Responding to messages: Historicity, modernity, and explaining a joke about 'geological obsession' with 'deep time' of Victorian Britain
(Originally posted elsewhere on 8 March 2025.)
Posted about British colonial officials in 1860s South India being fascinated by studying geology of Deccan Plateau as both a potential source of material wealth but also as more like intellectual curiosity that allowed them to consider "deep time" and the place of "civilization" in history. And someone shared post, commenting in tags something sort of like "interesting how British Empire could be so focused on rocks."
And really:
Both British imperial power and British popular imagination are tied to "ancient rocks"
British coal and coal-powered engines transformed global ecologies and societies with railroads and factories at the same time that British public became widely aware of dinosaurs, extinct Pleistocene megafauna, the vast scale of deep time, geology, and uniformitarian Earth systems. Then British anthropology, Egyptomania, archaeology, etc., were implicated in professionalization of sciences and ideas of primitivsm/racial hierarchy. Then British extraction of liquid fossil fuels instantiated expansion of petroleum products. Victorian popular culture had a penchant for contemplating death, decay, deep past, civilizational collapse, classical antiquity. So there's a simultaneous fixation on both temporality and materiality. Which both involve "earth."
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Consider:
Coal. How the mining of "ancient rock" (300-million-year-old Carboniferous) and coal-burning probably strongly propelled Britain (tied also to enclosure laws and Caribbean slave profits reinvested in ascendant financial/insurance institutions) to the "first" industrialization around 1830, helping cement its global hegemony and setting a blueprint for European/US industry. How burning that ancient rock "unlocked steam power" for Britain and facilitated the rapid expansion of railroad networks after the first public steam railway in 1825 (steam engines then let Britain reach and extract resources from hinterlands) while the rock also powered textile mills after the 1830s (putting poorer Britons to work in mills and factories while "Poor Laws" were put into effect outlawing "vagrancy" and "joblessness") which reshaped "the countryside" in Britain and reshaped global ecologies and labor regimes. Provincial realist novels and other literature reflect anxiety about this ecological/social transition. Even later Victorian novels and fin de siecle commentaries hint how coal and industrialization invoke temporality more directly, in that the engines and technologies provoke rhetoric and discourses about exponential growth, linear progress, and dazzling future horizons.
Fossils of Pleistocene megafauna: How an extinct Mastodon was displayed at Pall Mall in London in 1802. And how William Conybeare's discovery/description of coal-bearing rock in Britain led him to name "the Carboniferous period" in 1822, but it wasn't just coal power that this event inspired. in the very same year, Conybeare described the remains of extinct Pleistocene hyenas at Kirkdale Cave in Britain. The promotion of this discovery of Ice Age hyenas gave many Britons for the first time an awareness of deep past and obsession with Creatures. But the promotion also brought spectacle, public display, poetics, and marketing into natural history like "edu-tainment," a "poetics of popular science." This took place in the context of the rapid rise of British mass-market print media. Geological verse, Victorian novels, and cheap miscellanies reflect anxiety about this temporality and natural history.
Geology as a discipline: How the 1830 publishing of Lyell's monumentally significant Principles of Geology, directly inspired after he observed British ancient rock formations at Isle of Arran, completely changed European/US understanding of deep time and geology and the scale of Earth systems (uniformity principle), which made people wonder about linear notions of history and whether empires/societies can survive forever in such vast time scales.
Dinosaur fossils: How the "first dinosaur sculptures in the world" (dinosaur fossils reminiscent of ancient rock?) were reconstructed and put on display by Britain in 1854 at Crystal Palace in London following "the Great Exhibition," an event which set the model for future exhibitions and started the global craze for "world's fairs" and expositions showcasing imperial/industrial power for decades (the model for Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893, Paris event of 1900, St. Louis event of 1904, and beyond).
Soil mapping: How "ancient rock" was entangled with one of the most significant scientific projects of all-time, Britain's "The Great Trigonometric Survey of India" in 1802, undertaken to survey and record soil types across South Asia. After the resistance of the leaders of Mysore had finally been defeated, the subcontinent was vulnerable to consolidated British colonial power, and surveys were ordered immediately. The mapping of acreage for tax administration by the East India Company would remake societies with bordered property, contracted ownership, tax/wealth extraction. But the Survey also let Britain map soil for purposes of monoculture agriculture planning. Britain then used geology/soil as potential indicators of biological essentialism that equated "ancient" Gonds of India or "ancient" Aboriginal peoples of Australia with primitivism. Adventure stories and sportsmen's pulp magazines reflect anxiety about these cultural and geographical frontiers.
