Oil Boom: Agriculture, Chemistry, and the Rise of Global Plant Fat Industries, ca. 1850–1920

Fats extracted from plants and animals are an important and understudied part of the industrialization of the "global North" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Demand for soap, lamp oil, candles, lubricants, and other products drove European and American efforts to extract fats from animals across the continents and oceans, and by the late nineteenth century a proportion of this fat entered the North's food supply. Simultaneously, demand for edible and industrial fats appeared to be outstripping supplies. Plants emerged as an important source of fat in this period, as new technologies allowed plant fats to be transformed into more versatile and edible products. The transition to plant fats represented an important move down the food chain for Northern consumers, allowing for the efficient use of existing resources, as well as contributing to the ongoing extraction of raw materials from the tropics.