Technology and Culture

Herman Melville diagnosed the social and environmental cost of the whaling industry when he warned nineteenth-century readers: “For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.” In coruscating prose, Jeremy Zallen makes the case that histories of lighting have for too long been blinded by teleological narratives of technological progress. Whereas technology historian David Nye has shown how electrification became a symbol of bourgeois political values, by looking at early organic lighting technologies, Zallen argues that lighting has a spatial, environmental, and labor history beyond its use-value.

Employing the spatial frameworks of Richard White’s Railroaded (2011), David Harvey’s Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (1996), and Thomas Andrews’ Killing for Coal (2008) among others, Zallen demonstrates that in order to appreciate the full spectrum of pre-U.S. Civil War light, historians must trace the paths of organic compounds along their commodity chains. Unlike scenic train routes, however, there was nothing sublime in these “workscapes.” Zallen follows whale bodies from [End Page 990] whaleships to oil slick Nantucket wharves, where Quaker merchants employed women and children to pack candles. These were shipped to Caribbean slaveholders, who lit the clear-burning candles to extend the working hours of their captive sugar-mill workers and cotton-ginners (p. 39). The organic matter stored in West Indian guano islands was transmuted chemically into “inorganic” phosphorus that clung to the skin of the child workers in Birmingham match factories (p. 172). Whether considering the unpaid labor of colonial midwife Martha Ballard making tallow candles, or the “metabolism” of whales imbued in spermaceti, Zallen maintains that historians should see these sources of organic lighting in the Atlantic World “as historically embedded energy and matter in process” (p. 4).

Zallen does not eschew the “revolutionary” role of these technological innovations in shaping American industrialization, however, revolutions in lighting ultimately depended on antebellum revolutions in transportation. Railroads superseded well-trodden Ohio Valley mountain paths and river ferries as the dominant means of transporting hogs, allowing midwestern depots in Cincinnati to increase their daily production of lard oil (p. 154). Slaveholders forced captive workers to tap pines under the threat of violence and contended with the “living ecologies” of North Carolina turpentine forests they “coerced into survival” (p. 87). The politics of lighting “drew and challenged cleavages among more than just humans” (p. 134). Antebellum political discourses of progress also obscured the labor of enslaved “lucifers” mining by Davy lamps in the dark caverns of Richmond’s Midlothian coal pits. Slaveholders took out slave life insurance policies to minimize their financial risk, allowing mine owners to push slave miners deeper into the bowels of the earth. In 1858, Charleston chemist J. G. Dumas invented a distillation process that eliminated human labor in oil works, and Kanawha mine owners lowered their costs by substituting free with enslaved miners. Rather than eliminate human labor requirements, technological revolutions in antebellum lighting made the work even more oppressive. Zallen thus reminds historians how these technologies proved just as integral as the coal-powered steam pump to the industrial revolution.

While Zallen sheds light on industrial slavery, he does not compare regional investment in free and slave industrial labor nor devote much space to examining how these labor systems influenced their differing visions of modernity. This is probably why he depicts antebellum New Orleans, like New York, as a predominantly “liberal” urban space (p. 132). Understandably, the Civil War plays a pivotal role in Zallen’s narrative, simultaneously ending industrial slavery and older technologies of turpentine and whale oil as viable competitors to the newly discovered Pennsylvania petroleum. It was initially uncertain whether the Kanawha region in West Virginia would join the Union or the “slave-powered white-supremacist industrial war machine” of the Confederacy (p. 242). In telling this entangled history [End Page 991] of...