One of my earliest memories involves me anxiously asking my mother if I would still be alive in 2050, because oil would run out by then and ‘we’ wouldn’t be able to keep warm or move around. I am not sure when this took place, but based on the surroundings it must have been sometime between 1992 and 1994. Thirty-plus years later, I understand that this belief is known as ‘peak oil’, a theory initially propagated by geologist Marion King Hubbert in the 1950s positing that oil production in the USA would peak at some point in the late 1960s/early 1970s due to increasing difficulties in extracting the resource. The theory would periodically resurface, including in the 1990s, which, I assume, is how it reached me. I cannot recall whether I was truly anxious about oil running out or whether I thought that this would be the sort of question that would impress an adult. What I do recall is that winters used to be much colder back home and that the summer heat was not nearly as wet and as punishing as it is now. The problem, as it turns out, was not too little oil, but rather too much.

The book at hand offers a compelling explanation of how this world of too much oil came to be. Adam Hanieh has been thinking for a while about the interplay between oil and capitalism. His earlier work (Hanieh Reference Hanieh2011) focused on the class system of the Gulf monarchies. Dispelling the myth of them being anachronistic, semi-feudal societies that happened to sit on top of a bunch of oil, Hanieh dissected capital and class formation in the Gulf as well as the position of Gulf capitalisms within global circuits of accumulation. Crude Capitalism takes this line of inquiry one step further by dissecting the broader links between oil and global capitalism.

There are two main questions that concern Hanieh. The first is whether capitalism’s seemingly insatiable need for energy and, by extension, for oil is a contingent and, therefore, reformable development or whether there is a necessary link between the rise and globalisation of the capitalist mode of production and the spiral of fossil fuel consumption, emissions and climate meltdown that we find ourselves in. His second question concerns the precise modalities of oil-based capitalism across space and time and, in particular, which actors have controlled and profited from the extraction, refinement, transportation, marketing and consumption of oil from the mid-nineteenth century to this day.

The answer to the first question is delivered early on in the book. Hanieh rejects the idea that the rise of oil was due to some ‘objective’ superiority over alternatives. He also persuasively deconstructs the argument that there is no rational reason to consider oil as different from other vital raw materials, such as rubber (Vitalis Reference Vitalis2020). For Hanieh, the unique importance of oil goes back to the elementary Marxist insight that capitalist production is organised around exchange for profit and that endless accumulation is the organising logic of such a mode of production (p. 9). Competition among capitalists drives both the ever-increasing production of goods and services and the mechanisation of production to achieve efficiency and discipline and replace human labour. Machines also enable travel and the search for new markets for products, services and capital (pp. 11–12). In the process, demand for energy skyrockets. Historically, fossil fuels not only offered greater energy density, but, crucially, unlike earlier forms of energy, they were transportable and, therefore, their usage enabled the construction of energy-consuming factories near cities, where capitalists could benefit from abundant supply of cheap labour (Malm Reference Malm2016). Since the petrochemical revolution of the 1950s, oil has also underpinned the entirety of capitalist production, circulation and consumption, far beyond traditional energy markets. It is hard to overstate the significance of this shift: ‘the materiality of commodity production had become a derivative-or a by-product-of the production of energy’ (p. 144, original emphasis). One of the main takeaways from this book, then, is that the global power of Big Oil is not simply a case of state capture or a habit of thought but rather stems from the ‘foundational place’ of oil in a productive system with limitless energy needs (p. 310).

This structural Marxist explanation does not mean that Hanieh ignores the finer details of oil’s history. The book’s ten substantive chapters offer a comprehensive overview of the parallel and interlinked rise of oil and US capitalism (Chapter 2: ‘Petro-power: The Rise of the US Oil Industry; Chapter 7: ‘Petrochemicals and the Emergence of a Synthetic World’; Chapter 9: ‘US Power, Oil and Global Finance’); the evolution of Russian oil production from the formation of a multi-ethnic and militant working class in Baku to the Bolshevik nationalisation of the industry and, finally, to the intimate intertwining of state, corporate power and extractivism in post-Soviet Russia (Chapter 3: ‘A Russian Interlude: From Baku to the Bolsheviks’; Chapter 10: ‘Oil and Capital in Post-Soviet Russia’); and the centrality of struggles over oil for Third World nationalisms as well as for their more radical left-wing antagonists (Chapter 6: ‘Post-War Transitions II: Anti-colonial Revolt and OPEC’; ‘Chapter 8: A Moment of Rupture: Myths and Consequences of the First Oil Shock’).

