The Great Derangement

by Amitav Ghosh

  In short, as the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam has long argued, modernity was not a “virus” that spread from the West to the rest of the world. It was rather a “global and conjunctural phenomenon,” with many iterations arising almost simultaneously in different parts of the world.

  That such a possibility might exist had long been obscured by one of the distinctive features of Western modernity: its insistence on its own uniqueness. Yet even this insistence has usually been suspended in relation to one case: that of Japan, of which it is widely accepted that it had its own unique variant of modernity. This was due, no doubt (as Subrahmanyam suggests), to Japan’s bank balance, which was large enough to legitimize its claims to a singular form of modernity. But now, with the swelling of the bank balances of India, China, and many other nations, it is increasingly apparent that the early modern era nurtured not one or two but “multiple modernities.”

  This multiplicity extended also to the use of fossil fuels, which has a long non-Western history. Although largely forgotten now, this history provides some revealing insights into the emergent modernities of the period leading up to and immediately after the Industrial Revolution.

  5.

  About a thousand years ago, China went through a “medieval economic revolution.” This led to so much deforestation that the resulting run-off of silt actually altered the coastline, leading to the filling-in and expansion of the deltas of the Pearl, Yellow, and Yangtze Rivers. By the eleventh century, the shortage of wood was such that the people of northern Jiangsu province were overjoyed to learn of the discovery of coal in their region. This prompted the poet Su Dongpo to write the following lines in 1087 CE:

  That a rich inheritance lay in their hills was something they did not know:

  Lovely black rock in abundance, ten thousand cartloads of coal

  No one had noticed the spatters of tar, nor the bitumen, where it oozed leaking,

  While puff after puff, the strong-smelling vapors–drifted off on their own with the breezes

  Once the leads to the seams were unearthed, it was found to be huge and unlimited

  People danced in throngs in their jubilation. Large numbers went off to visit it.

  In short, coal has been used and appreciated in China for a very long time. Why then did China not make the transition to a large-scale coal economy before Britain? The work of the historian Kenneth Pomeranz suggests that the answer may lie in a purely contingent factor: it may simply be that China’s coal reserves, unlike Britain’s, were not in easily accessible locations.

  But the Chinese were also pioneers in the use of other fossil fuels. This is what the late eighteenth-century manual Classic of the Waterways of Sichuan has to say about the use and extraction of oil and natural gas in that province:

  [Natural gas] can be used as fuel to boil brine, steam rice, calcine limestone to make lime, or to smother-burn wood to convert it to charcoal. When it is drawn through an opening in a bamboo tube to serve as a substitute for firewood or candles, this aperture is smeared with clay. Thus it burns hotly at the mouth but the bamboo does not catch fire. At other times it is drawn off into the bladder of a pig, the opening sealed, and the bladder placed inside a box or bag that one can take home with one. When night falls, one pierces a hole with a needle, applies an ordinary domestic flame, and fire will come out of the bladder and light up the room.

  There are also oil wells. The color of the oil is turbid, but it burns well and one can have a fire anywhere. It will not diminish or go out in wind or rain, or even when plunged into water. If one is traveling at night, and stores oil in a bamboo tube, it is possible to travel for one or two kilometers on a single tube. . . . Such wells are commonplace, and no cause for astonishment.

  Mark Elvin (from whose book, The Retreat of the Elephants, these excerpts are taken) further notes, “Parts of this region of late-premodern China not only used gas for industrial processes, but had domestic gas cookers, domestic gas lighting, and a primitive form of mobile illumination using bottled oil. All based on bamboo tubing. . . . Once again . . . there is something of the feel of an emerging modern economy about this technical vigor and virtuosity.”

  6.

  My novel The Glass Palace touches upon a place in Burma where oil had for many centuries bubbled up to the surface and formed rivulets. The place is called Yenangyaung, and it takes its name from the foul smell of the ooze.

