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Empires and Anarchies
A History of Oil in the Middle East
Michael Quentin Morton
Reaktion Books, 2017
Oil lies at the heart of the modern history of the Middle East. For decades, the world’s largest oil reserves have enriched the region’s nations. But oil wealth has not brought with it universal prosperity. It has, though, transformed the Middle Eastern people and societies—enriching empires and engendering anarchies.

Empires and Anarchies is an unconventional history of oil in the Middle East. In Michael Quentin Morton’s account the burnt-out remains of Saddam Hussein’s armaments and the human tragedy of the Arab Spring are as much of the story as the shimmering skylines of oil-rich nations. From the first explorers trudging through the desert to the excesses of the Peacock Throne and the high stakes of OPEC, Morton lays out the history of oil in compelling detail, arguing that oil simultaneously enriched and fractured the Middle East, eroding traditional ways of life, and eventually contributing to the rise of Islamic radicalism. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the promises and peril of the world’s oil boom.
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The Enduring Legacy
Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela
Miguel Tinker Salas
Duke University Press, 2009
Oil has played a major role in Venezuela’s economy since the first gusher was discovered along Lake Maracaibo in 1922. As Miguel Tinker Salas demonstrates, oil has also transformed the country’s social, cultural, and political landscapes. In The Enduring Legacy, Tinker Salas traces the history of the oil industry’s rise in Venezuela from the beginning of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the experiences and perceptions of industry employees, both foreign and Venezuelan. He reveals how class ambitions and corporate interests combined to reshape many Venezuelans’ ideas of citizenship. Middle-class Venezuelans embraced the oil industry from the start, anticipating that it would transform the country by introducing modern technology, sparking economic development, and breaking the landed elites’ stranglehold. Eventually Venezuelan employees of the industry found that their benefits, including relatively high salaries, fueled loyalty to the oil companies. That loyalty sometimes trumped allegiance to the nation-state.

North American and British petroleum companies, seeking to maintain their stakes in Venezuela, promoted the idea that their interests were synonymous with national development. They set up oil camps—residential communities to house their workers—that brought Venezuelan employees together with workers from the United States and Britain, and eventually with Chinese, West Indian, and Mexican migrants as well. Through the camps, the companies offered not just housing but also schooling, leisure activities, and acculturation into a structured, corporate way of life. Tinker Salas contends that these practices shaped the heart and soul of generations of Venezuelans whom the industry provided with access to a middle-class lifestyle. His interest in how oil suffused the consciousness of Venezuela is personal: Tinker Salas was born and raised in one of its oil camps.

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Energy without Conscience
Oil, Climate Change, and Complicity
David McDermott Hughes
Duke University Press, 2017
In Energy without Conscience David McDermott Hughes investigates why climate change has yet to be seen as a moral issue. He examines the forces that render the use of fossil fuels ordinary and therefore exempt from ethical evaluation. Hughes centers his analysis on Trinidad and Tobago, which is the world's oldest petro-state, having drilled the first continuously producing oil well in 1866. Marrying historical research with interviews with Trinidadian petroleum scientists, policymakers, technicians, and managers, he draws parallels between Trinidad's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave labor energy economy and its contemporary oil industry. Hughes shows how both forms of energy rely upon a complicity that absolves producers and consumers from acknowledging the immoral nature of each. He passionately argues that like slavery, producing oil is a moral choice and that oil is at its most dangerous when it is accepted as an ordinary part of everyday life. Only by rejecting arguments that oil is economically, politically, and technologically necessary, and by acknowledging our complicity in an immoral system, can we stem the damage being done to the planet.
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Growing Apart
Oil, Politics, and Economic Change in Indonesia and Nigeria
Peter M. Lewis
University of Michigan Press, 2007

"Growing Apart is an important and distinguished contribution to the literature on the political economy of development. Indonesia and Nigeria have long presented one of the most natural opportunities for comparative study. Peter Lewis, one of America's best scholars of Nigeria, has produced the definitive treatment of their divergent development paths. In the process, he tells us much theoretically about when, why, and how political institutions shape economic growth."
—Larry Diamond, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution

"Growing Apart is a careful and sophisticated analysis of the political factors that have shaped the economic fortunes of Indonesia and Nigeria. Both scholars and policymakers will benefit from this book's valuable insights."
—Michael L. Ross, Associate Professor of Political Science, Chair of International Development Studies, UCLA

