Crude Capitalism

July 29, 2024
Explanations of the transformative role of oil in human history tend to focus on the uniqueness of oil as a product—it’s an easily extractable supercharged fuel—but ought to be focusing instead on the “uniqueness of capitalism as a social system,” according to this sprawling account. Political economist Hanieh (Money, Markets, and Monarchies) argues that “the emergence of an oil-centred world” was not a “self-evident outcome” but a consequence of the specific ways capitalism manipulated the oil market. Chapters tracking oil’s historical trajectory bolster this assertion, showing, for example, that oil’s “scarcity” in the early 20th century was a false construct implemented by monopolistic U.S. corporations (“The chief problem facing oil companies... was oil’s abundance,” Hanieh argues, “not its scarcity”), and that the mid-20th-century petrochemical industry (especially consumer plastics) emerged expressly because oil producers were looking for “new markets.” Other chapters highlight how foundational oil was to the origins of the international banking system, and how pariah states, like the Soviet Union, used their oil reserves as a lifeline. Hanieh sometimes gets lost in the vastness of his topic but keeps the reader hooked with fascinating tidbits (John Wilkes Booth founded a company called Dramatic Oil; the director Bernardo Bertolucci made movies for Italian oil giant ENI). The result is a rewarding reconsideration of oil’s ascendance on the world stage.