Of Fossil Fuels and Families: How the Oil Industry Shaped Ideas of Race and Poverty in Caribbean Europe
Feb 27, 2025 | 6pm ET
Lecture at GHI Washington | Speaker: Chelsea Schields (UC Irvine)
2025 Spring Lecture Series: Poverty in the Twentieth Century
Please join us for the first lecture in our Spring 2025 series focusing on the history of poverty. 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.
Doors will open at 6:00 pm and will close promptly at 6:30 pm with the beginning of the lecture. Access to the lecture after doors close will be at descretion of the GHI. Registration does not guarantee access once event capacity is reached. The lecture will be recorded and made available for viewing.
About the Series
Poverty in the Twentieth Century
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 criseslike 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.
Organized by Raphael Rössel and Atiba Pertilla (GHI Washington) in cooperation with the Collaborative Research Centre "Structural Change of Property"
February 27, 2025 | 6pm ET
Chelsea Schields (UC Irvine)
Nonprofit Neighborhoods: How the US Privatized the Fight against Urban Inequality
March 27, 2025 | 6pm ET
Claire Dunning (University of Maryland, College Park)
Credit's Histories: Debt, Loans, and Welfare in Twentieth-Century United States
May 1, 2025 | 6pm ET
Felix Krämer (Universität Erfurt)
From the Margins: Poverty in Divided and United Germany
June 12, 2025 | 6pm ET
Christoph Lorke (LWL-Institut für westfälische Regionalgeschichte)
About the Speaker
Chelsea Schields 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).