The energy crisis of the early 1970s is now widely recognized as a turning point in global environmental history. Particularly hard hit, but still largely overlooked by historians, were poor oil-importing countries. This talk offers an expansive reinterpretation of the early 1970s crisis as seen from the global South, focusing especially on India. Many postcolonial nations experienced the first oil shock as merely one component of a broader climate-food-energy emergency that spanned the planet. Its effects were both political and ecological. By 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had resorted to imposing a constitutional dictatorship – the Emergency – for the first time in independent India’s history, one amongst a series of coups and authoritarian takeovers that swept the postcolonial world. Less noticed was a second transformation that would reverberate through the Earth’s atmosphere. The prolonged energy crisis impelled the Indian state to embrace coal, bankrolled in large part by the United States and western Europe. In this way, the 1970s energy crisis marked a world-historical passing of the torch. The exponential rise in global carbon emissions that had begun around 1950 barely slackened after the oil shocks, but its leading regional drivers shifted southwards and eastwards.

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