Oil, Power, And War (a Dark History)

By (author) Auzanneau, Matthieu; Foreword by Heinberg Richard
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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
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Catholic Herald Book Awards 2019 Finalist, Current Affairs

"Auzanneau has created a towering telling of a dark and dangerous addiction.”—Nature

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.

 

 

Table of contents
Foreword Introduction I . . . to 1945 Germination 1 A Seed Is Planted 2 John D. Rockefeller, the Power of Petroleum, and the Spiral of Expansion 3 Sharing the World Market: The First Attempts, at the Cradle of Royal Dutch Shell 4 The Automobile: American Oil Regenerates Capitalism 5 The Tank: American Oil Feeds the Victorious Fighting Machines of the Great War 6 The Roaring 1920s: Consolidating the New Empires 7 Birth of a Petrol-Nation: Iraq 8 The Majors Band Together: A Secretly Planned Industry Weathers the Great Depression Unscathed 9 The Persistent Alliance of Big Oil with Nazi Germany 10 The Enablers of the Second World War II 1945-1970 Spring 11 After Yalta: The United States and Saudi Arabia Seal their Alliance 12 Washington Gives Absolute Power to American Petroleum 13 Big Oil''s Planetary Empire and the Rockefellers'' Hegemonic Ambitions 14 Big Oil Asserts Itself: A Matrix of Political Power in Washington 15 Saudi Arabia and Gabon: Nations Spoiled by Oil 16 Cartel Against Cartel: OPEC''s Painful Emergence 17 The Leapfrog Effect: Algeria, Biafra, and Libya 18 The Golden Childhood of the Oil-Made Man III 1970-1998 Summer 19 OPEC: Scapegoat for a 1973 Oil Crisis Made in the USA? 20 Oil Money: After Neocolonialism, a Perilous Symbiosis 21 The Second Oil Crisis: A Deadly Vortex of Power Is Unleashed Around the Persian Gulf 22 The Long Iran-Iraq War: A Lose-Lose Game Orchestrated by the Reagan Administration? 23 The Oil Countershock: The Frenzy of the Reagan Years, the Collapse of the USSR, and the BCCI Scandal 24 Dear Saddam: The Gulf War, the Fate of the Iraqi People, and the Long-Term Interests of Uncle Sam 25 Planetary Harvest: