Frontier Futures: Natures and Cultures of Capitalism in a Burmese Oilfield, 1880s-1940s

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Chao Ren, Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Hamilton College.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact [email protected].

Abstract

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Burma was once a prominent location in global histories of oil. The early oil industry in Burma attracted a substantial amount of global capital, which led to significant increase in oil property and a surge in litigation. Focusing on the early oil industry in colonial Burma from the 1880s to the 1940s, I examine the social life of global capitalism on the ground as it unfolded in the Burmese oilfields and argue that capitalism should be understood as a temporal orientation rather than solely a material system of production or circulation. In my reconstruction of the everyday economic life of ordinary people in the oilfields, I argue that capitalism took hold through a “future-oriented capitalist vision”: an anticipatory way of relating to value that emphasized speculative potential and imagined accumulation. Foregrounding lived experience and future-oriented consciousness, this project challenges diffusionist and materialist accounts of capitalism in Asia. It shows how ordinary actors shaped the making of global capitalism on the ground, and it shows how interior Southeast Asia was deeply embedded in global circuits of capital, law, and expertise.

About the Speaker

Chao Ren is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Hamilton College. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2025. He works on the histories of capitalism, law, and the environment of South and Southeast Asia in global contexts.