Shattered Glass, Live Wires: The Political Life of Energy in Colonial Suriname

This paper examines the entangled histories of energy infrastructure and working-class politics in colonial Suriname. Drawing on colonial and company archives, it shows how gas and electricity networks became arenas where working-class Surinamese protested uneven access, exploitative labor practices, and the racialized logics of privatization during the tumultuous 1930s and its immediate aftermath. These engagements reveal the infrastructures of everyday life as key theaters of political action. Surinamese critics and customers acted with strategic ambivalence—destroying gas lanterns one day, demanding broader connections the next. As a monopoly in a small colonial society eager to expand its customer base, the European-based utility company was compelled to respond to working-class demands, even as working-class communities continued to thwart colonial expectations of energy use and pacification. Attending to contested infrastructures and those who engaged them broadens understanding of the political and its actors, revealing how energy became a site of contention uniquely shaped by a post-slavery Caribbean context, and thereby expanding energy history beyond its usual Global North focus.