"Lewis presents an extraordinarily well-documented comparative case study of two countries with a great deal in common, and yet with remarkably different postcolonial histories. His approach is a welcome departure from currently fashionable attempts to explain development using large, multi-country databases packed with often dubious measures of various aspects of 'governance.'"
—Ross H. McLeod, Editor, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies

"This is a highly readable and important book. Peter Lewis provides us with both a compelling institutionalist analysis of economic development performance and a very insightful comparative account of the political economies of two highly complex developing countries, Nigeria and Indonesia. His well-informed account generates interesting findings by focusing on the ability of leaders in both countries to make credible commitments to the private sector and assemble pro-growth coalitions. This kind of cross-regional political economy is often advocated in the profession but actually quite rare because it is so hard to do well. Lewis's book will set the standard for a long time."

—Nicolas van de Walle, John S. Knight Professor of International Studies, Cornell University

Peter M. Lewis is Associate Professor and Director of the African Studies Program, Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies.

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Indians, Cattle, Ships, and Oil
The Story of W. M. D. Lee
By Donald F. Schofield
University of Texas Press, 1985

Indian trader, rancher, harbor developer, oil impresario—these are the many worlds of one of the least chronicled but most fascinating characters of the American West. In the early, bustling years of the frontier, a brazen young man named William McDole Lee moved from Wisconsin to Kansas and then to Texas to forge a life for himself. Becoming a driving entrepreneurial force in Texas's development, Lee soon garnered the alliances and resources necessary to shape the financial destinies of disparate groups throughout the state. His story is expertly told in Donald F. Schofield's Indians, Cattle, Ships, and Oil.

Beginning in 1869 as a trader to the southern Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes and fort provisioner to troops garrisoned at Camp Supply, Indian Territory, Lee gained a partner and amassed a fortune in short order from trading buffalo hides and robes. Vast herds of buffalo grazing on the southern plains were killed largely on his order. When buffalo were no longer a profitable commodity, Lee tackled his next challenge—the cattle trade.

He began with herds branded LR that grazed on pastures near Fort Supply. Then came his LE herd in the Texas Panhandle. Another partnership, with noted cattle rancher Lucien Scott, resulted in the vast LS ranch, one of the most successful operations of its day. Lee even introduced a new breed of cattle, the Aberdeen-Angus, to the western range. But as his partnership faded, Lee moved on to his next undertaking—the development of Texas' first deep-water harbor.

In 1888, Lee and other financiers put up one million dollars to finance a dream: opening international trade from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico to the mainland at the mouth of the Brazos River. Their Brazos River Channel and Dock Company was to construct, own, and operate a deep-water harbor at Velasco, with a railroad link to Houston. Though threats of financial disaster loomed large, the Velasco facility was to welcome, in its day, tugs, barges, and three-masted schooners and to provide impetus for Houston's boom. Yet with success, the mercurial Lee turned to yet another challenge—oil.

Starting still another partnership, Lee committed himself to prospecting for oil on the West Columbia Ridge in Brazoria County. Lee and crew struck oil in 1907, developing one of the first producing wells of Brazoria County, but inadequate drilling equipment hampered further fruitful exploration. Lee moved his rigs to the famed Spindletop, where he perfected the technique of shallow drilling. Though spectacular success in the oil business eluded him, Lee's accomplishments set him squarely among the great entrepreneurs of the Texas oil industry.

Lee's exploits led him to roles in some of the most dramatic moments in Texas and the West—Indian uprisings, buffalo hunts, political scandals, cowboy strikes and shoot-outs, railroad promotions, oil-well blow-outs and gushers. The people he encountered are the famous and infamous of western history: Cheyenne Chief Little Robe and the outlaw "Hurricane Bill" Martin; Indian Agent John D. Miles and Major General John Pope; outlaws Tom Harris and William Bonney, and Sheriff Pat Garrett. Altogether, Lee's biography vividly shows one man's manipulation of people and events during the settlement of the American frontier.

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Life in Oil
Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia
By Michael L. Cepek, Photographs by Bear Guerra
University of Texas Press, 2018

Oil is one of the world’s most important commodities, but few people know how its extraction affects the residents of petroleum-producing regions. In the 1960s, the Texaco corporation discovered crude in the territory of Ecuador’s indigenous Cofán nation. Within a decade, Ecuador had become a member of OPEC, and the Cofán watched as their forests fell, their rivers ran black, and their bodies succumbed to new illnesses. In 1993, they became plaintiffs in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit that aims to compensate them for the losses they have suffered. Yet even in the midst of a tragic toxic disaster, the Cofán have refused to be destroyed. While seeking reparations for oil’s assault on their lives, they remain committed to the survival of their language, culture, and rainforest homeland.

