Is state intervention making a comeback in economic policy? Should it make a comeback in economic policy? And, if so, what should this intervention look like? The relations between the state and the economy are a recurring theme throughout modern history, at least since the invention of the nation-state, but in Covid Europe these questions have made the news headlines for the first time in decades. This has been in addition to the strains and challenges posed to the global economy by climate change, which have increasingly put state intervention at the forefront of economic policy. In this context, it is not surprising that state intervention has been the subject of many new books. The ones under review here, all published between 2014 and 2020, add new food for thought to the topic. They raise important questions at a time when ideas around the relations between state, entrepreneurship and resources are beginning to be rediscussed, even in the most conservative economic circles.

The first volume under review, Controlling Credit, is perhaps the most suited to analysing the fundamentals of the relations between the state and the economy at large because it focuses on the role of public financial institutions in influencing the overall economic performance and outlook of a country. Its author, Eric Monnet, is a senior economist at the Bank of France (Banque de France, BdF) and Professor of Economic History at the Paris School of Economics. As an insider, he can offer a valuable perspective on the functioning of the BdF, even from a historical point of view. His research does not focus directly and explicitly on state intervention; nevertheless, the book suggests clear directions in its analysis of credit policies by the French central bank during the Trente Glorieuses, the expression commonly used to refer to France's period of post-war economic growth.

In the period that went from 1945, when the bank was nationalised, until 1975, in the aftermath of the first economic shock and the muscular re-adjustment of international finance, France's average annual GDP growth rate was almost 6 per cent. Far from making a simplistic direct inference between the nationalisation of the BdF and the country's economic miracle, Monnet writes a compelling financial history of the period by using detailed reconstructions of the activities of the Bank of France and its relation to the government and to the country's economic actors. Scholarship on the post-war decades has paid little attention to the role of central banks in shaping monetary policies. According to Monnet, the post-war years are commonly perceived by historians of finance as a quiet period of passive (or perhaps ‘restrained’, according to the narrative en vogue until the recent financial shocksFootnote ¹) monetary policies, in which central banks did not have an active role in shaping monetary or economic policies but merely implemented government directives. For this reason, much more attention has been dedicated to the post-Bretton Woods financial liberation, arguably a more thrilling time for international finance.

Monnet rejects this perception of passivity, at least in the case of the French central bank. If researchers shift the focus from the analysis of interest rates (that is, a quantitative approach) to the objectives that the BdF set during the post-war years (that is, a qualitative approach), then it becomes evident that the central bank had an active and fundamental role in influencing, and even directing, government policies. In particular, credit control was the instrument through which the BdF carried out its policies: during the Trente Glorieuses, the BdF essentially operated a nationalisation of credit, by intervening in all aspects of credit policies. This blurred the distinction between public and private. It was a strategy to implement credit policies outside of the markets, while remaining in a capitalist and open economic framework. Although not perfect financial tools, credit control promoted the reallocation and redistribution of capital to encourage economic activities that were redistributed from certain sectors to others, thereby liberating capital from concentration into a few sectors. By contrast, commercial banks played no role in the expansion of capital. The sustained inflation of the 1970s, which governments were not able to control, ultimately delegitimised credit control, but Monnet shows that the (re)opening to the markets in the aftermath of the oil shocks profoundly altered, and eventually hollowed out, the self-control mechanisms of credit control, even though the oil shocks themselves were a main cause of hyperinflation.

The author himself admits that the book does not cover the complex problem of misallocation of credit, which, according to Monnet, had become endemic by the early 1970s and another main cause for the delegitimisation of credit control. This would require extensive research on its own, for which this volume could be a valuable starting point. By focusing on primary sources from the BdF and on credit policy specifically, Monnet's research sets out a useful methodological framework for future comparative research on the central banks of other European countries, particularly those in the eurozone that also enjoyed extraordinary economic growth in the post-war years. Since the fading of credit policies occurred in parallel with the process of building the common currency, these comparable paths amongst different countries that eventually joined the euro could provide very valuable insights. Still, this book is a must-read for scholars in the field, while also accessible to scholars from other disciplines, particularly those with an interest in economic planning and economic growth.

