Running on Empty: Fossil Fuels, Local Fuels, and Entangled Infrastructures in Colonial Senegal, 1885–1945

Abstract This article examines the history of energy use in colonial Senegal from 1885 to 1945, and it considers how African populations and French colonial officials built a colonial energy economy through overlapping and competing infrastructures of local and imported fuels, labor, and networks of transportation. As the colonial state constructed a new system of infrastructure, from railways and roads to trains and trucks, the French extended their reach into the interior and increased the production of cash crops. At the same time, peasant farmers, migrant workers, and urban merchants incorporated colonial infrastructures into their own regimes of energy use while also fashioning an infrastructure of locally produced fuels. Through the entanglement of local and colonial infrastructures and labor, as well as the appropriation of various forms of technology, Africans and their colonizers forged a hybrid colonial energy economy — not organic, not industrial — specific to the context of colonialism.