Life in Oil presents the compelling, nuanced story of how the Cofán manage to endure at the center of Ecuadorian petroleum extraction. Michael L. Cepek has lived and worked with Cofán people for more than twenty years. In this highly accessible book, he goes well beyond popular and academic accounts of their suffering to share the largely unknown stories that Cofán people themselves create—the ones they tell in their own language, in their own communities, and to one another and the few outsiders they know and trust. Their words reveal that life in oil is a form of slow, confusing violence for some of the earth’s most marginalized, yet resilient, inhabitants.

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Lifeblood
Oil, Freedom, and the Forces of Capital
Matthew T. Huber
University of Minnesota Press, 2013

If our oil addiction is so bad for us, why don’t we kick the habit? Looking beyond the usual culprits—Big Oil, petro-states, and the strategists of empire—Lifeblood finds a deeper and more complex explanation in everyday practices of oil consumption in American culture. Those practices, Matthew T. Huber suggests, have in fact been instrumental in shaping the broader cultural politics of American capitalism.

How did gasoline and countless other petroleum products become so central to our notions of the American way of life? Huber traces the answer from the 1930s through the oil shocks of the 1970s to our present predicament, revealing that oil’s role in defining popular culture extends far beyond material connections between oil, suburbia, and automobility. He shows how oil powered a cultural politics of entrepreneurial life—the very American idea that life itself is a product of individual entrepreneurial capacities. In so doing he uses oil to retell American political history from the triumph of New Deal liberalism to the rise of the New Right, from oil’s celebration as the lifeblood of postwar capitalism to increasing anxieties over oil addiction.

Lifeblood rethinks debates surrounding energy and capitalism, neoliberalism and nature, and the importance of suburbanization in the rightward shift in American politics. Today, Huber tells us, as crises attributable to oil intensify, a populist clamoring for cheap energy has less to do with American excess than with the eroding conditions of life under neoliberalism.

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Living with Oil
Promises, Peaks, and Declines on Mexico’s Gulf Coast
By Lisa Breglia
University of Texas Press, 2013

For decades, Mexico has been one of the world’s top non-OPEC oil exporters, but since the 2004 peak and subsequent decline of the massive offshore oilfield—Cantarell—the prospects for the country have worsened. Living with Oil takes a unique look at the cultural and economic dilemmas in this locale, focusing on residents in the fishing community of Isla Aguada, Campeche, who experienced the long-term repercussions of a 1979 oil spill that at its height poured out 30,000 barrels a day, a blowout eerily similar to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster.

Tracing the interplay of the global energy market and the struggle it creates between citizens, the state, and multinational corporations, this study also provides lessons in the tug-of-war between environmentalism and the lure of profits. In Mexico, oil has held status as a symbol of nationalist pride as well as a key economic asset that supports the state’s everyday operations. Capturing these dilemmas in a country now facing a national security crisis at the hands of violent drug traffickers, cultural anthropologist Lisa Breglia covers issues of sovereignty, security, and stability in Mexico’s post-peak future.

The first in-depth account of the local effects of peak oil in Mexico, emphasizing the everyday lives and livelihoods of coastal Campeche residents, Living with Oil demonstrates important aspects of the political economy of energy while showing vivid links between the global energy marketplace and the individual lives it affects.

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Making the Desert Modern
Americans, Arabs, and Oil on the Saudi Frontier, 1933–1973
Chad Parker
University of Massachusetts Press, 2015
In 1933 American oilmen representing what later became the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) signed a concession agreement with the Saudi Arabian king granting the company sole proprietorship over the oil reserves in the country's largest province. As drilling commenced and wells proliferated, Aramco soon became a major presence in the region. In this book Chad H. Parker tells Aramco's story, showing how an American company seeking resources and profits not only contributed to Saudi "nation building" but helped define U.S. foreign policy during the early Cold War.