Faithful to the book’s subtitle, Hanieh focuses on questions of corporate structure and power throughout the book. Legal scholars may, in fact, read the book as a story about the oil corporation as a cradle of legal innovation that facilitated corporate power well beyond energy markets. In the late nineteenth century, overproduction haunted the oil industry leading to regular price collapses. Vertical integration of the oil corporation emerged as a central solution to the erratic booms and busts of the industry. The vertically integrated oil corporation sought to control extraction but more so refinement, circulation and, subsequently, marketing and distribution (pp. 30–31). However, these experiments in centralisation were constrained by the legal structure of the USA as a federal state. Dozens of firms were incorporated in different states and often ended up competing against each other. To solve this problem of incomplete centralisation, Standard Oil’s lawyer suggested in 1879 the formation of a trust for the most important shareholders of these firms to deposit their shares in and of a board of trustees with authority to make decisions about all relevant firms (pp. 32–33). The trust was fully established in 1882 and it was so successful that major corporations in other sectors also adopted it over the next decade (p. 33).

The Standard Oil trust was dissolved after the US Supreme Court found the corporation to be in violation of US anti-trust legislation, but concerns about corporate structure as a vehicle for corporate power persisted. The discovery of sizeable reserves in Latin America and, later, in the Middle East led to concessionary agreements between governments and Western corporations concerning the exploration, extraction and selling of oil. Payments to local governments were calculated based on oil’s posted price, which was not the market price of crude oil but rather an accounting fiction used by oil producers to trade with their subsidiaries (p. 63). As a result, Western corporations utilised the labyrinth of corporate relationships with their subsidiaries to suppress the profits that were subject to profit-sharing agreements with host countries. This arrangement lasted until October 1973, when five Arab states and Iran declared their right to control oil pricing and proceeded to raise sharply the posted price of oil (p. 171).

Control and manipulation of the posted price of crude oil is hardly the most unscrupulous practice by oil companies documented in this book. The main story, however, is not about a confrontation between greedy Western corporations and noble yet weak Global South governments. Instead, Hanieh emphasises that governments of oil-rich states often pushed for renegotiation of concessions in order to appease and/or domesticate radical opposition, be it the communist Left or militant workers’ movements (p. 130). In fact, Western corporations and their respective governments at times agreed to such renegotiations because they realised that the alternative to fairer profit-sharing was expropriation without compensation (p. 168).

Oil radicalism, then, had its limits. In Hanieh’s telling, the establishment of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in 1960 signified the beginning of a series of counter-revolutions (pp. 130–33) in which more conservative or outright reactionary forces assumed power across the Middle East. These counter-revolutions included the brutal, US-backed suppression of communists by Ba’athists in Iraq, the 1967 Arab–-Israeli war, and the ascendence in Egypt of Anwar Sadat, who proceeded to reverse some of Nasser’s more radical policies (p. 131). In many ways, then, the 1960s and 1970s saw the defeat and/or domestication of the most radical Third Worldist currents of the 1950s. This timeline might appear counter-intuitive to many international lawyers who consider the 1973 oil boycott to be the heyday of oil-backed Third Worldist radicalism, not least because of its common association with the launch of the effort to establish a New International Economic Order (NIEO). In the words of Antony Anghie:

The problem with this OPEC embargo is that it never happened. Only a handful of Arab oil producers reduced (and did not get anywhere close to stopping) their exports to the USA, the Netherlands and, subsequently, the white-minority regimes in Southern Africa. Enforcement of these measures was anything but comprehensive (pp. 173–74). Ultimately, Hanieh argues, the supposed boycott was ‘little more than a performative act, ultimately aimed at convincing Arab audiences that an anti-colonial front was possible between oil-rich monarchies and the more radical nationalist movements of the region’ (p. 174).

