Global circulation of low-end expertise: Knowledge,hierarchy,and labor migration in a Burmese oilfield

Oil in Burma: a background

Around the turn of the twentieth century, the town of Yenangyaung in Upper Burma emerged as a leading center of global oil industry. ⁶ The oil reserves in Burma were traditionally owned by a collective of Burmese families known as twinza-yo. The twinza-yo held a hereditary “abstract right to dig” for oil within “vaguely defined boundaries,” and could sell such rights to others interested in digging. ⁷ Despite its centuries-long history, oil in Burma was primarily consumed for lubrication and waterproofing until the late nineteenth century, when petroleum products started to be used as fuel. ⁸ After the conquest of Upper Burma in 1885, British involvement in Burmese oil intensified. In 1886, the Burmah Oil Company (BOC) was incorporated in Glasgow and soon became a major force in the Burmese oil industry. ⁹ Many others followed suit, including industrial capitalists from both Britain and India.

The opening decade of the twentieth century saw an epochal development in the global oil industry, as kerosene oil became widely used as engine fuel. ¹⁰ By 1910, oil had already emerged as among the most important industries in Burma – in terms of export value second only to Burma’s primary industry, rice production. ¹¹ As the main oil provider for the British Empire at the time, the Burmese oil industry received a major boost in the opening decade of the twentieth century, as the British Admiralty gradually converted to oil for its primary energy source. ¹² With British and Indian capital swarming into Yenangyaung from 1886, as well as an unsuccessful stint of experiments by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1902, the price of oil-well reserves in Yenangyaung skyrocketed, reaching astronomical numbers. ¹³ The price per well site in Yenangyaung rose steadily from about Rs. 20 to Rs. 100 around 1895 to an astounding Rs. 60,000 in late 1908. ¹⁴ This oil boom in Burma attracted large amounts of speculative capital from across the British Empire. Numerous small companies emerged, hoping to grab a piece in this scramble for oil profit.

American oil drillers were most active in Burma across the three decades from around 1905 to the early 1930s. Their initial arrival immediately followed the early days of the oil boom in Burma, when oil-related land property was undergoing an exponential rise in speculative value. The colonial oil companies, while desperately carving up their cut of oil-related land property, were also consciously looking for skilled labor to drill wells and turn such immobile land property into the commodity of crude oil. In the oilfield area, the labor power most readily available were Burmese and Indian migrants. However, neither group had any experience with mechanized oil drilling. The indigenous Burmese method of oil digging entailed manual underground scooping, which was considered slow and obsolete by the early 1900s. ¹⁵ There were also no known British drilling staff as there had been little, if any, oil production in Britain. It soon became an urgent task for the oil companies to secure labor power, given the fierce competition between them. The largest of them all, Burmah Oil Company, felt particularly sharp pressure, as they had recently managed to lobby for a huge deal with the British Royal Navy to supply fuel for ships. After the agreement with the Admiralty, the big challenge was to maintain a scale of oil production that was sufficiently large, in order to fulfill the amount required by the deal. ¹⁶ So as the scramble for oil-related land property approached completion, oil companies soon began a global pursuit for oil-drilling labor. The Americans successfully fulfilled this role. ¹⁷

The work of the drillers

Before the arrival of American drillers, the only method of oil excavation available there was the so-called Burmese “hand-digging.” Digging would commence on an auspicious day of the Burmese calendar (yet-ya-za-) after the performance of a nat (spirit)-appeasing ritual. ¹⁸ The Burmese laborers would first “[dig] their shafts into the oil sands by hand, using a windlass, buckets and hand tools,” and then set up a wooden cylinder above the well, where they would roll a leather rope to descend the digger into the well to scoop up liquid oil with earthen pots. ¹⁹ Above the ground, about eleven laborers would haul the rope at the other end of the cylinder to adjust the vertical positioning of the digger underground. ²⁰ The depth of hand-dug wells was generally within seventy-five meters, and it took around twenty to forty seconds to descend to the bottom of a seventy-meter well. ²¹ Due to lack of oxygen, the digger would only be able to stay at the bottom for about thirty seconds, during which time he would quickly dig for oil and clear away debris. After coming up, diggers would rest for around thirty minutes between each descent. During the rest, they would have their eyes tied up to avoid being exposed to sunlight, so that they could maintain vision down in the darkness of the well and avoid injury to their eyes. ²² This method mostly worked for shallow reserves where oil was close to the ground surface (within 100 meters) and readily available in liquid form. It would not be suitable for reserves where oil was deep and therefore descending into the well would take a long time, or where oil was mostly preserved in wet oil-sand contaminated by water.

Given the uniqueness of hand-digging, British colonial explorers and geologists alike throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who visited Yenangyaung all curiously documented this method in great detail. Despite the huge temporal gaps between these accounts and their visits, their descriptions of the digging method remained almost unchanged throughout the century. Certainly, this might be a result of British discursive stigmatization of Burmese indigenous practices, portraying them as unchanging and primitive. But this also shows how oil had not been an immensely valuable or much sought-after commodity before the late 1890s: for the everyday household uses of illumination and waterproofing, this method and its productivity would suffice, so there was no necessity of significant innovation. In the late 1890s, under the pressure of new mechanized drilling methods, the Burmese made efforts to direct some sunlight and oxygen into the hand-dug wells, using a mirror to direct light downwards and introducing a rudimentary diving-helmet with air tunnels. ²³ Despite improvements in diggers’ working conditions, these changes did not address the issues of productivity or geological limitations of hand-digging. Starting in the late 1890s, as oil became an important source of engine energy, the hand-digging method gradually became insufficient and could not meet the needs of the market anymore.