On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the reorganisation of labour according to Soviet-style economic planning is the subject of Alina-Sandra Cucu's stimulating volume Planning Labour: Time and the Foundations of Industrial Socialism in Romania. Cucu reflects on the limits, opportunities and impact of economic planning on labour in the specific case of the factories of Cluj, the fourth largest city in Romania. Cluj is an interesting case study because it was not an important industrial hub for the country and it was left at the margins of the large wave of investments in the early socialist years. However, the city was a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic environment, in which proletarians were mostly absent, and where class lines strongly intersected with ethnicity.

Rather than focusing on productivity indexes, Cucu extrapolates an ethnography of actually existing socialism in the production line from the everyday life of the factory, where space and time were the fundamental factors of the planned economy. Multiple temporalities and geographical privileges intersected and occasionally collided: the leap forward of early socialist industrialisation, the chronology of investments directed towards heavy industry rather than goods and agriculture, the tempo at which people's needs were met against strong austerity policies and the pace at which people moved from the countryside to become industrial workers. At the same time, the privileges of the city against the countryside, and of industrial areas over non-industrial ones, expressed all the contradictions of an economic organisation characterised by a chronic lack of capital and goods. In this model, intensity of labour was accompanied by extreme austerity measures, and propaganda based on the virtues of work hid exploitations very similar to those that existed under capitalism, but not addressed by the redistribution that was possible in the West in the post-war decades. All in all, the micro-approach adopted by Cucu provides a fascinating test for theories on communism and on actually existing socialism in the everyday reality of the factory, as well as on what it meant to be an industrial worker in Romania in the 1950s. Through a precise analysis of actually existing socialism in a specific case study, Cucu helps separate myth and reality, and ideology and theory.

While labour and capital are still the two pillars of economic theory and economic thought, climate change is forcing economists to reconsider energy sources as another factor of production that cannot simply be taken for granted. Since the oil shocks of the 1970s, and even more today in the so-called ‘Age of the Anthropocene’, discussions about energy in theory of value are taking place.Footnote ² In history, too, ever greater importance is given to the study of energy sources, and both energy history and energy policies are currently disciplines on the rise. Oil and Sovereignty by Rüdiger Graf offers interesting material to explore the complex relations between the oil industry – the engine of industrial production and mobility from the post-war years onwards – and the state. By analysing government energy policies in the same period as Controlling Credit and Planning Labour, Oil and Sovereignty acts as an interesting complement to these books.

Graf focuses on the United States and West Germany, which is in itself a very interesting choice, because not much literature is available (at least in English) on the German energy policies of the post-war years. His approach is also thought provoking and could provide a template for other studies of the oil industry. In particular, the author is strongly aware of what might be called the ‘gnoseological’ dimensions of his subject matter, that is, the problem of understanding where our knowledge of the oil industry comes from. He shows clearly how this sector is one in which myth and reality have co-existed since the establishment of oil as a main energy source in the mid-nineteenth century, when urban legends related to the oil industry flourished and gained traction even at high government levels and in the industry. Such legends remain very popular today and they exacerbate other problems related to the transparency and visibility in the actions of the oil industry as a whole.

For historians, reading government (or even industry) reports does not necessarily mean getting a truthful and clear picture of what was happening in reality. Graf focuses on government publications from the United States and West Germany, thus adopting an institutional approach; however, he recognises that this allows him to understand only what was believed about the oil industry and markets, not their reality. He therefore compares government publications with those offered by industry reports and by the media. More often than not the evidence does not correlate: the correct information was rarely in the hands of the media and very rarely in the hands of institutions. Thanks to this approach, Graf's history of Western energy policies in the 1970s is also a history of government understanding of the oil industry and of public knowledge on energy issues. The author does an excellent job in differentiating the level of what was a declaration to the media and the general public, what was a political report and what was technical knowledge. Given the vast and pervasive mythology around the oil industry, this is a very useful methodology with which to tackle the history of energy policies, particularly during a delicate time like the 1970s, when the oil shocks created a series of false narratives that have flourished over the years and that scholars have only recently started to debunk, from the idea of an embargo placed by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to an ‘oil war’ waged by producer countries against the West.