  Of all the river’s sights the strangest was one that lay a little to the south of the great volcanic hump of Mount Popa. The Irrawaddy here described a wide, sweeping turn, spreading itself to a width of over a mile. On the eastern bank of the river, there appeared a range of low, foul-smelling mounds. These hillocks were covered in a thick ooze, a substance that would sometimes ignite spontaneously in the heat of the sun, lighting fires that trickled slowly to the water’s edge. Often at night small, wavering flames could be seen in the distance, carpeting the slopes.

  To the people of the area this ooze was known as earth-oil: it was a dark, shimmering green, the colour of bluebottles’ wings. It seeped from the rocks like sweat, gathering in shiny green-filmed pools. In places, the puddles joined together to form creeks and rivulets, an oleaginous delta that fanned out along the shores. So strong was the odour of this oil that it carried all the way across the Irrawaddy: boatsmen would swing wide when they floated past these slopes, this place-of-stinking-creeks—Yenangyaung.

  This was one of the few places in the world where petroleum rose naturally to the surface of the earth. Long before the discovery of the internal combustion engine there was already a good market for this oil. . . . Merchants came to Yenangyaung from as far away as China to avail themselves of this substance. The gathering of the oil was the work of a community endemic to those burning hills, a group of people known as twin-zas, a tight-knit, secretive bunch of outcasts, runaways and foreigners.

  Over generations twin-za families had attached themselves to individual springs and pools, gathering the oil in buckets and basins, and ferrying it to nearby towns. Many of Yenangyaung’s pools had been worked for so long that the level of oil had sunk beneath the surface, forcing their owners to dig down. In this way, some of the pools had gradually become wells, a hundred feet deep or even more—great oil-sodden pits, surrounded by excavated sand and earth. Some of these wells were so heavily worked that they looked like small volcanoes, with steep, conical slopes. At these depths the oil could no longer be collected simply by dipping a weighted bucket: twin-zas were lowered in, on ropes, holding their breath like pearl-divers.

  . . . The rope would be attached, by way of a pulley, to [the twin-za’s] wife, family and livestock: they would lower him in by walking up the slope of the well, and when they felt his tug they would pull him out again by walking down. The lips of the wells were slippery from spills and it was not uncommon for unwary workers and young children to tumble in. Often these falls went unnoticed: there were no splashes and few ripples. Serenity is one of the properties of this oil: it is not easy to make a mark upon its surface.

  These paragraphs describe Yenangyaung as it was in the latter years of nineteenth century. But the history of Burma’s oil industry goes back much further, possibly even a millennium or more.

  Oil from natural springs, sinks, and hand-dug pits has of course been used in many parts of the world since ancient times. But it is quite likely that “the early oil industry of Burma” was “the largest in the world.”

  The oil wells of Yenangyaung caught the attention of British travelers as early as the mid-eighteenth century. Major Michael Symes, an East India Company envoy to the court of Ava, published this description of it in 1795:

  After passing various sands and villages, we got to Yaynangheoum or Earthoil (Petroleum) Creek about two hours past noon. . . . We were informed, that the celebrated wells of Petroleum, which supply the empire [of Ava], and many parts of India, with that useful product, were five miles to the east of this place. . . . The mouth of the creek was crowded with l
arge boats, waiting to receive a lading of oil; and immense pyramids of earthen jars were raised within and round the village, disposed in the same manner as shot and shells are piled in an arsenal. . . . We saw several thousand jars filled with it ranged along the bank.

  The earth-oil of Yenangyaung had many uses: it was applied on the skin as a remedy for certain conditions, and was also used as an insecticide, as a lubricant for cartwheels, as a caulking-agent in boatbuilding, and even as a preservative for palm-leaf manuscripts. But its principal use was as a fuel for lamps; in 1826, a British official was told that two-thirds of the oil of Yenangyaung served that purpose. It was this form of illumination that sustained the nighttime pwes or festivals that were, and still are, so beloved by the Burmese.