Diamonds: How the discovery of ancient rock (diamonds, from tens of millions of years old kimberlite) in the Kimberly (South Africa) rocketed Britain to more power when their colonial commissioners took possession in 1871, giving Britain a foothold and paving the way for Cecil Rhodes to amass astonishing wealth while completely remaking social institutions, labor regimes, and environments in southern Africa, giving Britain so much profit from diamonds that in 1882 Kimberly was only the second city on the whole planet to install electric street lighting.
Egyptomania: How British archaeologists digging around in ancient rock of their vassal/colony of Egypt, especially the tens of thousands of ancient Egyptian artifacts that they collected between 1880 and 1890, contributed to a craze for classical antiquity and a fixation on the ancient Mediterranean and mummies.
Victorian death fascination: How British archaeologists interacting with ancient rock in Southwest Asia (Mesopotamia, Levant) coupled with the Egyptomania also strongly influenced Late Victorian obsessions with death, decay, the occult, millennarian dates, and civilizational collapse which continued to influence culture, fashion, historicity, and narrativizing in Europe/US for years. Perhaps they wondered: "If Ur could fall, if Thebes could fall, if Mycenae could fall, if ROME could fall, then how could our civilization based in fair London survive such vast eons of time and such strong geological and environmental forces?"
Liquid fossil fuels: How "ancient rock" yielded liquid fossil that was extracted by British industrialsits when the first test oil wells were dug at "the Black Spot" in Borneo in 1896 which led to creation of Shell Oil company in 1897 led by a British director who was fascinated with ancient fossils. Followed then the global expansion of combustion engines, oil lubricants, and networks of imperial infrastructure to extract and refine oil. And how British tinkering with "ancient rock" of Persia and Southwest Asia led to the bolstering of a "Middle East" oil industry; the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was founded in 1909, giving Britain yet more geopolitical leverage in the region; the company would later become BP, one of the biggest and most profitable corporations to ever exist.
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So the immaterial imaginaries of place/space and time (frontiers, the exotic/foreign, the tropical/Orient, ascent/decay, civilization/savagery, deep past/future horizons) justify or organize or pre-empt or service the material dispossession and accumulation.
British Empire transformed Earth and earth. Both materially/physically and immaterially/imaginatively.
(Update on 10 March 2025.)
It was the one where I condensed excerpts from:
Pratik Charkrabarti. "Gondwana and the Politics of the Deep Past." Past & Present, Volume 242 (February 2019), Issue 1: pages 119-153.
Good overview of Victorian historicity of geologic time related to anthropology, India, race, etc.
But Chakrabarti expands on it in his book:
Inscriptions of Nature: Geology and the Naturalization of Antiquity (Pratik Chakrabarti, 2020).
Might be read in conversation with this:
Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Martin J.S. Rudwick, 2010).
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But also these:
Victorian Environments: Acclimitizing to Change in British Domestic and Colonial Culture (Edited by Grace Moore and Michelle J. Smith, 2018) ///// "Shaping the beast: the nineteenth-century poetics of palaeontology" (Laurence Talairach-Vielmas in European Journal of English Studies, 2013). ///// Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion (Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, 2021) ///// “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” (Laura Rademaker in Postcolonial Studies, September 2021). ///// "Literary Megatheriums and Loose Baggy Monsters: Paleontology and the Victorian Novel" (Gowan Dawson in Victorian Studies, 2011). ///// An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750-1850 (Siobhan Carroll, 2015) ///// "Making Historicity: Paleontology and the Proximity of the Past in Germany, 1775-1825" (Patrick Anthony in Journal of the History of Ideas, 2021). ///// Energy, Ecocriticism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction: Novel Ecologies (Barri J. Gold, 2021) ///// "'India isn't big enough for such as us': Conrad and Kipling's Fictions of Extraction" (Corbin Hiday, Victorian Network, Vol. 10, 2021) ///// "Victorian Ecology" special issue of 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century, Vol. 26 (2018) ///// '"A Dim World, Where Monsters Dwell": The Spatial Time of the Sydenham Crystal Palace Dinosaur Park' (Nancy Rose Marshall in Victorian Studies, 2007). ///// "Hyena-Hunting and Byron-Bashing in the Old North: William Buckland, Geological Verse and the Radical Threat" (O'Connor in Uncommon Contexts: Encounters between Science and Literature, 1800-1914, 2013). ///// 'Victorian Ecologies' issue of Victorian Network, Vol. 10 (2021)