By the 1890s, American drillers in the Appalachian oil region had already been working for decades with a steam-powered drilling method known as “Artesian” drilling. The most important distinguishing feature of this method was the drilling of sinking wells of small diameter into deep oil-bearing rocks. Unlike the Burmese oil reserves endowed with flowing liquid oil at a shallow depth, the oil-bearing rocks in Pennsylvania were much deeper underground, lying generally “from 600 to 2,000 feet below the surface,” somewhere between 180 and 600 meters. ²⁴ The drillers, therefore, had to pierce through these oil-bearing rocks with immense force using long, heavy metal rods. They set up steam engines to power the ascent of the metal rod, so that its force would increase when coming down.

Despite its wide presence in the oil region, this drilling method was not an original American invention. According to a Pennsylvanian business in the late nineteenth century, the name “Artesian” came from the French place name Artois, where work on the first deep well of this kind was believed to have started in 1126. The modern method, it was claimed, was “an adaption of steam power to the method practiced for ages in China,” where deep-well drilling had been used for centuries to drill for salt. This particular source did not specify the relationship between the French method and the Chinese one, and only suggested a possible historical genealogy between the two. ²⁵ It was not clear how exactly the Americans initially learned about this method, but steam-powered Artesian drilling was indeed the predominant practice in the oil region in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

As the Pennsylvanian oil rush of the 1860s and 1870s unfolded, drilling gradually went deeper and deeper into the oil-bearing rocks, and new devices were developed accordingly for more sophisticated drilling needs. Broadly speaking, the main Artesian principle remained the same, but new tool designs proliferated to accommodate all kinds of geological conditions and challenges. With the sudden bust of the oil business in this area in the late 1870s (such as the quick downfall of Pithole), these drilling tools emerged as a prominent new source of revenue for the oil region. ²⁶ In 1884, the Oil Well Supply Company, a business based in Bradford and Oil City, PA, published a 150-page catalogue of their Artesian drilling tools. Illustrated with 946 figures, this catalogue functioned as the company’s product inventory for marketing purposes. In addition to detailed descriptions and illustrations of various parts of the rig and tools for installation, the catalogue also included advertisements for “portable well rigs,” where customers could purchase entire oil-well setups to be installed ground-up at requested destinations. ²⁷

As well as drilling tools and facilities, starting in the early 1890s, the Oil Well Supply Company’s catalogue also included oil drillers as part of the merchandise package. This was especially true for the portable well rigs, which required on-site installation of complex components. In order to set up a 2,000-foot-deep oil well ready for pumping, a complete outfit would require “wood rig ready to set up, boiler on wheels, engine, drilling tools and ropes, fishing tools, several sizes of drive pipe or casing, hydraulic jacks, tubing, and everything necessary,” weighing a total of 175,000 pounds. ²⁸ To ensure proper assemblage of these sophisticated drilling facilities, the Oil Well Supply Company provided its customers with installation labor as add-on merchandise. Given how complex these facilities were, most of the company’s customers kept the drillers as regular drilling staff after the initial installation.

In order to secure this labor supply, the company started a labor agency business in Pittsburgh, recruiting drillers from the oil region who needed jobs. Within a couple of decades, the Oil Well Supply Company expanded its merchandise sale not only all over the United States but also globally – along with the drillers they dispatched to install and operate the drilling facilities. Their 1892 catalogue states:

We have sent similar outfits with experienced workmen to various parts of the world. They have gone to Russia, Austria, Italy, Persia, India, Egypt, Africa, Canada, England, Hungary, Cuba, Peru, Brazil, Honduras, Mexico, Australia, Japan, China, New South Wales, Java, Sumatra, Roumania and other foreign countries, and to almost every State and Territory in this Country.

Skilled workmen require $125.00 per month and travelling expenses both ways, their time to commence when leaving Pennsylvania and end on their return. We are always willing, without charge, to hire such men for parties who purchase goods from us. ²⁹

While written to attract customers, the description of workmen as “experienced” or “skilled” actually provides a fair assessment of what the drillers had to offer. Broadly speaking, the Artesian method would apply generically to any landscape where drilling occurred in a valley, as the pressure of the surrounding elevations would push the liquid down to the low point of the valley that the drilling would target. However, in specific instances of drilling, the layout and firmness of the earth layers would differ significantly from place to place. The geological complications of in situ applications of Artesian drilling required skillful work to gauge exactly where to drill and how, what tools to use, well depth, rig height, potential underground pressure, relevant safety measures, etc. As the Oil Well Supply Company sold its drilling tools, it certainly wanted to minimize any cost that might arise due to unsuitability or replacements. Therefore, it was important for the drilling staff – the installation labor the company sold – to have a good understanding of what tools to use for what kind of geological formations. The company would ask its customers for information on targeted geological formations before drilling commenced, but an accurate description was not always available. Under such circumstances, the company would make sure to send out drillers along with “a list of material that ought in skillful hands to drill a well in any formation or in any country.” ³⁰ It would inevitably cost extra to hire such skilled drillers, but, in an effort to market these experienced drilling services, the company said, “the extra cost for such things as may possibly be superfluous will be much less than would be incurred by the loss of time in waiting for them if they should be afterward required.” ³¹

The skillfulness of the experienced drillers – their skill in gauging exactly where and how to drill, depending on specific geological conditions – rendered them a major asset for the Oil Well Supply Company. Despite their lack of formal education, their skills can be said to qualify as scientific “expertise,” as they were locally grounded yet globally applicable, abstracted from practice, not readily available to anyone, and occupying an important and hard-to-replace role in oil production. While not institutionally grounded, their expertise was recognized by the global flow of capital and the specific on-ground drilling needs of the oil companies. The drillers knew how to gauge the geological formations and drill for the best results using the tools available, and oil companies around the world, and their capital, recognized their expertise by purchasing their drilling labor. This sustained market activity of global capital seeking Pennsylvanian drilling labor served as a de facto credentialing mechanism in the absence of institutional legitimation of expertise.