In the years following World War II, as Aramco expanded its role in Saudi Arabia, the idea of "modernization" emerged as a central component of American foreign policy toward newly independent states. Although the company engaged in practices supportive of U.S. goals, its own modernizing efforts tended to be pragmatic rather than policy-driven, more consistent with furthering its business interests than with validating abstract theories. Aramco built the infrastructure necessary to extract oil and also carved an American suburb out of the Arabian desert, with all the air-conditioned comforts of Western modern life. At the same time, executives cultivated powerful relationships with Saudi government officials and, to the annoyance of U.S. officials, even served the monarchy in diplomatic disputes. Before long the company became the principal American diplomatic, political, and cultural agent in the country, a role it would continue to play until 1973, when the Saudi government took over its operation.
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Oil and Mexican Foreign Policy
George Grayson
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
The discovery of enormous oil reserves in the early 1970s revolutionized Mexico's economy and political behavior, bringing soaring revenues and industrial development. The oil glut of 1981 and wild fluctuations in world prices, pushed the country to the brink of bankruptcy. George W. Grayson describes how the roller-coaster economic ride, shrill nationalism, political assertiveness, and arrogant posturing of the 1970s have given way to greater professionalism, fiscal responsibility, and a cooperative attitude towards the United States in recent times.
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Oil and Nation
A History of Bolivia's Petroleum Sector
Stephen C. Cote
West Virginia University Press, 2016
Oil and Nation places petroleum at the center of Bolivia’s contentious twentieth-century history. Bolivia’s oil, Cote argues, instigated the largest war in Latin America in the 1900s, provoked the first nationalization of a major foreign company by a Latin American state, and shaped both the course and the consequences of Bolivia’s transformative National Revolution of 1952. Oil and natural gas continue to steer the country under the government of Evo Morales, who renationalized hydrocarbons in 2006 and has used revenues from the sector to reduce poverty and increase infrastructure development in South America’s poorest country.

The book advances chronologically from Bolivia’s earliest petroleum pioneers in the nineteenth century until the present, inserting oil into historical debates about Bolivian ethnic, racial, and environmental issues, and within development strategies by different administrations. While Bolivia is best known for its tin mining, Oil and Nation makes the case that nationalist reformers viewed hydrocarbons and the state oil company as a way to modernize the country away from the tin monoculture and its powerful backers and toward an oil-powered future.
 
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Oil and Urbanization on the Pacific Coast
Ralph Bramel Lloyd and the Shaping of the Urban West
Michael R. Adamson
West Virginia University Press, 2018

Oil and Urbanization on the Pacific Coast tells the story of oilman Ralph Bramel Lloyd, a small business owner who drove the development of one of America’s largest oil fields. Lloyd invested his petroleum earnings in commercial real estate—much of it centered around automobiles and the fuel they require—in several western cities, notably Portland, Oregon. Putting the history of extractive industry in dialogue with the history of urban development, Michael R. Adamson shows how energy is woven into the fabric of modern life, and how the “energy capital” of Los Angeles exerted far-flung influence in the US West.

A contribution to the relatively understudied history of small businesses in the United States, Oil and Urbanization on the Pacific Coast explores issues of interest to multiple audiences, such as the competition for influence over urban development waged among local growth machines and outside corporate interests; the urban rivalries of a region; the importance of public capital in mobilizing the commercial real estate sector during the Great Depression and World War II; and the relationships among owners, architects, and contractors in the execution of commercial building projects.    

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Oil and Water
A Novel
Mei Mei Evans
University of Alaska Press, 2013
What happens when the American dream collides head-on with a nation’s dependence on fossil fuels? Oil and Water, a novel by Mei Mei Evans, focuses on precisely this question. Starting with a star-crossed supertanker, a wayward fishing boat, and a well-known hazard in the Gulf of Alaska, the story presents a region plunged into an oil-slicked crisis. As thousands of miles of shoreline and sea are obliterated, the spill threatens the lives and livelihoods of the coastal community of Selby.

At the center of the disaster are Gregg, a down-on-his-luck skipper, and Lee, his lone deckhand. As they cross paths with the tanker and later the residents of Selby, they are faced with decisions that will have a lasting impact on the entire community. And when the residents are presented with a controversial deal—accept handouts in the form of work from the very company responsible for the disaster—they must learn just how important it is to find strength in the connections that bind humans to each other and the natural world. 

