Oil Revolution

Christopher R. W. Dietrich is Assistant Professor of History at Fordham University, New York. He has been awarded fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Historical Association, the National History Center, Yale University, Connecticut, the University of Texas, Austin, and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

• Introduction. The cash-value of decolonization; 1. One periphery: the creation of sovereign rights, 1949–55; 2. Past concessions: the Arab League, sovereign rights, and OPEC, 1955–60; 3. Histories of petroleum colonization: oil elites and sovereign rights, 1960–7; 4. Rights and failure: the 1967 Arab oil embargo; 5. Nationalist heroes: imperial withdrawal, the Cold War, and oil control, 1967–70; 6. A turning point of our history: the insurrectionists and oil, 1970–1; 7. A fact of life: the consolidation of sovereign rights, 1971–3; 8. The OPEC syndrome: the Third World's energy crisis, 1973–5; Conclusion. Dead by its own law? Decolonization, sovereignty, and culture.

'Dietrich's Oil Revolution is a triumph of research and writing. This is an indispensable book, illuminating the central role petroleum played in the transition from the global Keynesianism of the 1960s to the neoliberalism of the 1980s. A tour-de-force synthesis of intellectual, political, and economic history.' Greg Grandin, New York University