The drillers’ expertise was qualitatively different from the work of professional oil geologists. London-trained oil geologists working in Burma were usually young university graduates with decent book knowledge of geology but almost no on-site experience. For their job in Burma, they would be asked to conduct surveys on geological layering and formations. ³² They would then write up the results in reports and their job was done – they would not be directly responsible for the material result of extraction. But it was the drillers, not the geologists, who would be held immediately accountable for the production output of a well. Rather than the geologists’ knowledge, it was the drillers’ expertise that came into direct contact with oil reserves to produce what the oil companies cared about the most – the production output.

The training and circulation of the drillers

As oil companies came to recognize the uniqueness and importance of the drillers’ expertise, the question now became: Where can we find and how can we ensure a sustained supply of such expertise? Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate the records of the Oil Well Supply Company, so it is impossible to reconstruct a systematic account of the driller recruitment and assessment process from the company’s side. However, this history did leave its fragments in the margins: through a careful tracing of census records and passport applications, we are able to take a glimpse into the world of the training and circulation of the drillers, which took them from the Allegheny region to the Irrawaddy basin across some thirty years.

Most of the drillers came from families in and around western Pennsylvania, where entire households of men had been engaged in drilling for generations, as far back as the 1870s. George O’Mara, born in 1879 in Bradford, grew up in a big family in McKean County in northwestern Pennsylvania. According to a 1900 census, at twenty-one years of age, O’Mara lived with his parents, four brothers, and four sisters in a household of eleven. His father, James O’Mara, then fifty-four years old, was registered as an “oil worker” in the census. All three of James’s adult sons (John, twenty-six; Will, twenty-four; George, twenty-one) were also working as “oil workers,” while the two younger sons (thirteen and eleven respectively) were still in school. The O’Maras were evidently a family of drillers, as all the adult male went into drilling, and so did many of their neighbors. ³³ In 1911, George O’Mara went to Burma and spent a decade there drilling for oil. ³⁴ In another instance, Elmer J. Mong, a native of Clarion County in western Pennsylvania born in 1872, had been working as a driller since his twenties and went to Burma in the 1910s. ³⁵ By 1920 Mong had returned home, where his twenty-one-year-old son, Daniel, had also started working as a “pumper,” along with their numerous pumper neighbors in the outskirts of Oil City. ³⁶ The drilling profession was highly hereditary in the oil region across multiple decades, where generations of men learned Artesian drilling from their fathers and uncles.

In addition to being temporally generational within households, the oil-drilling profession was also geographically concentrated in clusters of communities. As census records show, usually driller families lived with other driller families in the same neighborhoods, and many American drillers in Burma knew each other from such neighborhoods back home, sometimes even since childhood. John E. McDonald was one of the drillers working in Burma in the late 1910s. A native of Washington County southwest of Pittsburgh, born in 1874, he grew up in a community where many of his neighbors were reported as “oil well drillers,” “oil well pumpers,” or “oil producers.” ³⁷ Such driller household distributions were characteristic of the professional landscape across the oil region from western Pennsylvania to the Ohio–West Virginia border. Thomas R. Hulings worked as a driller in Burma in the 1920s. He was born in 1881 in Clarion County, Pennsylvania, and moved to northern West Virginia with his family in his early years. In 1900, Hulings was the only child living with his parents, but his household had ten other “roomers” living with them. Among these ten “roomers,” nine were from Pennsylvania, and eight of the nine worked as oil drillers. Hulings’s father was also a driller, and it was hardly surprising that in such a driller’s household Thomas later grew up to become one himself. ³⁸

Not only did such communities train the younger generations in drilling through hands-on practice, they also provided extensive oil networks for drilling jobs both in the United States and abroad. Many from these drilling communities went to Burma in clusters, especially those from the Venango and Clarion Counties. Born in 1872, William H. Mehrten grew up in a farmer’s household in Clarion County. Although his own family was not in the drilling profession, Clarion County was the center of the Pennsylvania oil boom in the 1870s, so he grew up with many neighbors who were oil-well “pumpers.” ³⁹ Through such drillers’ communities, Mehrten learned Artesian drilling and got connected with a job opportunity in Cholame, California, where he worked around 1900. He stayed as a “boarder” with another Pennsylvanian driller in a drillers’ neighborhood. ⁴⁰ Later, he returned to Pennsylvania, and from there he went to Burma in the 1910s. ⁴¹ Besides such internal migration patterns, some American drillers in Burma explicitly mentioned how they had already known other drillers there who came from the same communities back home. While in Burma, Thomas Hulings regularly wrote letters back home to his stepmother, where he frequently dropped names that his stepmother recognized. In the very first letter he wrote upon arrival at Yenangyaung, he mentions to his stepmother:

