Dutch Diseases: Race, Oil, and Intimacy in Offshore Europe

The Modern Europe Colloquium presents Chelsea Shields, Assistant Professor of History, University of California, Irvine, on “Dutch Diseases: Race, Oil, and Intimacy in Offshore Europe.”

 

Moving from Caribbean oil towns to the European metropolis, this talk explores how the management of sex and race shaped global hydrocarbon industries and the Dutch welfare state in an age of energy crises.

 

The Modern Europe Colloquium is generously sponsored by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; the European Studies Council of the Yale MacMillan Center

 

Bio: Chelsea Schields is a historian of sexuality, race, energy, and empire with a focus on Europe and the Caribbean. Her first book, Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean, argues that global energy systems cannot be understood without attention to the sexual and racialized interventions that fueled their emergence. In the Dutch territories in the Caribbean—islands under Dutch sovereignty and home to the world’s largest oil refineries—the apex of oil and the end of empire resulted in the flagrant flouting and routine circumvention of laws regulating sex, reproduction, and the family. Linking the political economy of oil with histories of race and sexuality, Offshore Attachments reveals the durable prejudices that structured oil economies and the uneven, enduring ties between Europe and the Caribbean. With Dagmar Herzog, Schields is co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (Routledge, 2021). Her next project tracks social scientific literature on Black family life from its emergence in the United States and the colonial Caribbean to decolonization-era Europe. It asks how post-slavery knowledge centering on race, the family, and sexuality traveled across time and national contexts ultimately to shape the policies foundational to postwar Europe.