He is not the first left-wing critic to do so. Mitchell (Reference Mitchell2013) and Vitalis (Reference Vitalis2020) have also deconstructed the ‘myth’ of the OPEC embargo and offered alternative explanations for the temporary skyrocketing of oil prices in the USA. What is particularly generative about Hanieh’s book is that this claim is part of an overarching argument about the role of oil-producing states in the peripheries and semi-peripheries of capitalism in the construction, endurance and transformation of ‘crude capitalism’. Instead of building a story of states against corporations or North against South, Hanieh offers a story of capital formation in which states and corporations from the North and South cooperate, clash or evade each other but they do so with an eye to capturing profits and rents, and not to undo capital’s bottomless thirst for oil. Examples abound. Hanieh outlines the complicity of Nigerian, Angolan and Equatorial Guinean comprador classes in the violent and environmentally disastrous extraction of oil in Africa that resulted in wanton environmental destruction, widespread health issues, extrajudicial killings of activists, and the personal enrichment of a handful of intermediaries (pp. 246–48). He also offers indispensable insights into the transformation of late Soviet state bureaucrats into oil capitalists in the late 1980s and 1990s, as liberalisation entailed turning administrative and technical know-how and personal connections into private property and control (pp. 208–13).

Thinking about the shifting relationship between states and markets in the context of ‘crude capitalism’ also requires that we comprehend how the contemporary geography and legal form of oil production and consumption has shifted considerably in comparison to the early and mid-twentieth century. State-owned enterprises in the Gulf, Russia and China have now surpassed their Western, private-owned counterparts. In a sharp departure from historical patterns of ownership and control, three out of the four top refiners are now state-owned, non-Western corporations (Aramco, Sinopec and the Chinese National Petroleum Corporation) (p. 264). Similarly, the industrialisation and urbanisation of East Asia, and particularly China, has altered the geographies of demand for oil. Currently, most oil exports from the Middle East are destined for China, not Europe or the USA (p. 261).

These shifts raise urgent questions concerning climate change, especially for Western climate activists who have focused their energies on private corporations and Western states. The changing geographies of oil production and consumption and, in particular, the rise of East–East nexuses of production, consumption and investment make the recent turn (Wewerinke-Singh et al. Reference Wewerinke-Singh2021; Lin and Peel Reference Lim and Peele2024) of large sections of the climate movement to domestic and international litigation look particularly out of place. Climate litigation relies on the assumption that legalism and internationalism are useful tools of political advocacy. The recent wave of climate litigation attempts to use favourable rulings by domestic and international courts to influence political systems that are rightly seen by activists as biased in favour of fossil fuel corporations. Hanieh’s book gives us many reasons to doubt the effectiveness of this tactic. The proposition that a progressive or even legally groundbreaking opinion on climate change by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) will be an effective tool of advocacy vis-à-vis China, Saudi Arabia, the USA or Russia is hard to contemplate.