I have met several of the boys I knew and there are several of them that have been here several years and I did not know it. Both the Hanlon boys are here. Dick and Will. Geo. Bowers, Sid Holmes Fred Link and a lot more. . . . Have not seen Mr. & Mrs. Wolfe yet for they are down the river from here. ⁴²

Other than Mr. and Mrs. Wolfe, the other most frequent name was Willis Mong, a childhood friend of Hulings then working alongside him in Burma. Hulings’s stepmother also knew Mong personally, as Hulings conveys Mong’s greetings to her in a letter: “I may get to see Wolfs as they are in the Minbu district. Saw Willis Mong Sat. and he looks fine too and sends his best regards to you.” ⁴³ Later, Mong himself wrote a letter to Mrs. Hulings while taking a brief trip back to the United States, bringing gifts from Hulings to his family. ⁴⁴ All these people were from the same adjacent villages in Clarion County (Elk and Shippenville), and had obviously known each other for decades across generations, yet they all met in Burma working as drillers.

As has been shown, the drilling profession was inherited vertically across generations in family households, and was also concentrated horizontally in geographical clusters. The driller communities had professional ecologies in and of themselves, where the practical skills of Artesian drilling were passed on and networks of job opportunities got introduced. Training in the driller’s craft was not conducted in any form of formal schooling – there is absolutely no mention of any institutional training for oil drilling anywhere in the records. The driller families usually lived with farmers and other laborers (such as carpenters), and most of the boys stopped schooling in their mid-teens. ⁴⁵ The drillers’ expertise, therefore, was obtained through hands-on practice with senior members of the community, rather than through institutional training, which was why it lacked the legitimating credentialization that usually came with recognized “professional” jobs.

The communitarian nature of the drilling profession made it easy for agencies like the Oil Well Supply Company to recruit drillers for overseas oil companies needing such skilled labor. As the Pennsylvanian oilfields approached depletion in the late 1800s, many drillers, whose families had been in the oil-drilling business for generations, suddenly found themselves jobless. ⁴⁶ Around Pittsburgh and Oil City, labor agency businesses proliferated. As mentioned above, the Oil Well Supply Company had now turned itself into a major player in the labor market, recruiting Pennsylvanian drillers and dispatching them to oilfields around the world, especially Burma and Venezuela. ⁴⁷ Given the depletion of local oilfields, the labor business served a double purpose for the Oil Well Supply Company: both to boost its facility sales globally and to profit from the surplus labor situation.

Recruiting in whole clusters from families and villages, the Oil Well Supply Company would take care of the full administrative process for the drillers, from passport application to affidavit letters to physical examinations, and of course, connecting individual drillers with their respective oil companies in the target region. ⁴⁸ Thomas Hulings’s passport application, for example, has five components: application form with oath of allegiance, personal descriptive information (with photo), identification by an acquaintance, notarized affidavit by a relative, and another business affidavit from the labor agency. The affidavit from the Oil Well Supply Company reads:

      March 1^st, 1921.

Department Of State

 Bureau Of Passport Control.

  Washington D.C.

Gentlemen,

This will serve to introduce Mr T.R.Hulings who has been employed by us for the Yomah Oil Co., a British corporation operating in Burma.

Mr Hulings is an American citizen, and will be paid on a salary basis. In view of this we trust passports will be issued promptly.

      Yours Truly.

      OIL WELL SUPPLY CO.

      W.W.Anderson Mgr. Export Dept. ⁴⁹

Moreover, the mailing address of the passport was designated as “Thomas Roy Hulings, c/o Oil Wells [sic] Supply Co., 215 Water Street, Pittsburg, PA”; his passport was not mailed directly to Hulings himself but to the agency. ⁵⁰ Serving as the intermediary between the drillers and the oil companies abroad, the Oil Well Supply Company provided paperwork services that made things easier for both. These services proved crucial to the labor migration process, as most drillers could hardly navigate the labyrinthine bureaucratic procedures required to work overseas. ⁵¹

Intermediate social locations

On the oil production sites in Burma, the American drillers were situated in an awkward position in the social hierarchy of the colonial oilfield society, sandwiched between the British supervisory personnel above them and the Asian “coolies” below. ⁵² On one hand, these drillers were working-class laborers with extended working hours and daily pay arrangements: they were required to attend to mechanized derricks for twelve-hour shifts daily, six days a week, with wages calculated daily, while their British superintendents either sat in offices or roamed around the production area as they wished. ⁵³ On the other hand, these American drillers had the privilege of having the assistance of Burmese or Indian coolie laborers, who did most of the “heavy work of handling tools and casing” on the oil well. ⁵⁴ The coolies did not know English, so the working languages on the production sites were mostly Burmese or Urdu. ⁵⁵ The American drillers had absolutely no training in Asian languages, and could only speak a very few utterances. Tension between the two groups sometimes broke out, which occasionally even ended up as “revolver shooting incidents” on the production site. ⁵⁶

