Fossil Fuels and Industrialization in the Basin of Mexico, 1870–1915

The transition from an energy regime based on biomass and animal muscle to another based on fossil fuels is an epochal transformation whose importance is arguably on a par with the Neolithic transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture as the basis of human existence. This paper explores that transition in central Mexico, and explores its social, political, and environmental implications, both for nineteenth-century Mexicans and for current global debates on energy use. In particular, it examines the ways in which fossil fuels (coal and later oil) shaped the process of industrialization as well as of social and environmental change during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Like societies elsewhere, local inhabitants relied throughout their history on the sun’s energy locked up in plants and animals for their livelihood. This fundamental socioenvironmental arrangement, what historian Fernand Braudel called the “biological ancien régime,” persisted in Mexico until the late nineteenth century, when the limits of the old energy regime began to be overcome through the simultaneous expansion in the use of organic energy sources such as wood, charcoal, and hydropower; the incorporation of the steam engine, and the gradual adoption of fossil fuels.

The paper argues that coal remained expensive and thus played a secondary role as an energy source throughout the period under study. Only large industrial establishments and urban lighting adopted coal as their main source of energy, while wood and charcoal continued to fuel houses, most industries, and even locomotives. Paradoxically, this situation may have facilitated the rapid transition to oil in the first decade of the twentieth century, as investment in coal technology was limited. By the early decades of the twentieth century, oil had become the basis of industry and transport in the region.