Evans’s compelling story, influenced by her own experiences during the Exxon Valdez oil spill, is a provocative look at the choice that must be made between environmental safety and economic survival. A PEN/Bellwether Prize finalist, it will have readers reconsidering where they draw their own lines.
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Oil and Water
Being Han in Xinjiang
Tom Cliff
University of Chicago Press, 2016
For decades, China’s Xinjiang region has been the site of clashes between long-residing Uyghur and Han settlers. Up until now, much scholarly attention has been paid to state actions and the Uyghur’s efforts to resist cultural and economic repression. This has left the other half of the puzzle—the motivations and ambitions of Han settlers themselves—sorely understudied.
 
With Oil and Water, anthropologist Tom Cliff offers the first ethnographic study of Han in Xinjiang, using in-depth vignettes, oral histories, and more than fifty original photographs to explore how and why they became the people they are now. By shifting focus to the lived experience of ordinary Han settlers, Oil and Water provides an entirely new perspective on Chinese nation building in the twenty-first century and demonstrates the vital role that Xinjiang Han play in national politics—not simply as Beijing’s pawns, but as individuals pursuing their own survival and dreams on the frontier.
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Oil and Wilderness in Alaska
Natural Resources, Environmental Protection, and National Policy Dynamics
George J. Busenberg
Georgetown University Press

Colliding environmental and development interests have shaped national policy reforms supporting both oil development and environmental protection in Alaska. Oil and Wilderness in Alaska examines three significant national policy reform efforts that came out of these conflicts: the development of the Trans-Alaska pipeline, the establishment of a vast system of protected natural areas through the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, and the reform of the environmental management of the marine oil trade in Alaska to reduce the risk of oil pollution after the Exxon Valdez disaster.

Illuminating the delicate balance and give-and-take between environmental and commercial interests, as well as larger issues shaping policy reforms, Busenberg applies a theoretical framework to examine the processes and consequences of these reforms at the state, national, and international levels. The author examines the enduring institutional legacies and policy consequences of each reform period, their consequences for environmental protection, and the national and international repercussions of reform efforts. The author concludes by describing the continuing policy conflicts concerning oil development and nature conservation in Alaska left unresolved by these reforms. Rich case descriptions illustrate the author’s points and make this book an essential resource for professors and students interested in policies concerning Alaska, the Arctic, oil development, nature conservation, marine oil spills, the policy process, and policy theory.

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Oil, Banks, and Politics
The United States and Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1917–1924
By Linda B. Hall
University of Texas Press, 1995

Mexico was second only to the United States as the world's largest oil producer in the years following the Mexican Revolution. As the revolutionary government became institutionalized, it sought to assure its control of Mexico's oil resources through the Constitution of 1917, which returned subsoil rights to the nation. This comprehensive study explores the resulting struggle between oil producers, many of which were U.S. companies, and the Mexican government.

Linda Hall goes beyond the diplomacy to look at the direct impact of a powerful, highly profitable foreign-controlled industry on a government and a nation trying to recover from a major civil war. She draws on extensive research in Mexican archives, including both government sources and the private papers of Presidents Alvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles, as well as U.S. government and private sources.

Since the North American Free Trade Agreement has expanded United States business ties to Mexico, this study of a crucial moment in U.S.-Mexican business relations will be of interest to a wide audience in business, diplomatic, and political history.

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Oil in Texas
The Gusher Age, 1895-1945
By Diana Davids Hinton and Roger M. Olien
University of Texas Press, 2002

As the twentieth century began, oil in Texas was easy to find, but the quantities were too small to attract industrial capital and production. Then, on January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher blew in. Over the next fifty years, oil transformed Texas, creating a booming economy that built cities, attracted out-of-state workers and companies, funded schools and universities, and generated wealth that raised the overall standard of living—even for blue-collar workers. No other twentieth-century development had a more profound effect upon the state.

In this book, Roger M. Olien and Diana Davids Hinton chronicle the explosive growth of the Texas oil industry from the first commercial production at Corsicana in the 1890s through the vital role of Texas oil in World War II. Using both archival records and oral histories, they follow the wildcatters and the gushers as the oil industry spread into almost every region of the state. The authors trace the development of many branches of the petroleum industry—pipelines, refining, petrochemicals, and natural gas. They also explore how overproduction and volatile prices led to increasing regulation and gave broad regulatory powers to the Texas Railroad Commission.