The American drillers were very conscious of their positions in such hierarchies: they displayed both animosity toward the British and contempt for the Asians. As for the British, Thomas Hulings reported to his stepmother within a month of his arrival in Burma in 1921, “I have not found anything seriously wrong with the country[,] only the Britishers.” ⁵⁷ The Americans socialized among themselves in the “American Club” and did not mingle with the British socially. They also had little respect for the Asians, routinely bossing around their Asian servants and disparaging the integrity of the Burmese. In a description of Burmese Buddhist festival celebrations, Hulings elaborated on the gorgeous decorations of the parade, but labeled the Burmese as “fanatics” with bad morals: “They will pray to Buddah [sic] for an hour and go out and steal from an own brother. Just as natural with them as eating rice.” ⁵⁸ They also complained about striking Asian laborers and emphasized the necessity of military crackdowns against them, not the least because when they went on strike the American drillers had to take over their work “pulling rods etc.” ⁵⁹

This hierarchical consciousness was also prevalent among the American drillers themselves. In addition to Pennsylvanians, there were also some drillers from the oil-producing areas of the American West, who came to Burma through similar recruitment channels. ⁶⁰ The Pennsylvanians “regard[ed] the advent of the Californians with little favour,” showing “quite a degree of provincial and professional jealousy among the drillers.” ⁶¹ As Pennsylvania was the first major oil-producing area in the United States, the Pennsylvanian drillers regarded themselves as superior to those from out West, and almost never intermingled with the Texans or Oklahomans while in Yenangyaung.

The American drillers in Burma occupied several intermediate social locations that were crucial in the perception and self-perception of their social status. First, the drillers were commodity-like, but not quite commodities. From the perspective of the oil companies, the value of the drillers was primarily based on their ability to convert wage capital into commodity capital. The depleted Pennsylvanian oilfields led to a relatively lower wage demand, while the drillers’ ability to manage mechanized drilling facilities meant that they could do a good job of converting the low wage into a high commodity value in crude oil. Once their wage demands increased and their ability to generate profit declined, the oil companies no longer needed them, as was increasingly the case in the early 1930s. ⁶² Meanwhile, the drillers were also not inanimate, raw-material global commodity objects such as cotton, jute, or tea. ⁶³ This difference meant that the drillers, as much as they were subjected to commodity-like global circulation (similar to David Arnold’s characterization of the colonial popularization of “everyday technology” such as bicycles and sewing machines), inevitably participated in and shaped the social process that created the very conditions for their own circulation. ⁶⁴ To borrow a term from Jason Moore, the drillers’ commodity-like feature “cheapened” them socially and in turn, as we shall see, contributed to the social unmaking of their expertise. ⁶⁵

Second, the American drillers were proletarian-like, but not quite proletariats. They came from working-class backgrounds, in terms of both productive relations and group culture. They worked for daily wages instead of monthly salaries and were on short-term contracts without pensions or other benefits. They were also not highly educated, as we hardly see them possessing reading or writing devices. In the rare instances that they did (such as Hulings), they routinely made grammatical or spelling mistakes. ⁶⁶ Nonetheless, they lived a fairly comfortable life in Burma, as they received a decent daily wage due to their locally unavailable expertise and had company-hired Asian domestic servants. Some drillers were able to save up their wages to support family back home. ⁶⁷ Their material conditions and their technical skills marked them as drastically different from contemporary Asian laborers, most of whom were indentured and worked on low-skill jobs. ⁶⁸

Finally, the drillers were white elite-like, but not quite white elites: on the social ladder, they stood higher than the Burmese or Indians due to their racial background and drilling expertise, but lower than the British professional personnel, who treated them with disdain. They arrived in Burma during the height of colonial racialization. Despite their working-class background, their mere presence as Caucasians earned them remarkable privilege in colonial society. The existence of an “American Club” in Yenangyaung was a clear sign of their privileged position, as the club in British colonies was an institution of social respectability and racial distinction. ⁶⁹ However, the drillers worked physically on the frontline of oil production, getting themselves dirty with crude oil and mud. This occupational difference formed a sharp contrast with white colonial elites in administrative or managerial positions, who mostly worked in the comfort of offices. ⁷⁰ Although both groups were distinctively Caucasians in an Asian colony, the British colonial elites did not consider the American drillers to be part of their self-proclaimed “esteemed” circles, as the latter, despite their unique expertise in oil drilling, occupied an inferior social position.

To sum up, in the oilfield society in Burma, these American drillers functioned as an intermediary in oil production between British managers and Asian laborers – an intermediary that made the system work; however, they were also an intermediary that was socially distant from either group. Ultimately, it was this social positioning that led to the social unmaking of the American drillers’ claim to expertise.

Between “carbon democracy” and “carbon technocracy”: the social (un-)making of low-end expertise

For the drillers, both their superiors and subsequent generations failed to recognize their expertise. This failure was partly a result of the social construction of expertise in the European context: throughout the early modern period down to the nineteenth century, the very idea of expertise came to be construed with a specific social dimension, a particular undertone of respectability, bourgeois status, etc. Given that the men of letters in early modern Europe were conceivably more eloquent than craftsmen in the promotion of their expertise, scholars inherited and long maintained a mind/hand or knowledge/practice distinction at the cost of other kinds of unlettered expertise. ⁷¹ Despite recent scholarly efforts to challenge these binaries, such distinctions still seem to underlie scholarly discussions on carbon industries. Consider the celebrated concept of “carbon democracy” promoted by Timothy Mitchell, who reminds us to pay attention to the labor politics of carbon extraction, and the more recent concept of “carbon technocracy,” proposed by Victor Seow, pointing to the high modernist planning and state-building side of carbon industries. ⁷² Both these concepts have made important contributions to how we understand carbon industries historically. However, taken together, they also inadvertently serve to reinforce the distinctions between the high and the low, the expert and the worker, the knower and the doer. Such distinctions, since they are informed by considerations of social status, would leave little room for the recognition of the historical circulation of skillful expertise with low social status. The social making of expertise, therefore, contributed to the social unmaking of low-end expertise.

