As record American oil production floods global markets and thwarts the efforts of large oil exporters to stabilize world oil prices, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that forty years ago an equally consequential new order in world energy markets was emerging. While a number of studies have explored how that new order either affected the advanced economies or enriched the major oil exporters, Christopher Dietrich's Oil Revolution offers a fresh view—namely, an intellectual history of the anticolonial elites who stood at the center of that new oil order in the 1970s. Well researched and smartly written, Dietrich's text clearly shows us how the campaign by Arab, Latin American, and other anticolonial elites to achieve fairer oil prices was a central factor in the transformation of the world economy from Keynesianism to neoliberalism.
The central insight of Oil Revolution is that the governing elites of the major oil-producing countries in the mid-20th century saw themselves and acted internationally as a single global elite. Despite cultural and geographic differences and allegiances to the rival blocks in the Cold War, the elite shared a common historical vision of colonial subjugation, and a strategy to correct the injustices of the past—the assertion of sovereign rights. In the eyes of this elite, sovereign rights—“the transnational political program to use state power over natural resources” (p. 3)—were the mechanism by which their nations and others in the developing world would finally win economic independence to match their newfound political freedom from Western colonial power. As Dietrich makes clear, sovereign rights were the idée fixe of the anticolonial elite (p. 14), a framework akin to self-determination and racial equality that encompassed the elite's cultural values as much as it guided its diplomacy.
Dietrich supports this argument by drawing on an impressive array of written sources in both English and French, the lingua francas of the anticolonial elites of the oil exporters. Thanks to these written documents, we see how the tactics and rhetoric of Mahmud al-Magribi and others in the anticolonial elite (and some Westerners) took shape from their time as graduate students in the West to their time serving at the heights of international power. Strikingly, we see how Venezuelan Minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons Manuel Egaña had his country's oil law, in 1949, translated into both Arabic and English and sent a special delegation to the Middle East to explain it to Arab oil producers (p. 77). By contrast, Reza Pahlavi Shah, who had been restored to power in 1953 after a US–UK organized coup toppled Mohammed Mossadegh, positively invoked the former premier's nationalization of Iranian oil in December 1967 to express his rage upon learning that multinational oil companies had secretly limited Iranian oil production for years (p. 159).
No less striking, we see Saudi Arabia's King Feisal and other national leaders allied with Washington, learning from, and even capitalizing on the success of the oil-exporting countries aligned with Moscow and the Eastern Block. For instance, Reza Pahlavi Shah, in 1970, used the same language of decolonization, sovereignty, and rights used by other anticolonial elites when he demanded that the Nixon administration force global oil companies to sell more Iranian oil. Notably, Nixon strongly endorsed the Iranian leader's position, writing on the edges of a memorandum that he would take drastic legal action against the multinational oil companies were they not to increase Iran's oil production. To stress the importance of the matter, Nixon concluded by writing an aid not to resist his plans: “This is an order” (p. 188).
President Nixon's language points to one of Dietrich's strongest arguments in the book—namely, how US policies ironically led to both the 1973 Oil Crisis, the great achievement of the anticolonial elites, and to the rise of the neoliberal order that signaled the end of their era. We see the first part of this argument unfold clearly in Chapter 6, in which Dietrich brilliantly lays out how Libya's geographic proximity to Europe, overflowing treasury, and relationship to Moscow after 1968 gave it and other members of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) unparalleled power to finally set world oil prices by 1973. In the same chapter, Dietrich shows how American policy in the era—which aimed to stabilize the Persian Gulf after Great Britain's withdrawal in 1971 and to limit Soviet influence in the oil exporting nations—reinforced OPEC's newfound position by checking the power of the multinational oil companies and the other forces that had once opposed the goals of anticolonial elites.
Washington, however, saw OPEC's new power as a threat to US national security and sought to control it. As Dietrich shows in the final chapters of the book, US officials not only convinced the major oil producers to invest their newfound wealth in major US banks, but they also sowed division in the developing world by blocking programs designed to ease the burden of high oil prices for poorer nations. Over time, US officials also rigorously challenged OPEC's higher oil prices, finding a receptive audience among the developing nations that had no oil and that had once viewed OPEC as a model. Furthermore, the funds deposited by OPEC countries in US banks became loans to developing countries, leading to a series of transformative events in the world economy: the debt crisis, the fall of Keynesianism, and the rise of neoliberalism.
While Dietrich effectively uses the massive traffic jam in Julio Cortázar's short story “The Southern Highway” (Todos los Fuegos el Fuego [Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1966]) to discuss how OPEC's unity buckled after oil prices rose in 1973, the reader is still left to wonder why the oil anticolonial elites did not develop strategies to counter the Washington policies meant to thwart their hard-won victories. Here one wonders what Dietrich would have found had he supplemented his written sources with interviews of the remaining living figures from the era, such as Henry Kissinger or Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister. Yamani could have shed light on how the kingdom's culture shaped Riyadh's oil strategy and why he used the same metaphor—a Catholic Marriage—to describe the relationship of oil exporters with multinational oil companies that Prince Bandar later used to describe Saudi–US relations (p. 252). Furthermore, one has to wonder why President Lázaro Cárdenas's nationalization of Mexican oil production in 1938, a landmark event in the history of oil and sovereign rights, merited only one reference in Dietrich's 352-page text (p. 39).
Nonetheless, the greatest strength of Oil Revolution is Dietrich's intelligent empathy for the subject of his book. By using this term, I am not suggesting that Dietrich is a partisan for the anticolonial elites but that he has a passion for his subject akin to Alexis de Tocqueville's for the country that is at the heart of Democracy in America. Just as De Tocqueville describes American society and its many complexities—its virtues, contradictions, and flaws—Dietrich shows us an equally complete view of the anticolonial elites. Ultimately, neither they nor us as readers could have asked for a stronger analysis of the ideas of a diverse group of men who revolutionized the global oil industry and profoundly shaped the economic history of the contemporary world.
