By Nikki Babri
Behind every gallon of gasoline that fueled the 20th century’s economic boom lies a hidden history of controlled intimacy and regulated desire. While oil’s story is typically told through drilling rigs and corporate boardrooms, Associate Professor of History Chelsea Schields uncovers a more personal narrative in her book, Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean (University of California Press, 2023).
For Schields, this forgotten history reveals the “hidden infrastructure” of the global oil industry: how corporate power extended far beyond refineries and into the bedrooms, homes and intimate family lives of Caribbean people.
Schields’s exploration of the Dutch Caribbean oil industry has earned recognition from the broader scholarly community. Her work recently garnered two prestigious awards from the American Historical Association – the largest professional organization of historians in the world – winning both the 2024 Joan Kelly Memorial Prize in Women’s History and/or Feminist Theory and the AHA Prize in European International History. These honors join four additional awards from the Caribbean Studies Association, World History Association and Latin American Studies Association.
“It is a profound honor to see Offshore Attachments recognized across such distinct fields. This recognition is not only personally meaningful but, more importantly, a testament to the significance of a Caribbean story too often overlooked," says Schields.
Profits over people
In Offshore Attachments, Schields reveals the ways in which oil giants systematically regulated workers’ intimate lives. By the 1940s, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world’s largest oil refineries, where companies like Shell and Standard Oil actively regulated who workers could marry, how they formed families and their access to sex and reproduction.
Schields’s interest in this research began with her grandfather who, during the Great Depression, jumped on a freighter to China and began selling kerosene door-to-door, eventually spending his career with U.S. oil companies abroad in East Asia and Southern Africa.
“Stories of my father’s upbringing in corporate enclaves shaped me immensely. They were my first lessons about empire, oil and racial inequality,” she shares.
When she moved to the Netherlands as a teenager, she discovered surprising similarities between Dutch and American oil interests in the Caribbean around racial antipathy and imperial legacies.
For her book, Schields conducted extensive archival research across Aruba, Curaçao, the Netherlands and the United States. Piecing together oil’s hidden story required her to look beyond corporate archives and into the intimate spaces where industry power reshaped everyday life. Her research revealed a furtive story of how colonial authorities and corporate managers engineered intimate relationships to maximize corporate profits – and also how Caribbean people responded to and resisted these interventions.
“Oil is so embedded in modern life that its influence often hides in plain sight. Our collective neglect of the Caribbean oil refining industry stems from the way energy supply chains obscure labor and production,” Schields says.
She challenges the misconception that oil is inherently valuable; rather, it is the laborious refinement process that actually creates usable fuels. And the Caribbean, often overlooked in oil narratives, was one of the world’s first major refining centers and is therefore central to the global fossil fuel economy.
The economics of sex
Far from the scrutinizing eyes of American and European regulators, corporations circumvented colonial law to accommodate industry needs in ways that directly enhanced their bottom line. As Schields argues, “Oil did not simply facilitate sex; sex lubricated the age of oil.”
Just as formal colonialism was ending, oil corporations established new forms of racial governance disguised as industrial efficiency. Corporations deliberately recruited unmarried men from across the region who could be housed cheaply and deported easily if they rebelled.
To maintain this profitable bachelor workforce without the expense of family housing or family wages, Dutch colonial authorities established a regulated system of sex work. Women, primarily from the Dominican Republic, received temporary visas specifically designed to prevent permanent settlement.
“This exemplifies what I call the ‘offshoring of sex,’” Schields explains. “It was fundamentally a strategy of managing labor that enlarged corporate profits by creating a migratory, exploitable workforce through systematized intimate regulation.”
The corporations enforced a racialized tier system. White managers lived with families in clean residential areas upwind from pollution, while migrant workers found transactional “companionship” in controlled settings. Local men were incentivized to marry to encourage workplace discipline. Each of these arrangements reflected corporate calculations about which forms of intimate life different types of workers merited, based on their economic value to the company and proximity to racial whiteness.
Fighting for sexual freedom
Corporations deployed different strategies for managing intimacy as market conditions shifted. During the boom period of the 1930s-50s, companies used domesticity and marriage incentives to create a domesticated local workforce. As refineries automated and shed jobs in the following decades, corporate attention pivoted toward reproduction.
Rather than addressing structural economic inequalities through job creation or wealth redistribution, European and Caribbean officials launched aggressive family planning campaigns to limit population in low-income families. By blaming economic hardship on the fertility of Caribbean women, these efforts attempted to preserve models of the nuclear family even as material support for such families disappeared.
Offshore Attachments documents how Caribbean communities responded to corporate intrusion in complex ways. For example, in the 1950s, some Aruban women echoed the oil industry’s rhetoric of family value to oppose regulated prostitution, which “they saw as a threat to emerging ideals of domestic life,” says Schields. While, by the 1960s, as refineries downsized due to automation, anti-imperial Curaçaoan leftists argued that true reproductive freedom required more than limiting fertility – it demanded comprehensive social investments and political transformation. “For these activists,” Schields explains, “sexual unfreedom was central to racial and economic oppression. Real liberation therefore required the remaking of intimate relationships.”
Reimagining our energy future
Placing the Caribbean in the center of oil history, Schields’s work affirms what feminist scholars have long argued: sexuality and subjectivity have always been key to how economies function. The fossil fuel economy, she adds, was no exception.
“As humanities scholars studying energy have shown, oil is not just a commodity – it embeds itself in our ideals about what constitutes good living, itself a concept with racial, class and gendered dimensions,” she reflects. “I hope the book encourages imaginative thinking: if oil has shaped our social relations, aspirations and self-fashioning, how can we begin to envision meaningful sociality beyond it?”
In the classroom, Schields teaches courses that examine how power, profit and private life have historically intersected. Her current course, “Empire, Capital, Sex,” bridges often-disconnected scholarly conversations between feminist and postcolonial studies and studies of political economy. She challenges students to consider how corporations have participated in the racialized regulation of intimacy alongside imperial states. This spring, she will teach “Caribbean History II,” which will examine the region’s changes from the post-emancipation period to the present, paying particular attention to how colonial legacies of race, gender and labor shaped Caribbean societies and affect our world today.
Her research offers crucial lessons for today’s debates about energy transition. Continuing her scholarship around energy systems and social relations, Schields is currently working on two new projects: a history of electrification, debt and climate crisis in the Caribbean; and a global study of sex, reproductive labor and fossil fuels.
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