Author: Timothy Mitchell
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-06-25
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 1781681163
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →“A brilliant, revisionist argument that places oil companies at the heart of 20th century history—and of the political and environmental crises we now face.” —Guardian Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called “the economy” and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.
Author: Darren Dochuk
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2019-06-04
Total Pages: 688
ISBN-13: 1541673948
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A groundbreaking new history of the United States, showing how Christian faith and the pursuit of petroleum fueled America's rise to global power and shaped today's political clashes Anointed with Oil places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics -- boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's political and environmental debates. Ranging from the Civil War to the present, from West Texas to Saudi Arabia to the Alberta Tar Sands, and from oil-patch boomtowns to the White House, this is a sweeping, magisterial book that transforms how we understand our nation's history.
Author: Matthieu Auzanneau
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2020-02-20
Total Pages: 674
ISBN-13: 1603589783
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The story of oil is one of hubris, fortune, betrayal, and destruction. It is the story of a resource that has been undeniably central to the creation of our modern culture, and ever-present during the darkest exploits of empire the world over. For the past 150 years, oil has become the most essential ingredient for economic, military, and political power. And it has brought us to our present moment in which political leaders and the fossil-fuel industry consider extraordinary, and extraordinarily dangerous, policy on a world stage marked by shifting power bases. Upending the conventional wisdom by crafting a “people’s history,” award-winning journalist Matthieu Auzanneau deftly traces how oil became a national and then global addiction, outlines the enormous consequences of that addiction, sheds new light on major historical and contemporary figures, and raises new questions about stories we thought we knew well: What really sparked the oil crises in the 1970s, the shift away from the gold standard at Bretton Woods, or even the financial crash of 2008? How has oil shaped the events that have defined our times: two world wars, the Cold War, the Great Depression, ongoing wars in the Middle East, the advent of neoliberalism, and the Great Recession, among them? With brutal clarity, Oil, Power, and War exposes the heavy hand oil has had in all of our lives—and illustrates how much heavier that hand could get during the increasingly desperate race to control the last of the world’s easily and cheaply extractable reserves.
Author: Christopher R. W. Dietrich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-06-16
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 131673952X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Through innovative and expansive research, Oil Revolution analyzes the tensions faced and networks created by anti-colonial oil elites during the age of decolonization following World War II. This new community of elites stretched across Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Algeria, and Libya. First through their western educations and then in the United Nations, the Arab League, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, these elites transformed the global oil industry. Their transnational work began in the early 1950s and culminated in the 1973–4 energy crisis and in the 1974 declaration of a New International Economic Order in the United Nations. Christopher R. W. Dietrich examines how these elites brokered and balanced their ambitions via access to oil, the most important natural resource of the modern era.
Author: Naosuke Mukoyama
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2024-03-31
Total Pages: 247
ISBN-13: 1009444301
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Explores the impact of oil and other natural resources on the formation of sovereign states.
Author: Raymond J. Learsy
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 1594032033
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Longtime commodities trader Learsy explains the real reason behind todays most outrageous gas prices. A sharp, sweeping survey of OPECs methods of economic dominance, this work explains how to bust the Mideast oil cartel and chart a course toward energy independence.
Author: Edward H. Shaffer
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-03-02
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 1317243153
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This volume, originally published in 1983, analyses the extent to which American dominance in world affairs is based on the control of oil resources and the changes which will inevitably take place with the end of the oil era. The author concludes that the USA will be forced to take part in a struggle to control both the new sources of energy and the new technology which must be developed to make use of them.
Author: Peter R. Odell
Publisher: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England ; New York, N.Y., U.S.A. : Penguin Books
Published: 1974
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A discussion of the economics and politics of the international oil industry.
Author: Duco Hellema
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 321
ISBN-13: 9053564853
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This incisive study examines the role of the Netherlands in the October War and the oil crisis of 1973. The authors contend that the actions of the Dutch government were hypocritical: the Dutch government faced a domestic crisis when an oil embargo was levied against them by Arab countries for selling arms to Israel; yet after oil began arriving again two months later, the Dutch rejected a proposal for a stricter interventionist energy policy within the European Union. A probing and thought-provoking study, The Netherlands and the Oil Crisis draws on previously unavailable archival sources to shed new light on a pivotal moment in contemporary Dutch history.