Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean

"In this highly original work, historian Chelsea Schields illuminates how the contested management of sex and race transformed the Caribbean into a crucial site in the global oil economy. By the mid-twentieth century, the Dutch islands of Curaçao and Aruba housed the world's largest oil refineries. To bolster this massive industrial experiment, oil corporations and political authorities offshored intimacy, circumventing laws regulating sex, reproduction, and the family in a bid to maximize profits and turn Caribbean subjects into citizens. Offshore Attachments reveals that, from boom to bust, Caribbean people challenged and embraced efforts to alter intimate behaviors in service of the energy economy, molding the industry from the ground up.