  For the ruling Konbaung dynasty, the oil industry was a major source of revenue even in the eighteenth century, which was one reason why British envoys took a special interest in it. But oil became especially important after the Second Anglo-Burmese War of 1852–53, when the British seized a large part of the kingdom, depriving the then ruler, King Mindon, of his southern revenues. This greatly increased the king’s dependence on oil, and in 1854 he did what the rulers of many modern petro-states were to do in the century to come: he asserted direct control over the oil fields of Yenangyaung, effectively nationalizing the industry. After this, producers could sell only to the state, and the king was able to dictate prices. At the same time, King Mindon also took steps to create links with the world market by entering into contracts with an English firm that manufactured paraffin candles. Soon, Price’s Patent Candle Company Ltd. was importing approximately two thousand barrels of Burmese oil per month. This amounted to more than half of the yearly production of the Yenangyaung oil fields, which was in the range of forty-six thousand barrels.

  The king further consolidated his relationship with the oil industry by marrying the daughter of a leading well-owner, thereby acquiring control of over 120 oil wells. King Mindon is also said to have created a refinery in Mandalay, where oil was stored and processed. These and other interventions brought about a twofold increase in oil production in Burma between 1862 and 1876.

  In light of this, it could be said that the first steps toward the creation of a modern oil industry were actually taken in Burma. But where these steps might have led we do not know because Burma’s attempts to control its oil came to an abrupt end in 1885, when the British invaded and annexed the remnants of the Konbaung realms, deposing Thibaw, the dynasty’s last king. After that, the oil fields of Yenangyaung passed into British control, and, in time, they became the nucleus of the megacorporation that was known until the 1960s as Burmah-Shell. But throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the twin-zas of Yenangyaung continued to play a major role in exploiting the oil fields of the region: they do so to this day.

  In nineteenth-century British sources, the unfortunate Konbaungs are often represented as indolent, corrupt, and backward. But as the historian Thant Myint-U has shown, the late Konbaungs—even the doomed Thibaw—were, in their own fashion, trying hard to stay abreast in matters of technology: they introduced the telegraph, imported steam-powered vessels, enacted administrative reforms of many kinds, encouraged manufacturing industries, tried to build railways, and created scholarships to educate students in France and England. They also exerted themselves to improve animal welfare, in line with Buddhist teachings. At King Mindon’s behest, a number of wildlife sanctuaries were established in the Burmese kingdom from the 1850s onward.

  There is no reason to suppose that Burma would have been unable to navigate the emerging petroleum economy had it been free to do so: certainly in the mid-nineteenth century no part of the world had more experience in the production of oil than Burma.

  It will be clear from this that, as with much else that bears the label of “modern,” the development of the oil industry in Burma was a profoundly hybrid process, involving local rulers, officialdom, and businessmen, not to speak of technologies that dated back many centuries. Yet, as the historian Marilyn Longmuir notes, “Most oil historians give the date 28 August 1859 as the commencement of the modern oil industry when ‘Colonel’ Edwin L. Drake organized the first successful drilling of an oil well at Oil Creek near Titusville, Pennsylvania.”

  Here again is an instance of what I cited earlier as the one feature of Western modernity that is truly distinctive: its enormous intellectual commitment to the promotion of its supposed singularity.

  7.

  The first steam-powered vessel to operate in India was a dredger on the Hooghly River. The vessel’s engine is said to have been sent from Birmingham to Calcutta in 1817 or 1818, little more than a decade after Robert Fulton made history by launching the first commercial steamboat on the Hudson River in 1807.

  The first marine steam engines to see commercial service in India were purchased by a group of Calcutta businessmen from a British trader in Canton in 1823. The two engines were mounted on a locally built vessel, which was launched upon the Hooghly under the name Diana. Although the Diana attracted much attention, the venture was a commercial failure. But the import of steam engines continued at a steady pace: the records of one of Britain’s most important manufacturers of steam engines show that India was the company’s second-largest market after the Netherlands.