In his discussion of expertise and the early modern state, historian Eric Ash delineates four key elements of the early modern notion of expertise, namely specialization (“the possession of and control over a body of specialized, productive knowledge”), practice (“a foundation based (at least in part) on a body of practical experience”), universalization (“the abstraction of universal, theoretical principles from the mundane details of everyday practice”), and legitimation (“a sociopolitical context that valued, rewarded, and legitimated useful knowledge”). ⁷³ In terms of the making of socially accepted norms of expertise, there was much in common between early modern Europe and colonial frontier areas in Asia, as both underwent political reorganization and the establishment of new authorities. If we accept Ash’s formulation of expertise, then we can make a good case that the American drillers in Burma could indeed qualify for the claim to “expertise” in their own ways.

First, mechanized oil drilling was a specialized kind of knowledge-labor. Given the underground material conditions of oil, it is impossible to see the target item of extraction before drilling happens – there was no “open-pit” mining as happened with coal, copper, or other solid minerals. Therefore, gauging specific underground geological conditions was an important skill for the drillers as they undertook their drilling tasks. Professional geologists would be able to provide geological information on potential oil reserves across the oilfield area, but would not be helpful on-site as drilling proceeded. Moreover, oil drilling entails immensely high underground pressure from both liquid oil and kerosene gas, which may cause serious explosions or blowouts. Here, the safe operation of oil-drilling derricks very much relied on the operative knowledge and “cunning intelligence” of the drillers on the spot. ⁷⁴ The knowledge component of the drilling job outweighed the physical labor component, which was provided in plenty by Asian coolies. It was because of this specialized ability to gauge the underground conditions of oil wells and to operate and maneuver the oil-drilling machinery in an informed, situated way that the American drillers proved to be an indispensable, yet locally unavailable, productive resource for the oil companies.

Second, the know-how of oil drilling was based on practical experience, and was transmitted through kin and community networks of knowledge-labor, rather than from institutional channels such as official schooling. Oil-drilling communities in Pennsylvania had been engaging in this kind of work for decades, since the time of Edwin Drake and Titusville. Most, if not all, of these American drillers in Burma grew up in such oil-producing environments, and had been immersed in oil-drilling techniques and tools all their lives. They had largely inherited their practical knowledge from their forefathers (drillers being exclusively male) and local driller communities, rather than through official institutional education. ⁷⁵ Their inherited hands-on expertise had certainly proved useful in oil production – enough so that the oil companies were willing to splash the cash to ship them all the way from western Pennsylvania to inland Burma. Meanwhile, in colonial oilfields, their hands-on expertise was sharply contrasted with the work of the imperial geologists. Usually trained in one of the royal colleges of science in London, these British imperial geologists were often recruited by the Indian Civil Service or the oil companies soon upon graduation. They often worked under the title of officials of the Geological Survey of India and remained card-holding members of esteemed learned societies in London or Edinburgh. These geologists, who claimed the universal high ground of knowledge, offered distinctively different content of expertise from the drillers, and served very different functions in their own roles of knowledge-labor. It should also be noted that the driller’s operative knowledge of drilling was not locally bound to where they came from – it was readily transferrable to the Burmese geological context. Therefore, the drillers’ expertise can also be understood as delocalized, even if it was not recognized as bearing the status of “universal” scientific knowledge.

Third, without any institutional recognition of knowledgeable expertise, it was the delivery of oil-producing results that served as legitimating criteria. Here, the similarity with early modern Europe was more pronounced: like in early modern Europe, in the oil drilling (rather than oil geology) sector in colonial Burma, there was no institutional recognition of what was considered expertise and how. The colonial state in Burma was a patchwork and porous existence, with particularly limited reach in hinterland areas. ⁷⁶ As Eric Ash argues for the early modern European context, “in the absence of any institutional credentialing system for identifying expertise, results mattered; to attempt and accomplish some specialized, technically involved task might be the only definitive way to proclaim one’s expertise to the world.” ⁷⁷ For the American drillers, they had no official recognition of their skills, so the only way that they could claim expertise was to operate the mechanized drilling facilities and produce crude oil. Here, the flow of capital to a certain extent served as their credential provider: the fact that British and Indian oil companies were willing to recruit these drillers (even despite the possible marketing or lobbying strategies from the labor agencies), and ran oil production with these drillers for decades, speaks volumes about what capital thought of the drillers’ expertise. After all, it was the delivery of capital valorization that oil companies were chasing after. Once the drillers failed to deliver the expected (or promised) amount of value, oil companies no longer recognized their value and stopped hiring them. In the absence of institutional credentialing systems, therefore, the behavior of oil capital can be understood as a good indicator of the drillers’ expertise.

If we can indeed recover the invisiblized expertise of these American drillers, then why have they not been recognized? As noted above, our conventional understanding of expertise has been heavily influenced by the imagery of social status. A mind/hand distinction often got conflated with the bourgeoisie/proletariat binary. In academic historical writings on carbon industries, we see abovementioned conceptual paradigms of “carbon democracy” and “carbon technocracy” – the democratic possibilities embedded in certain mining labor arrangements, and the vision of large-scale high modernist planning. ⁷⁸ What these paradigms do not emphasize is the phenomenon somewhere in between: the low-end expertise between the “machines of democracy” and the “rule of experts.” ⁷⁹ So how did this intermediate social location get obliterated in our understanding?

