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My research connects the narrative imaginaries of two critical moments in the history of fossil capital: the roughly analogous world-systemic crests of the post-Sepoy Rebellion British Empire (c. 1857-1895) and the post-Berlin Wall American Empire (1991-2024). The first goal of my research is to spur us to consider the continuities and disjunctures of the popular narrative work of these eras and thus reveal tensions incumbent on material and cultural systems predicated on limited carbon resources. Victorian anxiety around coal exhaustion, American anxiety about climate change: perhaps these are fossil-fueled flare-ups of the same energetic malady. My second goal is to show that the figure of a pre-industrial other – whether in the form of an indigenous culture or an imagined European past – provides an imaginative release valve for these ecological anxieties.