Oil Revolution
Anti-Colonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3298091 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Brandon Wolfe-Hunnicutt (0000-0002-1287-8924, California State University, Stanislaus, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 558-559 |
| Publication date | 2018-02-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-1953 • E-ISSN: 1530-9169 |
| Publisher | MIT Press - Journals (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1162/jinh_r_01211 |
| OpenAlex | W2793339410 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 1 |
Marx once observed that ideas can have a material force in history.1 Dietrich’s new book presents powerful evidence in support of that proposition. He shows how a set of ideas about a postcolonial state’s right to control its natural resources, oil in particular, transformed the world economy between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. Dietrich describes this set of ideas, what he calls the “sovereign rights” paradigm, as part of a broader “economic culture of decolonization” (3). He charts the emergence of this cultural formation from its earliest articulations in the developmental economics of Prebisch through the collective actions of an international class of oil elites who sought to overturn the oil concessions established under colonial auspices in the early part of the twentieth century.2The underlying premise of these oil elites was that the existing concessions were unfair to oil-producing nations. These elites then worked through an assemblage of international organizations, ranging from the United Nations to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and many others, to wrest control of oil pricing and production decisions from the private corporations that controlled the existing oil concessions. These oil elites gained special prominence in Iraq and Libya—states that underwent powerful social revolutions and mobilized broad national followings. Working in and through these “insurrectionist” states, oil elites forged a discourse of natural-resource sovereignty into a powerful weapon used to expropriate major foreign corporations between 1969 and 1972.The tragic irony of Dietrich’s narrative is that sword of “sovereign rights” was ultimately co-opted by “gradualists” states, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, with significant investments in maintaining the existing structures and systems of global capitalism. While insurrectionist states became mired in controversies of postcolonial political and economic development, gradualists states, led by Iran and Saudi Arabia, wielded the sword forged by insurrectionists to create the massive oil-price increases associated with the 1973/4 opec oil crisis. Insurrectionist intellectuals forged plans to use opec to provide low cost oil to developing nations and to use opec’s gains against global corporations as a model to raise commodity prices for all raw-materials exporters. But these plans were ultimately thwarted by the alliance of the United States, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Rather than using the increased oil prices to overturn the legacies of colonialism and ameliorate global inequality, Iran and Saudi Arabia, with the support of the Nixon administration, chose to purchase weapons from the United States and deposit surplus funds in U.S. banks, where they were then loaned to developing nations struggling to cope with increased oil import costs. Those loans, however, came with onerous conditions attached. The sword that was sharpened to cut down global corporations was ultimately wielded to cut down liberation movements in the developing world.In narrating this drama, Dietrich eschews a traditional nation-state-based methodology to relate a transnational history of ideas and their often-unintended consequences. In so doing, he crosses several methodological boundaries. He synthesizes legal and intellectual history, and the history of economic thought, with political and diplomatic history in ways that break down these disciplinary categories. In the process, he draws from an array of international archives and secondary sources in English, French, and Spanish, weaving them together with lively and vivid prose.The originality of the research, especially the excavation of the pivotal role played by transnational oil elites, makes the book an important resource for scholars of international history and international political economy. Indeed, no concise, thorough, and readable narrative of this period in oil history has been available until the publication of this book.3
Colonialism · Decolonization · Economics · Economy · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Premise · Sociology · Sovereignty · African studies and sociopolitical issues · International Development and Aid · Law · Natural Resources and Economic Development
| Citations per year | 1.14 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2019 - 2025 (7) |
| Highly cited | No |