Graf contributes to this new scholarship by analysing petro-knowledge and the resultant energy policies in two countries at the opposite spectrum of energy studies: the United States, which is unsurprisingly one of the most studied countries in the field of energy policies, and West Germany, which is one of the most overlooked countries. The comparison between the two is of great interest. In the first instance, it allows us to see the profound differences in energy policies between Europe and the United States. The former is one of the largest oil-consuming regions in the world, which maintains an uncomfortable, vassal-like position in relation to the US oil industry; the latter, by contrast, is one of the world's main producers, whose companies enjoyed a de facto monopoly upon the world market until at least the 1960s. Second, the position of West Germany within Europe was different from that of rest of the European Economic Community (EEC). Unlike the Netherlands, it did not have a strong oil industry operating abroad; unlike France or Italy, it never pushed for an energy policy that would make the country more independent from the United States. Germany's energy problems relied on protecting the coal industry from its looming crisis, mostly to secure jobs rather than to be more energy independent.

These tensions, which extended to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) bloc as a whole, were already present in the immediate post-war years, and greatly influenced energy policies in Europe in the decades leading to the first oil crisis, as well as the attempts to implement an EU-level energy policy. In the 1973 oil crisis these tensions exploded, only to be appeased by the United States through a clampdown on the attempts on part of several European countries to implement independent energy policies through the signing of agreements with the governments of producer states directly, rather than delegating to oil companies. These independent negotiations with producer countries had larger implications than oil contracts and were rooted in the directives from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the New International Economic Order (NIEO), the manifesto created by resource-exporting non-aligned countries for a more redistributed global economic growth, controlled by governments and institutions rather than being left to global markets to self-regulate. The 1973 oil shock, in this respect, was a failed watershed moment in the history of the twentieth century, and although the NIEO and US–European tensions in the field of energy supplies are still relatively unknown amongst non-specialists, new important research on the period has started to emerge.Footnote ³

Graf provides an important contribution to this emerging literature, with a dense volume that combines the study of the understanding our society has of the oil industry, the legitimacy – and capability – of swift government action during a crisis, the ability of governments to effectively communicate with the public during a crisis and the problems of Western democracies vis-à-vis economic powers, from OPEC to the international oil industry. Such rich and multi-layered material is perhaps too much for a single volume, and by focusing on different aspects of the energy-related economic crises of the 1970s, the book does not dwell enough on any of these strands, nor on the context in which the crises took shape.

In particular, exploring in more detail the context of the European Economic Community would have been beneficial. The author recognises that, with the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and of Euratom, ‘even before the oil crisis, significant energy policy competencies no longer lay exclusively in member states’ hands’.Footnote ⁴ At the same time, developing a ‘European’ energy policy proved difficult (and we may as well add that we are still waiting for one). The reconstruction of the debate promoted by figures such as Claude Cheysson and Enrico Mattei, two pillars of the theory of sovereignty over resources on the part of producer governments against US multinational companies, would have made the work more complete. Instead Graf goes in the opposite direction: rather than adopting a mostly German (and thus European) policy focus, he deals extensively with the United States, on which there is already a substantial bibliography. Drawing more on the archives of the European Union would have been beneficial to the book, and it would have allowed Graf to answer a few interesting questions that emerge from his narrative. For example, in West Germany there was no equivalent to the ‘Project Independence’ launched by Nixon in the aftermath of the actions of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC, the Arab section of OPEC), for obvious reasons connected to the post-war world, as well as to German natural resources. However, we might still ask how Germany interacted with Italian and French attempts to build an energy policy that would be independent from the United States. How did German authorities react to the nationalisation processes that occurred in several countries in Europe in the post-war years in an attempt to create a state-owned oil industry?

Nevertheless, while Graf's multi-layered approach sacrifices some complexity, it does allow him to make fundamental connections between international governance, technical know-how inside the oil industry, domestic policies, public opinion and the way in which all of these factors concurred in shaping global energy policies – or to be more precise, global energy events. Furthermore, through an information-formation approach, Graf is very successful in showing that the oil weapon flagged by producer countries during the oil crisis was not just about control over oil resources but about control over oil-related information, both on a technical level and in the media. Attention to oil data and information is quite an innovative perspective in energy history and a path worth exploring in more depth.

