-class migrants from Britain died rapidly, and the colony collapsed in disaster. Stollmeyer remained in Port of Spain and gained a position as manager of an asphalt deposit in South Trinidad. He found a method to distill that heavy hydrocarbon into a light oil that would burn and generate heat. He had at last found a reliable substitute for human bodies and a means to the paradise without labor. Yet, as Stollmeyer observed freed slaves in Trinidad, his sentiments grew racist and flipped entirely: work, he now felt, did not enslave men but improved and invigorated them. His oil alleviated no toil in the plantations. Instead of sending it there, he sold it for illumination. As an emancipator, Stollmeyer failed because of he no longer wished to succeed. And petroleum failed too: it never attached itself to that signal Caribbean virtue, freedom. An interesting man then and now, Stollmeyer made oil boring.