In terms of material life and income, the American drillers actually lived a fairly comfortable life with decent income compared to junior British professional geologists. The junior British geologists had better benefits, but not a significantly larger salary compared to the American drillers. For an entry-level junior geologist straight out of university in London or Cambridge, the average annual salary for a Burma post around 1913 was about £400, equivalent to approximately $4,000 in U.S. dollars around 1921 (exchange rate- and CPI-adjusted), with all everyday living expenses paid for, including housing and maintenance. ⁸⁰ Meanwhile, in 1921, when American drillers’ labor was valued at its highest, a driller’s average daily wage for twelve-hour shifts was around $14. ⁸¹ Oil companies also provided the drillers with bungalows, cooks, and servants, as well as special married quarters for drillers with a family. ⁸² The major differences were that the British geologists, being on long-term contracts, had welfare benefits such as pension funds and other bonuses, which the drillers did not. ⁸³ In addition, unlike the drillers, who were largely in their forties, many imperial geologists were quite young when they arrived in India and Burma, so they had means and prospects of promotion (and therefore higher pay), whereas the drillers did not. ⁸⁴ But overall, there was not a gigantic economic difference between the entry-level British geologists and the American drillers, like there generally was between British clerks and Asian laborers. British managerial personnel, however, earned a significantly heftier salary bill, amounting to somewhere around £600 per month in 1932. ⁸⁵

What particularly distinguished the American drillers from other white men in the oilfields were the separate social arrangements and distinctive class cultures. As mentioned in the section on social locations, the British and the Americans socialized in different physical spaces, with a separate “American Club” just for the American drillers. At the dance parties, the young American children of family-raising drillers – “from a few days to twelve years old” – also mingled around in the American Club into the late night, sometimes even till 2 or 3 A.M. ⁸⁶ The American drillers never attended British banquets, gatherings, or sporting events, so it was in effect a mutual social segregation between the British and the Americans, although there was no institutional prohibition against their socializing.

Besides physical segregations of sociality, their difference in class cultures was particularly striking. In the 1920s, excessive alcohol consumption became a huge problem among the American drillers in Yenangyaung, which led to gambling, bankruptcies, and suicides. ⁸⁷ “Booze of course has a free reign here and so many men fall for it,” writes Hulings ten days after his arrival in Yenangyaung. “It is a crime that the Oil Co.’s stand for its use as much as they do.” ⁸⁸ The American Club had a bar in it, with non-stop drinking, dancing, and poker from Saturday evenings to Monday early mornings, when drilling was not in session. In the bar there was a notice: “This Bar is closed from 4 to 5 A.M. to allow the staff to get some rest.” ⁸⁹ Alcohol indulgence was so prevalent that some Britishers cautioned, “these [American] men had volunteered to come to Burma for a spell more, it was suspected, to avoid the prohibition laws than to give of their best to the Company.” ⁹⁰ It was a fair suspicion, as alcohol consumption in Yenangyaung was not nearly so much of a problem in the 1910s before the U.S. prohibition. ⁹¹

Such overindulgent alcohol consumption and gambling in the American Club, even leading to bankruptcy, shows not only a working-class behavioral pattern but more importantly an economic culture among the drillers that focused highly on consumption with little future financial planning. As a more moderate member of the community, Thomas Hulings vocally criticized the incontinent alcohol use and gambling. But even he was only able to wire home an occasional $50 or $75 a couple of times a year, while his daily wage was somewhere around $14. ⁹² Among the drillers who died in Burma leaving a record of their belongings in their death reports, most had little to no savings. ⁹³ The American drillers’ consumption pattern indicates that collectively they inhabited an economic culture that was largely working-class, radically different from that of British bourgeois society, which celebrated values such as temperance as an important virtue in their self-fashioning of social respectability.

British company staff were keenly observant of differences in economic culture. One field manager once commented on the varied attitudes toward salary disbursement between the “happy-go-lucky Burman” and the “more serious and naturally more financially conscious Indians.” ⁹⁴ These discourses were definitely very much colonial stigmatizations against the colonized, but the popularity of these opinions reflects what the British cared about and how they saw themselves. In the context of everyday spatial work arrangements in the oilfields, this kind of remark may also be understood as an implicit comparison between the British and the Americans: the Indians mostly worked as office staff, so they worked in close proximity to the British clerks and supposedly learned a more “civilized” financial consciousness from the British, whereas the Burmese laborers worked directly with the Americans on the wells, both getting themselves dirty and being frivolous about money. This latent civilizing discourse becomes clearer if we consider British society’s general distaste for jobs in Burma, as Burma was consistently considered an undesirable destination for young, aspiring Indian Civil Service candidates. ⁹⁵ The American drillers, by virtue of their similar economic culture and spatial proximity in work to the Burmese, were therefore also designated to a subordinate cultural position. With this designation, the drillers’ subordinate position overshadowed their claim to expertise. As expertise became conceptually associated with social respectability, these American drillers also fell into historical oblivion and only sometimes get remembered as low-end laborers.

Global circulation of low-end expertise: toward a new horizon for writing the knowledge-labor complex?