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Oil, Islam, and Conflict
Central Asia since 1945
Rob Johnson
Reaktion Books, 2007
The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan while Chechnya still struggles under a shadow of violence, and the nations surrounding them are barely more stable. Add in the significant reserves scattered throughout Central Asia and you have a volatile political cocktail that makes the region, in Rob Johnson’s words, the “new Middle East.” In Oil, Islam and Conflict, Johnson provides an essential analysis of the region’s tumultuous history and uncertain future.

Johnson examines the problems that have plagued the region, including civil wars in Afghanistan and Tajikistan and burgeoning Islamist terrorist movements in several nations. He explains the complex role played by narcotics, ethnic tensions, and the potential wealth from oil and gas reserves in the region’s political maneuverings, and delineates the complex links between civil violence and the policies of Central Asian governments on such crucial issues as human rights, economic development and energy.

A timely investigation, Oil, Islam and Conflict will be required reading for all those invested in the threat of terrorism and the future of energy security.
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Oil, the State, and War
The Foreign Policies of Petrostates
Georgetown University Press, 2023

A comprehensive challenge to prevailing understanding of international implications of oil wealth that shows why it can create bad actors

In a world where oil-rich states are more likely to start war than their oil-dependent counterparts, it’s surprising how little attention is still paid to these so-called petrostates. These states’ wealth props up the global arms trade, provides diplomatic leverage, and allows them to support violent and nonviolent proxies. In Oil, the State, and War, Emma Ashford explores the many potential links between domestic oil production and foreign policy behavior and how oil production influences global politics.

Not all petrostates have the same characteristics or capabilities. To help us conceptualize these differences, Ashford creates an original classification of three types of petrostates: oil-dependent states (those weakened by the resource curse), oil-wealthy states (those made rich by oil exports), and super-producer states (those that form the backbone of the global oil market). Through a combination of case studies and analysis, she illustrates how oil shapes petrostates’ behavior, filling a major gap in our understanding of the international implications of oil wealth. Experts have too often treated oil-rich states as passive objects, subject to the energy security needs of Western importing states. Instead, this book highlights the agency and power enjoyed by petrostates.

As the oil market undergoes a period of rapid change, Oil, the State, and War sheds light on the diversity of petrostates and how they shape international affairs.

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The Pan-African Nation
Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria
Andrew Apter
University of Chicago Press, 2005
When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, it celebrated a global vision of black nationhood and citizenship animated by the exuberance of its recent oil boom. Andrew Apter's The Pan-African Nation tells the full story of this cultural extravaganza, from Nigeria's spectacular rebirth as a rapidly developing petro-state to its dramatic demise when the boom went bust.

According to Apter, FESTAC expanded the horizons of blackness in Nigeria to mirror the global circuits of its economy. By showcasing masks, dances, images, and souvenirs from its many diverse ethnic groups, Nigeria forged a new national culture. In the grandeur of this oil-fed confidence, the nation subsumed all black and African cultures within its empire of cultural signs and erased its colonial legacies from collective memory. As the oil economy collapsed, however, cultural signs became unstable, contributing to rampant violence and dissimulation.

The Pan-African Nation unpacks FESTAC as a historically situated mirror of production in Nigeria. More broadly, it points towards a critique of the political economy of the sign in postcolonial Africa.
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The Petro-State Masquerade
Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago
Ryan Cecil Jobson
University of Chicago Press
A historical and ethnographic study of the fraught relationship between fossil fuels and political power in Trinidad and Tobago.
 
Examining the past, present, and future of Trinidad and Tobago’s oil and gas industries, anthropologist Ryan Cecil Jobson traces how a model of governance fashioned during prior oil booms is imperiled by declining fossil fuel production and a loss of state control. Despite the twin-island nation’s increasingly volatile and vulnerable financial condition, however, government officials continue to promote it as a land of inexhaustible resources and potentially limitless profits.
 
The result is what Jobson calls a “masquerade of permanence” whereby Trinbagonian state actors represent the nation as an interminable reserve of hydrocarbons primed for multinational investment.  In The Petro-State Masquerade, Jobson examines the gulf between this narrative crafted by the postcolonial state and the vexed realities of its dwindling petroleum-fueled aspirations. After more than a century of commercial oil production, Trinidad and Tobago instructs us to regard the petro-state less as a permanent form than a fragile relation between fossil fuels and sovereign authority. Foregrounding the concurrent masquerades of oil workers, activists, and Carnival revelers, Jobson argues that the promise of decolonization lies in the disarticulation of natural resources, capital, and political power by ordinary people in the Caribbean.
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Reckoning with Harm
The Toxic Relations of Oil in Amazonia
Amelia Fiske
University of Texas Press, 2023

An ethnography of the Ecuadorian Amazon that demonstrates the need for a relational, place-based, contingent understanding of harm and toxicity.