The last two books under review here also focus on energy, albeit with completely different approaches. Anthony N. Penna's A History of Energy Flows provides a big picture of energy production and consumption from an environmental history perspective, with the aim of showing how energy flows are a key component in the study of history, embedded as they are in the socio-economic structures we live in. Starting with the discovery of fire, and running all the way to the emergence of hydrogen fuel cells, A History of Energy Flows reconstructs the origin and development of energy sources used by humankind throughout history. The book is divided into four parts, corresponding to the periodisation made by the author of energy flows throughout history. Within this division, each chapter is dedicated to an energy source – a rational and clear way to organise content, and one that allows each chapter to be accompanied by a vast and impressively comprehensive bibliography on each of the topics examined.

The first part, ‘organic energy’, presents the history of energy before its main tipping point, the industrial revolution. The first chapter is on ancient civilisations and the biological converters of energy, particularly muscles (humans and animal) and fire. The second chapter presents the long run of the industrial revolution, with ancient watermills and windmills. This section is particularly inspired by the seminal work of Vaclav Smil and other scientists and energy historians, distilling in an effective way what we know so far about energy consumption in the antiquity and pre-modern era.Footnote ⁵ The second section is dedicated to ‘mineral energy’ – coal, petroleum, gas, nuclear energy – with a narrative that roughly follows a chronological order, and that, interestingly, is not as Eurocentric as standard energy accounts tend to be. In particular, it dedicates a lot of attention to coal in China. The last two sections, ‘renewables’ (modern hydropower, solar power, modern wind power) and ‘alternative solutions’ (the new frontiers, such as hydrogen fuel cells and battery power storage like lithium batteries), take stock of the situation on the future of energy production and consumption and the new paradigms that could ensue from alternative energy flows. In these last two sections, Penna adopts a country-by-country approach, providing an excellent overview of the geography of energy technology and of investments in energy transitions. He shows that, while the challenges of climate change are global, responses are still strongly shaped by the paradigm of the nation-state.

As a history of energy technology, A History of Energy Flows is a reliable compendium for anyone wishing to get an overview of the main work on energy history. It is very dense and very informative, condensing information from thousands of studies, and it provides a very comprehensive literature review. In this sense, it is an interesting and useful volume, and a real starting point for those wishing to familiarise themselves with the subject. The book is weaker at analysing energy systems in general, throughout history, with all the social, political and economic implications that the exploitation of energy resources entails. Penna does not claim to present ground-breaking research, or new theoretical frameworks; however, the book does not really provide any guiding thread on how energy flows affect societies through history, which is its stated premise. Given the amount of material available on the social sciences of energy, the task would have been monumental, and choices had to be made. Even so, Penna does not provide an overview of the theories around energy and society, nor does he take into account all the elements of analysis that allow us to reflect on the ways in which energy structures affect society, and vice versa.

For instance, the book does not include energy markets in its analysis, or the complex structures and superstructures that regulate them, missing fundamental aspects of global energy economics that are intertwined with energy policies and consumption. At times, theories are mentioned but not analysed or explained. To take one example, the book cites Timothy Mitchell's theory of carbon democracy, which states that coal is inherently ‘more democratic’ than oil, because its production flow is much more open to disruption on the part of workers.Footnote ⁶ Without an explanation, this becomes more a bibliographical exercise than a coherent analysis of the debate on the ways in which energy structures and social structures are intertwined. Any other reflection on energy and society, which must commence with the information provided by A History of Energy Flows, is left to the reader to make.

A more serious problem is that A History of Energy Flows also contains several mistakes and inaccuracies about the geopolitics of oil, particularly with regard to the oil shocks and supply flows from the Middle East, falling into one of the aforementioned myth traps of the oil industry. Penna describes the 1973 energy crisis as a supply crisis, caused by an embargo placed by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) against the United States and other Western countries, in protest against Western support to Israel during the Yom Kippur war – but this narrative has been by now completely debunked. Even if it persists in certain circles of international relations, most serious scholars of energy geopolitics have now dismissed it.Footnote ⁷ OPEC never placed an embargo against the West; it was individual countries from the OAPEC that stopped their own exports to the United States and other Western countries. There was never a shortage of crude, nor of refined, products, and the embargo was overall ineffective beyond its psychological effects. The explanations for the price spikes of petroleum and the ensuing global economic crisis are to be found in the end of the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, and in the negotiations between producer countries and oil companies, rather than in the Arab–Israeli war. These deficiencies notwithstanding, A History of Energy Flows remains a very useful introduction to the field of energy studies, a light yet solid manual for environmental energy history, with a comprehensive summary and bibliography on all energy resources exploited by humankind throughout history.

