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As a research fellow at the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, I had a wonderful time doing research at several archives around the country. It was crucial to the progress of my dissertation project, “Kerosene Anti-Monopoly: An Energy History of the Antitrust Movement Against Standard Oil, 1846-1911.” With the Consortium’s help, I was able to publish part of this project in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537781423000518 ). My dissertation argues that the antitrust movement against Standard Oil was a political outcome of the global energy transition to artificial light in the late nineteenth century. It examines how kerosene – the earliest petroleum product and the first universal illuminant in history – shaped the ways in which its producers, consumers, distributors, and regulators around the world responded to Standard Oil’s monopolization of the global market. The new business challenges, lifestyles, technologies, and, most important, environmental threats associated with the transition to kerosene gave rise to transnational dynamics that reshaped how political actors perceived the international political economy. Within these dynamics, independent oilmen and middle-class consumers in the United States shaped their extraordinary antimonopoly sentiments that shaped the course of American economic history. While previous studies on the antitrust movement against Standard Oil have focused on elite lawyers’ and politicians’ legal campaigns, my dissertation zeros in on bottom-up contexts by investigating ordinary businesspeople and consumers. For this research, then, it was crucial to find first-hand testimony from these actors. This testimony would show how people engaged in the kerosene trade understood the energy transition and their role in the energy economy, which shaped their responses to Standard Oil. Thanks to the Consortium, I was able to read multiple records in several archives. At Linda Hall Library, I found documents recording the reactions of European politicians and inspectors to American kerosene. It was great to know how they greeted the new light with both fear and awe. On the one hand, Europeans welcomed the cheap light imported from the United States, but on the other, they were afraid of fires and lamp explosions caused by adulterated kerosene products. At the Library Company of Philadelphia, I was able to look at local oil dealers’ accounts of kerosene fires and explosions, as well as their business records of the kerosene trade. There, I also read oil inspectors’ testimonies, which provided great first-hand views on lamp explosions. At Yale University, I read records of independent oilmen who opposed Standard Oil, which included surprisingly vivid pictures of the Pennsylvania oil field. At the Rockefeller Archive Center, I read the papers of John D. Rockefeller, which allowed me to better understand Standard Oil’s position in the marketplace. At the Science History Institute, I read several catalogs of kerosene and lamp instruments. Taken together, this research helped me to uncover the nuanced ways of understanding the environmental threats brought about by kerosene, particularly lamp explosions and fires. Petroleum was inherently flammable, and human intervention fanned the flames. Poor refining skills and adulteration carried the risk of fire into the consumer sector, where no one was prepared for the widespread use of such a volatile material. I have learned from the records that in the 1870s, 6,000 people died each year in the United States from lamp explosions caused by inferior kerosene. Between 1883 and 1896, kerosene started 2,500 fires a year in London. In the late 1880s, ninety percent of the fires in Guangdong were triggered by kerosene. These findings then led me to examine Standard Oil’s response to this threat. Previous studies have argued that Standard Oil decreased the occurrence of kerosene fires by standardizing its products. This myth is based on the work of early business historians who first examined the corporate records of Standard Oil, which were full of self-laudatory reports on the company’s quality management. Surprisingly, this decades-old argument based on one-sided sources has not yet been cross-checked. My research as a Consortium research fellow allowed me to find a wealth of counterevidence. At the Linda Hall Library, for instance, I found the cry of a British politician in 1899. “The very oil [of] Mr. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Trust,” he said, was “nothing else than murder oil … with the effect that it burns and roasts to death our friends and our own people.” Then, who was right – Standard Oil or the British? Was the company thanked or blamed for the kerosene fires? Or, in other words, did Standard Oil actually standardize kerosene products? In my dissertation, I will tackle this simple question. All in all, my dissertation would have taken much longer without my time as a research fellow at the Consortium. I was also fortunate to present my work at the Consortium’s workshops, including the Energy History Workshop, and to speak with other fellows and historians whose advice was crucial to the development of my research. The experience was especially helpful to extend my research to histories of science and technology. I could better understand the roles of chemists, kerosene testing apparatuses, lamp appliances and more in shaping people’s perception of the political economy of oil. For instance, as different countries chose different testers, different technological systems emerged to determine the quality of kerosene in the world market. Understanding this discrepancy was important to examine how global actors thought of the monopolization of Standard Oil. Without the thoughtful comments and advice I received during my tenure year, I would not be able to investigate such connections between technology and political economy. |
Minseok Jang is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is a 2023–2024 Consortium Research Fellow.