This is not simply the case because of the (terminal) crisis of neo/liberal internationalism and the rise of openly authoritarian forms of capitalism. Even at the heyday of neo/liberal internationalism, oil was never governed fully by democratic politics or even by law. Of course, the rules of property, contract and investment protection governed oil, and they continue to do so. Western, capitalist claims that the Soviet Union or Iran had unlawfully nationalised oil production indicate that domestic and international law alike have played an important role in the construction of ‘crude capitalism’. However, the legal scaffolding of ‘crude capitalism’ only tells us part of the story of how oil has been governed in practice. As Hanieh shows, secret agreements between states or corporations have coexisted alongside treaties, contracts and court rulings when it comes to oil. Once again, examples abound. In 1928 alone, oil majors concluded two secret pacts, the Red Line Agreement (p. 64) and the Achnacarry, or As Is, Agreement (pp. 65–66). Both agreements sought to limit inter-firm competition and restrict production in order to maintain prices and profit levels. Even though oil corporations never actually signed the As Is Agreement (p. 66), avoiding both the appearance of collusion and the creation of binding legal obligations, its contents shaped oil exploration and production for decades, often in direct contravention of legally binding instruments (p. 67). Secret, informal agreements pertaining to oil persisted long after 1928. Prime among them is the informal 1974 agreement between Saudi Arabia and the USA: the Gulf state agreed to denominate oil sales exclusively in US dollars and, crucially, to invest its massive surpluses in US treasury bonds in exchange for military protection by the USA, thereby ensuring that the dollar remained the global hegemonic currency in the aftermath of the Bretton Woods collapse (pp. 184–86). By stabilising the links between a dollar-denominated financialised capitalism, oil and US militarism (Hanieh Reference Hanieh2023) the 1974 informal agreement shaped the modern world in a much more direct way than any legally binding treaty. Similarly, governments of oil-producing states combined efforts to reform the international legal regime pertaining to the exploitation of natural resources but did not shy away from secret agreements of their own (pp. 128–29). Secrecy is, of course, no stranger to law (Donaldson Reference Donaldson2017). There is, however, no evidence that the relevant actors, be it states or corporations, understood their undertakings to be legal or that lawyers were the driving force behind the formulation, interpretation and implementation of the relevant texts.

This constant interplay between legality, illegality and a-legality in the history of oil puts significant pressure on recent claims by progressive legal scholars that markets are legally constructed (Pistor Reference Pistor2019; Britton-Purdy et al. Reference Britton-Purdy2020) or even that ‘[c]apitalism is fundamentally a legal ordering’ (Grewal-Singh Reference Grewal-Singh2014, p. 652). Such bold pronouncements are often accompanied by expansive interpretations of what counts as law in the first place and/or by the (generally implicit) assumption that a singular and coherent interpretation of law is comprehensively enforced and fully determines social relationships. As I have argued elsewhere (Tzouvala Reference Tzouvala2022), neither assumption is defensible from a theoretical point of view.

The richness and care of Hanieh’s book offer additional, empirically inflected reasons for scepticism vis-à-vis strong articulations of legal constructivism. The logic of capitalism that the book identifies as the animating force behind the never-ending rise of oil is the product of human action but not the result of conscious human design, and it is certainly not controlled by one group of professionals, be it lawyers, accountants, engineers or asset managers. In fact, even as Hanieh documents the secret dealings of oil capitalists, he also shows that they have not been in full control of ‘crude capitalism’, either because they have always had to respond to pressures and demands by governments, workers, activists, etc. or because inter-firm and inter-imperialist competition has compelled them into in/action often against their individual preferences.

Acknowledging structural limitations or even the simple fact that people who are not lawyers have interests and preferences of their own and are, at times, capable of enforcing them does not mean that progressive lawyers do not have a role to play in the undoing of ‘crude capitalism’ and the construction of the eco-socialist alternative that this book identifies as the only solution to climate change (pp. 310–13). International investment law, intellectual property, international trade law and even the rules of state responsibility or the law of treaties make claims about who should shoulder the burdens of the ‘green transition’ and who should benefit from it. For the most part, these rules are biased in favour of public and private fossil capital. However, the depth and consistency of these biases vary considerably and do not preclude the reinterpretation or reform of at least some of these legal fields.

With these considerations about the shape and content of progressive legal work in mind, I read Hanieh’s book as offering valuable methodological provocations and tools to progressive lawyers. The main offering of this book to progressive lawyers is its commitment to holding together structural constraints and human agency; historical continuities and epochal transformations; global capitalist unevenness and the significance of states and domestic social forces; and, as far as lawyers are concerned, law and other forms of authority and regularisation.

Progressive lawyers will need to build our own disciplinary movements, and at times our conversations and clashes will not be identical to broader political struggles or to the conversations and clashes of other disciplines. In doing so, though, we cannot jettison disciplinary humility and, more importantly, disciplinary curiosity and – to move beyond the virtues – a shared commitment to the idea that ‘[t]he concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations’ (Marx Reference Marx1993 [1857]).