On energy policy, Francesca Batzella's The Dynamics of EU External Energy Relations provides a more limited, but very accurate and illuminating, analysis of the relations between states and the European Union (EU) in the setup of energy polices for supplies from non-EU countries. In a concise yet informative volume (the best format for an academic book), Batzella analyses four relevant case studies that take the form of four directives passed by the EU between the 1990s and 2012: the first on the establishment of the information exchange mechanism on agreements between member states and third parties (Decision 994/2012); the second to set common rules on the internal market of natural gas (Directive 2009/73/EC); the third on the signing of the Energy Community Treaty in 2005, in which the EU as a party (rather than individual member states) signed an agreement with nine non-EU countries; and the fourth on the 1994 Energy Charter Treaty, signed by fifty countries and by the European Community. Batzella, a political theorist, uses these four case studies to test the Principal–Agent Model, one of the most applied models in the theoretical studies of the functions of the European Union (in which the European Commission is conceptualised as the Agent and the member states as Principals). She shows that the Principal–Agent Model is highly effective at describing the dynamics of the relationship between the commission and its member states.

By testing the Principal–Agent Model in the practice of the negotiations for agreements on energy policies, Batzella is able to dig deep inside the convoluted practices of the relations between the EU and member states, the conditions under which the interests and preferences of the EU and the other member states diverge or converge and the patterns of preferences from the single member states. What emerges is, unsurprisingly, a convoluted and confusing picture of crossed interests between the EU, member states and third parties, further complicated by the presence of different actors within the actors used in the model, which Batzella is able to trace and describe, untangling a web of competing bureaucracies and policies that is at times reminiscent of the squabbles from the British satirical TV show Yes Minister. Two main features emerge from the analysis of the negotiations of these cases: first, the seemingly insurmountable difficulties in integrating energy systems that operate under opposite interests, logics and infrastructures. As Batzella reminds us in the introduction, the starting point of the European Union, the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), was itself a treaty on energy. However, since the 1950s and all the way to the present, Europe has not been able to put into place a common strategy for energy supply from third parties. The Dynamics of EU External Energy Relations makes it possible to scrutinise the mechanisms that hinder the creation of a common policy.

Second, and strongly connected to the first point, Batzella shows clearly how energy supplies are intertwined with the general diplomatic and economic relations between states. Notoriously, the EU not only lacks effective common energy policies but also a unified foreign policy. Batzella's book sheds light on the fact that the tensions between nation-states and the commission are most acute in their external dimensions, especially in such an important and sensitive field as energy policies. This, in turn, shows the strong entanglement between foreign policies and energy policies. While the book has a rigid theoretical approach, which is reflected in an excessively schematic structure (every chapter has its own introduction and conclusion, which sometimes makes some of the text redundant), it does explain the central nodes of the functioning of the EU on a fundamental aspect such as energy policies. This is even more important as there is very little work on EU energy policies from a social sciences perspective, particularly with a historical approach. Batzella's analysis provides an original framework for analysing the relations between companies, states and organised interests. Alongside Graf's Oil and Sovereignty, it provides an interesting contribution to a growing field.

Finally, the book brings the issue of energy policies to a supranational dimension, placing the problem of the relationship between political and economic powers beyond the nation-state, to embrace new institutional forms as well as international economic actors. In this sense, The Dynamics of EU External Energy Relations takes all the reflections stimulated by the other books and prepares the debate for the future. If we were to embrace a federal European Union, what would the future spaces for negotiations be, not only in the energy field but in the economy more broadly? Would the debate about state intervention in energy policy be conducted at a supra-state level, or on a glocal level? While the nation-state seems to be an obsolete institution in the current globalised and interconnected world economy in which we live, political institutions are still very much rooted in states. Going back to economic and political history allows us to perceive change and continuity and, ultimately, the mechanisms for transformation.