  Around this time, several steam engines were also built in Calcutta. The skills for the making and maintenance of these machines were abundantly available in and around the city. A historian of Indian steamships notes, “the Ganges valley villages were teeming with men whose skills in their own traditional technology were roughly similar to those needed to keep a steam flotilla in service.” This anticipated an important but little-noticed aspect of the age of steam: it was India that provided much of the manpower for the boiler rooms of the world’s steam-powered merchant fleets.

  Already in the early 1820s, businessmen in India, foreign and local, had become keenly interested in the possibility of a regular steamer service between England and India. Since no coal-fueled vessel had yet made that journey, a conglomerate of wealthy men—a group that included the Nawab of Awadh—announced a prize of ten thousand pounds sterling for the first steamship to complete the voyage in less than seventy days. The challenge was taken up by a group of investors in England and a side-wheeled steamship called Enterprise (a name that recurs often among early steamships) was built at Deptford at a cost of forty-three thousand pounds sterling.

  The Enterprise left Falmouth on August 16, 1825, and arrived in Calcutta on December 7, after a voyage of 114 days. Even though the steamer had not met the specified time limit, the committee decided to award the owners a substantial sum of money in recognition of the historic nature of the journey.

  The arrival of the Enterprise caused great excitement in Calcutta. In my novel Flood of Fire, a character recalls the moment many years later, in Canton:

  I well remembered the day, fourteen years ago, when a steamer called Enterprize had steamed up to Calcutta . . . this was the first steamer ever to be seen in the Indian Ocean and she had won a prize . . . for her feat. Being young at that time I had expected that Enterprize would be a huge, towering vessel: I was astonished to find that she was a small, ungainly-looking craft. But when the Enterprize began to move my disappointment had turned to wonder: without a breath of wind stirring, she had gone up and down the Calcutta waterfront, manoeuvring dexterously between throngs of boats and ships.

  . . . the arrival of the Enterprize had set off a great race amongst the shipowners of Calcutta. Within a few years the New Howrah Dockyards had built the Forbes, a teak paddle-wheeler fitted with two sixty-horsepower engines. This had inspired my own father to enter the race: he had invested five thousand rupees in a company launched by the city’s most eminent Bengali entrepreneur, Dwarkanath Tagore: it was called the Calcutta Steam Tug Association, and it was soon in possession of two steamers. . . . Steam-tugs are a familiar sight on the Hooghly now; people have grown accustomed to seeing them on the
river, churning purposefully through the water and exhaling long trails of smoke, soot and cinders.

  Dwarkanath Tagore, whose grandson, the poet Rabindranath Tagore, would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, is a key figure in the history of India’s carbon economy. In the late eighteenth century, at a time when “British investment in Bengal . . . was insignificant,” he was one of a number of local businessmen who took the initiative in building a commercial infrastructure. He was also a visionary in regard to the carbon economy. Not only did he set up the Calcutta Steam Tug Association, he was one of the earliest promoters of railways in India. In 1836, Tagore bought the Raniganj coalfields in Bihar, thereby becoming one of the principal suppliers of coal in Bengal. But this venture eventually failed, not because it was inherently flawed, but because it received no support from the East India Company, the ruling power.

  On the other side of the subcontinent in Bombay, indigenous merchants were equally enthusiastic about the new technology. In some ways, they were also in a better position to respond to it because Bombay’s indigenous shipbuilding industry dated back to the mid-eighteenth century. The Wadia family and their Bombay Dockyard were the industry’s leaders, and they were able to compete effectively with the most famous shipyards of Europe and the United States. The Wadias’ reputation was such that they obtained many contracts from the Royal Navy (it was their shipyard that built the Cornwallis, on which the Treaty of Nanking was signed in 1842).