Reckoning with Harm is a striking ethnographic analysis of the harm resulting from oil extraction. Covering fifty years of settler colonization and industrial transformation of the Ecuadorian Amazon, Amelia Fiske interrogates the relations of harm. She moves between forest-courtrooms and oily waste pits, farms and toxic tours, to explore both the ways in which harm from oil is entangled with daily life and the tensions surrounding efforts to verify and redress it in practice. Attempts to address harm from the oil industry in Ecuador have been consistently confounded by narrow, technocratic understandings of evidence, toxicity, and responsibility. Building on collaborators’ work to contest state and oil company insistence that harm is controlled and principally chemical in nature, Fiske shows that it is necessary to refigure harm as relational in order to reckon with unremediated contamination of the past while pushing for broad forms of accountability in the present. She theorizes that harm is both a relationship and an animating feature of relationships in this place, a contingent understanding that is needed to contemplate what comes next when living in a toxic world.

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Subterranean Struggles
New Dynamics of Mining, Oil, and Gas in Latin America
Edited by Anthony Bebbington and Jeffrey Bury
University of Texas Press, 2013
Over the past two decades, the extraction of nonrenewable resources in Latin America has given rise to many forms of struggle, particularly among disadvantaged populations. The first analytical collection to combine geographical and political ecological approaches to the post-1990s changes in Latin America’s extractive economy, Subterranean Struggles closely examines the factors driving this expansion and the sociopolitical, environmental, and political economic consequences it has wrought. In this analysis, more than a dozen experts explore the many facets of struggles surrounding extraction, from protests in the vicinity of extractive operations to the everyday efforts of excluded residents who try to adapt their livelihoods while industries profoundly impact their lived spaces. The book explores the implications of extractive industry for ideas of nature, region, and nation; “resource nationalism” and environmental governance; conservation, territory, and indigenous livelihoods in the Amazon and Andes; everyday life and livelihood in areas affected by small- and large-scale mining alike; and overall patterns of social mobilization across the region. Arguing that such struggles are an integral part of the new extractive economy in Latin America, the authors document the increasingly conflictive character of these interactions, raising important challenges for theory, for policy, and for social research methodologies. Featuring works by social and natural science authors, this collection offers a broad synthesis of the dynamics of extractive industry whose relevance stretches to regions beyond Latin America.
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The Varnish and the Glaze
Painting Splendor with Oil, 1100–1500
Marjolijn Bol
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A new history of the techniques, materials, and aesthetic ambitions that gave rise to the radiant verisimilitude of Jan van Eyck’s oil paintings on panel.
 
Panel painters in both the middle ages and the fifteenth century created works that evoke the luster of precious stones, the sheen of polished gold and silver, and the colorful radiance of stained glass. Yet their approaches to rendering these materials were markedly different. Marjolijn Bol explores some of the reasons behind this radical transformation by telling the history of the two oil painting techniques used to depict everything that glistens and glows—varnish and glaze.
 
For more than a century after his death, the fifteenth-century painter Jan van Eyck was widely credited with inventing varnish and oil paint, on account of his unique visual realism. Once this was revealed to be a myth, the verisimilitude of his work was attributed instead to a new translucent painting technique: the glaze. Today, most theories about how Van Eyck achieved this realism revolve around the idea that he was the first to discover or refine the glazing technique. Bol, however, argues that, rather than being a fifteenth-century refinement, varnishing and glazing began centuries before. Drawing from an extensive body of recipes, Bol pieces together how varnishes and glazes were first developed as part of the medieval art of material mimesis. Artisans embellished metalwork and wood with varnishes and glazes to imitate gold and gems; infused rock crystal with oil, resin, and colorants to imitate more precious minerals; and oiled parchment to transform it into the appearance of green glass. Likewise, medieval panel painters used varnishes and glazes to create the look of enamel, silk, and more.
 
The explorations of materials and their optical properties by these artists stimulated natural philosophers to come up with theories about transparent and translucent materials produced by the earth. Natural historians, influenced by medieval artists’ understanding of refraction and reflection, developed theories about gems, their creation, and their optical qualities.
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