Writing a concise history of Bolivia's twentieth century for English-language speakers is a challenge, not least because the history itself is fragmented by region, language and even industry. Simply put, the nation in Bolivia has never quite managed to consolidate itself. Writing a history of Bolivian oil politics that can push forward a nuanced national history and appeal to scholars of energy and natural resources outside of Bolivia is an immense undertaking. Stephen Cote's account of how oil shaped the Chaco War (1932–5), the National Revolution (1952) and the development of regional divisions between the eastern lowlands and the Andean highlands is for this reason a welcome addition to scholarship on Bolivia. Oil and Nation is both a refreshing view of an important subject and a call for more, and better, works that can expand our understanding of natural resources and Bolivia.

Bucking trends of Bolivianist historiography, Cote argues that oil, not tin, has been crucial to the politics and social change of Bolivia's twentieth century. As he suggests, concerns over oil sovereignty started the Chaco War, Latin America's largest and deadliest twentieth-century conflict. Cote further argues that the nationalisation of Standard Oil's Bolivian holdings in March 1937 – exactly a year before Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated the Mexican oil fields – set the template for many of the policies of the Bolivian National Revolution. One of Cote's most interesting arguments is that early associations between oil development and modernisation helped create a feeling of separatism and cultural superiority among white communities in the eastern regions of Bolivia. This argument is a welcome corrective to assuming the pre-eminence of tin in Bolivian economic history, but sometimes overstates itself.

Oil and Nation hints at oil itself as a metaphor for understanding Bolivian development, though the book itself does not quite articulate this connection. The process of oil extraction condensed many anxieties that Bolivian nationalists shared about their country: the inaccessibility of the lowlands, and the problems of transport, disease and poverty among the Bolivian population; the inability of the Bolivian state to develop its own resources and the tendency of foreign companies to exploit them; the racial anxieties of a country more indigenous than most of the rest of Latin America. Oil developers and nationalists saw oil as a means to bring about modern Bolivia, in contrast to the colonial mining and feudal agricultural past. Unlike raw materials which could only be exported for refining elsewhere, Bolivians hoped that domestic oil could fuel aircraft, lorries and highways, and even medicines. Unlike Bolivian tin, furthermore, Cote suggests that petroleum was not only a commodity that could be used to generate national wealth from its sale on the international market, but also a domestic need whose increased production could fuel modernisation and infrastructure development at home. Cote's suggestion here is an important one. However, his insistence on the primacy of oil overlooks significant continuities between the oil economy and other resources including tin that played a significant role in Bolivian dreams of modernisation. Moreover, the social welfare benefits that Cote identifies as primarily associated with oil development were not exclusive to the national oil company, but also part and parcel of nationalist development in industries such as railways and mining itself.

Oil and Nation also asks historians to re-evaluate the causes of the Chaco War. Widely considered in Bolivia to have been instigated by Standard Oil itself, Cote shows how the Bolivian state drove itself to war partly in response to legitimate concerns about the state's ability to control a precious natural resource in a region that was not well integrated into the nation itself. As Cote points out, the Chaco region in dispute at the beginning of the war was not a region in which Standard Oil or the Bolivian, Paraguayan and Argentine governments expected to find oil. By the end of the war, however, the Bolivian government was indeed fighting to protect its existing oil fields at the base of the Andes. Furthermore, and most crucially, the Bolivians discovered during the course of the war that Standard Oil was holding its local production levels at an artificially low rate for market reasons, even when the government asked for assistance, and might have been shipping oil outside the country without paying export taxes.

Once the war began, oil had everything to do with Bolivia's responses to the crisis. In the 1920s, Standard Oil had deliberately held back production on Bolivian oil fields, hoping to ramp up production at some future date when the international price of oil would outpace the costs of production. This practice made business sense for an international company but deprived Bolivia of oil profits while misleading the state about the nature and capability of production. As hostilities escalated between Bolivia and Paraguay, the Bolivian government wanted more oil to fuel Bolivian planes and trucks, while Standard Oil insisted it could not, rather than would not, increase production. Once the government realised that the company was deliberately holding down production, Bolivian army officials expropriated oil holdings and increased production themselves during the war, laying the groundwork for future nationalisation.

Ultimately, Cote's study pushes forward the historiography of two areas that is long overdue: environmental history and history of the lowlands as constitutive of nation and central to nation-building and nation-contesting projects. Bolivia is less well known for its oil than for its silver and tin and less recognised for its lowland history than for that of the Andean highlands – which is why one wishes Cote’s analysis could go a bit further than it does here. The author is at his most tantalising, but least satisfying, when he tries to link development of oil as a resource to social concerns such as disease and illiteracy. As he points out, President Evo Morales’ contemporary ideology of living well through the exploitation of petroleum and natural gas has long roots in Bolivian history. Cote's account begins with a Bolivian doctor discovering oil as a medical resource and ends with the social policy of the national oil company, Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB), but does not connect these two moments critically. Similarly, Cote writes that the Bolivian state saw nature as an insurmountable obstacle to progress, the dearth of local expertise as an obstacle to development and – at the end of the book – oil development and social policies as a means to overcome both. It is here that Cote's book offers an explanation for Morales’ ambivalent relationship with the Amazon in the present day. Oil and Nation is thus a welcome first step in the path to a history of Bolivian natural resources.