As a concept that weaves together the history of labor migration and the history of science, the global circulation of low-end expertise was in no way unique to the American oil drillers in Burma: there were many similar phenomena in both oil and other extractive industries. The most well-known example in the oil industry was the “International Drillers” of Canada. Between 1873 and the outbreak of World War I, some 134 Canadian oil drillers from Lambton County of western Ontario went abroad to work on the oil wells of Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean. ⁹⁶ They were particularly active in the oil-producing areas of the Netherlands East Indies, namely Sumatra, Java, and Borneo, whose oil output was foundational to the emergence of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company (later merged with Shell to become Royal Dutch Shell) as a major behemoth in the global oil business. ⁹⁷ These “International Drillers” of western Ontario also had on-ground connections with the American drillers of western Pennsylvania, in addition to being the chronological predecessors of the latter: some Canadian drillers in the Netherlands East Indies went to work in Burma, and some learned about the global oil industry through books written by corporate geologists of the Burmah Oil Company. ⁹⁸ In addition, the Oil Well Supply Company also had active business operations in western Ontario. ⁹⁹ Therefore, while the Canadian and the American oil drillers were two separate instances of global circulation of low-end expertise, they were also deeply entangled and interconnected across the border.

Besides the oil business, there were also other examples of the global circulation of low-end expertise in various extractive industries during this period. Upstream the Irrawaddy River in further Upper Burma, the copper mines in Namtu and Bawdwin were home to not only some American corporate managerial personnel (with Herbert Hoover as one of them), but also a sizable group of American copper mining workers (though a lot fewer than the oil drillers). Most of these copper workers came from Butte, Montana, which was then one of the world’s major copper mining centers. ¹⁰⁰ Outside Burma, another noticeable example of white mining workers in global circulation was the copper miners in colonial Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). Although some of the white miners were Africa-born, a substantial proportion came from Europe. Meanwhile, even the Africa-born white miners referred to themselves as “European,” as the word “European” became a racial signifier to replace the term “white.” ¹⁰¹ Here, the global circulation of low-end expertise got racially reified beyond the first generation of migrants, as geographical signifiers took on connotations of race and expertise. Additionally, some other examples can be found in American cotton plantation overseers in India, “Portuguese” whale fishery workers in New Bedford, and Black metallurgists of eighteenth-century Jamaica who deeply influenced the British industrial revolution. ¹⁰²

As much as it seems like a white phenomenon, more recently, the global circulation of low-end expertise has also appeared in other racial contexts. In a way, the American drillers in Burma foreshadowed the experience of Global South participants in the “low-end globalization” in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Newer examples include, for instance, Chinese workers in Africa contracted to Chinese state-owned enterprises, private South Asian, Middle Eastern, and African small-traders in the marketplace of Hong Kong and Guangzhou, and Indian migrants working in the Gulf oil industry. ¹⁰³ As the nonwhite population participate in the global circulation of low-end expertise to replace the more expensive white labor of similar expertise levels, the white population in these sectors now mostly occupies elite managerial positions. Paradoxically, this new, racialized labor configuration means that the presence of the nonwhite inadvertently reinforces white superiority in such global knowledge-labor complexes.

A similar situation exists in the gender dimension. The global circulation of low-end expertise has almost invariably been a masculine endeavor: the frontier-trotting, land-toiling, sweat-shedding male worker represented the pinnacle of masculine imaginary in the age of imperial expansion. ¹⁰⁴ The presence of colonial-style clubs in mining towns further reinforced a masculine culture of sociality as the only acceptable norm of respectability. This is not to say that the global circulation of low-end expertise had no women: quite the opposite. Ever since the time of Florence Nightingale in the mid-nineteenth century, women have often featured in the global circulation of low-end expertise – though much less acknowledged due to the gendered (masculine) understanding of such phenomena. Meanwhile, most women in such circulation worked in heavily gendered encapsulations: they were usually hired as nurses, caregivers, and domestic workers, even into the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. ¹⁰⁵ The global circulation of low-end expertise has largely remained a gendered endeavor.

A final word about the conceptual significance of the term for the history of global capitalism. While anthropologist Gordon Mathews has coined the phrase “low-end globalization” in his description of contemporary commercial mobility across the Global South, I suggest that such “low-end globalization” can be better understood as a more recent iteration in the long history of the global circulation of low-end expertise, which had been in existence since at least the late nineteenth century. ¹⁰⁶ Conceptually, the global circulation of low-end expertise extends “low-end globalization” into a much longer historical perspective: that the deeper structure of such global connectivity is something enacted by global capital flow and enabled by the particular combination of certain knowledge-labor configurations in particular historical moments.

This particularity of knowledge-labor configurations in particular historical times explains why the history of global knowledge-labor complexes has never been one of progressive expansion, but always comes in “lumps” and tides: as global capital constantly seeks to extract profit wherever possible, the knowledge and labor conditions where maximum profit exists are always in flux. ¹⁰⁷ Therefore, the global circulation of low-end expertise, which attends to both knowledge conditions and capital–labor relations, explains the sudden outbursts (and quick demise) of certain knowledge-labor complexes throughout the history of global capitalism. Transcending conventional geographical confines yet not losing sight of dynamics of power, the “global circulation of low-end expertise” demonstrates the multilayered and the multifaceted character of how global capitalism changed the world in deep and often unexpected ways. It is not simply another concept about flattened notions of “globality,” “connectivity,” or “mobility.” Rather, it is an experiment – and invitation – to engage with what Sebastian Conrad calls “structured integration” in global history. ¹⁰⁸