Lightning Strikes Back: Lightning Fire, Standard Oil, and Anti-monopoly in the Pennsylvanian Oil Fields, 1859–1897

This article examines how lightning fires shaped anti-monopoly sentiment among Pennsylvanian oilmen in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on 138 lightning-fire incidents coded from local periodicals, the study investigates the environmental impacts of Standard Oil’s expansion in the Pennsylvania oil fields—particularly how its oil storage infrastructure attracted lightning and thus increased the risk of oil fires. Leveraging its monopsonistic position, Standard Oil sought to financialize this environmental risk and shift it onto independent producers, inventing a quasi-fire-insurance system called the “general average assessment.” Viewing this practice as a major threat to their business, oilmen developed bottom-up antagonism toward Standard Oil. Ultimately, this study offers a new framework for integrating environmental and business history by showing that the financialization of environmental risk acts as a central arena where corporate power is consolidated, contested, and politically reconfigured.