Atjeh. Het verhaal van de bloedigste strijd uit de Nederlands... by Anton Stolwijk

Generally, however, these wells did not reach very far into the lithosphere. At some places, wage labourers emptied the oil pits every four or five days at others the oil was channeled through iron tubes into collection reservoirs. Iraq), European travellers noted how fissures where oil seeped from the rocks were leased out by the state and that lease-holders had artificially deepened these natural wells with, for instance, steps hewn out in the rock. In British-occupied Burma, at the Yenangyaung fields, Western oilmen came upon an extensive hand-dug well industry, controlled by a hereditary monopoly of 24 men and women, named the twinzayo. Some were quite elaborate, others more rudimentary. While it is little known, many of the areas that were to become centres of Western colonial oil extraction actually already had local extraction infrastructures. The urge to dig deeper was certainly unprecedented, as for instance in the oil boom of the second half of the nineteenth century. This was ‘the golden age of resource-based development’, when the last yet-unincorporated territories were colonised and capitalist power pushed into these new, non-commodified spaces − a process Jason Moore has called the ‘lifeblood’ of capitalism.

Nevertheless, fossil fuel extraction and the consequent incursions into the lithosphere grew dramatically from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. In China, oil wells up to 240 metres deep already existed in 347 BCE. Humans have been digging into the earth for millennia – deep mines were already known in antiquity. Here, however, I focus mainly on oil and gas extraction. Obviously, this human foray into the earth did not only involve fossil fuels but all sorts of minerals. In this piece, however, I want to chart a more experimental course and look, from a broader dis:connective as well as historical and contemporary angle, at oil and gas drilling as connecting and disconnecting the world above with its lithosphere − what one could tentatively call lithospheric connectivity.

Specifically, I am investigating the imperial infrastructures in situ that made such extraction possible and that bound commodities into global networks of extraction and consumption, creating new connections while simultaneously diverting or cutting others. Since August 2021, I have been researching early colonial oil extraction (ca. What if global dis:connectivity stretches not only around the surface of our globe, but also into its crust? Let me present some initial thoughts on this idea from the perspective of global oil and gas extraction since the nineteenth century. In Blog 2022 lithospheric connectivity tom menger He saw in oil a weapon, and he heard groaning in the bowels of the Earth when the jack pumped up the oil (…) From Varujan Vosganian’s novel Book of Whispers (2018 )

Atjeh. Het verhaal van de bloedigste strijd uit de Nederlands... by Anton Stolwijk