Special issue

Human labor and knowledge has been central to the ability of companies and states to extract and produce energy. Workers, engineers, technocrats, and managers have played a central role in the development of the hydrocarbon industry.

This paper analyses employee needs in the Romanian oil industry during the interwar period. Three distinct periods will be explored: the aftermath of the First World War, the economic crisis of 1929-1933, and the outbreak of the Second World War.

Through examinations of domestic servants in electrical advertisements and writings this article looks at the imaginations and realities of visions of an “Electrical Calcutta” at the turn of the twentieth century.

This paper explores the use of electricity in 20th-century British farming, as captured in the agricultural press, advisory literature, films and specialist publications intended for the farming community.

The oil and gas industry is generally imagined as a prototypical ‘men’s world’, with the multifaceted work women have performed largely invisible. This is being rectified by growing research on women workers in the industry.

The Iranian oil nationalisation crisis, which ended in the coup that overthrew nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, is well known.

The arrival of widespread domestic electricity in rural Ireland was spread over two decades in the 1950s and 1960s, where the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) rolled out an electrical grid across the State.

Economics was a major field of struggle for anti-imperialist oil experts and activists.

Emerging in the midst of a painful war of independence and deeply intertwined with the contested claims to territorial and economic sovereignty, the Algerian oil industry, and its labour force, occupied a unique place at the forefront of the Algerian decolonisation process.