In the hands of one nineteenth-century whaling cooper: Finding ourselves at sea

The cooper, or barrel maker, on an American nineteenth-century commercial whaling voyage occupied such a valuable position that his life was not risked hunting whales. The cooper was both part of the action and distanced from it, enabling him to create, through his collection of casks of whale oil, the archive of the whaling voyage. A close reading of one cooper’s logbook from the 1850s allows us to consider the process of whaling from his standpoint, as well as to theorize how the cooper was like the archivist, the chronicler, of the voyage. The cooper gave the ocean a history by creating its archive with his barrels, bearing them safely to shore, and sharing them with the world. The single cooper discussed here presents readers with two archives – his barrels of whale oil and his private logbook – which expose two different temporalities in which the potential archives of scholars exist.

American Lucifers

The myth of light and progress has blinded us. In our electric world, we are everywhere surrounded by effortlessly glowing lights that simply exist, as they should, seemingly clear and comforting proof that human genius means the present will always be better than the past, and the future better still. At best, this is half the story. At worst, it is a lie. From whale oil to kerosene, from the colonial period to the end of the U.S. Civil War, modern, industrial lights brought wonderful improvements and incredible wealth to some. But for most workers, free and unfree, human and nonhuman, these lights were catastrophes. This book tells their stories. The surprisingly violent struggle to produce, control, and consume the changing means of illumination over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries transformed slavery, industrial capitalism, and urban families in profound, often hidden ways. Only by taking the lives of whalers and enslaved turpentine makers, match-manufacturing children and coal miners, night-working seamstresses and the streetlamp-lit poor--those American lucifers--as seriously as those of inventors and businessmen can the full significance of the revolution of artificial light be understood.

Dragged up Hither from the Bottom of the Sea

Beginning with the rise of the American whale fishery in the 1750s, this chapter explores the violent accumulation and circulation of energy embodied in whales. The lives and struggles of workers across the Atlantic world were caught up in the politics and processes of producing oil lights. Enslaved Africans forced into nightwork in West Indian sugar houses, the London poor confronting new state-sponsored street lamps, cotton mill laborers, and Pacific mariners were tangled together around common threads of American whale oils. American deep-sea whaling voyages first triggered a street lighting revolution that radiated from London to Europe and America, while a New England run trade in spermaceti candles, whale oil, slaves, and sugar helped illuminate and circulate the people and goods caught up in colonial transatlantic sugar slavery. Later, American whale oils lubricated an industrial revolution in cotton manufacturing, while fugitive slaves and free blacks carved out a geography of freedom in the globe-spanning Quaker-run fishery. As these entwined revolutions in night and cotton intensified in the antebellum period, they overwhelmed the capacity of the American fishery to meet the demand for both light and lubrication, even as ship masters drove whalemen on harder and longer voyages for less pay.

The Race for Antarctica in the Twentieth Century

What caused a boom in Antarctic whaling in the late nineteenth century? The 1860s and 1870s saw a decline in whaling when kerosene largely replaced whale oil for heating and lighting. The resulting drop in profits caused fewer whaling fleets to set out to sea....

Why Petroleum Did Not Save the Whales

Ironically, even though fossil fuels provided substitutes for the main uses of whale oil, the rise of fossil fuel use in the nineteenth century served to increase the intensity of whaling. The connections between fossil fuels and whaling are an example of the unanticipated consequences that frequently come with technological change. I draw on political-economic theory to explain why fossil fuels served to escalate rather than eliminate whaling. The case of whaling highlights the limited potential for technological developments to help overcome environmental problems without concurrent political, economic, and social change that supports conservation.