Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean

Chelsea Schields
History
UC Irvine

“Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean” shows how ideas about sex and race shaped the oil economy from the dramatic disruptions of the Second World War to the fallout of the OPEC energy crisis in 1973-74. These transformations condensed in an unlikely setting. In the offshore Dutch territories in the Caribbean—islands under Dutch sovereignty and home to the world’s largest refinery sites—transnational oil companies, governing leaders, and even U.S. military officials introduced peculiar forms of sexual regulation intended to maximize oil revenues and transform Caribbean subjects into European citizens. The result was a range of dubiously licit and obviously illegal efforts to control intimate behaviors, as well as creative efforts to refute and challenge them. Joining analysis of the political economy of oil with histories of race and sexuality, “Offshore Attachments” shows how durable prejudices structured oil economies and the uneven, enduring relation between Europe’s offshore margins and its continental core.