Overview

Much more than an energy source or transport fuel, oil is woven into every aspect of contemporary life. In this original and wide-ranging analysis, Crude Capitalism argues that an understanding of oil must begin with its place in capitalism and the dynamics of capital accumulation. Tracing the development of an oil-centred world market from the late 1800s through to the current ecological catastrophe, the book explores the pivotal social transformations associated with the transition to oil: the emergence of the US as the dominant global power; the breakdown of Empire and the nature of post-war anti-colonial struggles; the origins of financial markets and the rise of the US dollar as 'world money'; the synthetic remaking of everyday commodity production; and the profound impact that oil continues to have on global patterns of state and class formation. Grounded in a clear and accessible account of how oil markets operate today, Crude Capitalism reveals the structures of power and control within world oil, including connections to other industrial and financial sectors, and the growing significance of large oil firms in the Middle East and Asia. By centring oil in capitalism, all of this raises essential questions for what kind of politics is needed to end oil-dependency and ensure our survival as a species.

Full Product Details

Author:   Adam Hanieh
Publisher:   Verso Books
Imprint:   Verso Books
Weight:   0.400kg
ISBN:  

9781839763427

ISBN 10:   1839763426
Pages:   336
Publication Date:   17 September 2024
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Not yet available  
This item is yet to be released. You can pre-order this item and we will dispatch it to you upon its release.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements 1. Approaching Oil 2. Petro-Power: The Rise of the US Oil Industry 3. The Middle East and the Seven Sisters 4. A Russian Interlude: From Baku to the Bolsheviks 5. Post-war Transitions I: Europe's Shift to Oil 6. Post-war Transitions II: Anti-colonial Revolt and OPEC 7. Petrochemicals and the Emergence of a Synthetic World 8. A Moment of Rupture: Myths and Consequences of the First Oil Shock 9. US Power, Oil, and Global Finance 10. Oil and Capital in Post-Soviet Russia 11. A Sorority Reborn: The Western Supermajors, 1990-2005 12. NOCs and the New East-East Hydrocarbon Axis 13. Confronting the Climate Emergency Index

Reviews

"""The trail of the serpent reaches into all the practices of man,"" said Ralph Waldo Emerson, of chattel slavery, and ""requires a certain shutting of the eyes."" So too today does oil. It's everywhere and that's why everything feels greasy. Adam Hanieh's excellent Crude Capitalism forces us to unshut our eyes, to see the way fossil fuels penetrate all aspects of modern society, both concrete and abstract. An important book. -- Greg Grandin, author of <i>The End of the Myth</i> Adam Hanieh is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the role of oil in the global economy. In Crude Capitalism, he has provided a field guide for navigating the difficult terrain in which we now find ourselves: situated between an accelerating climate crisis and an economy structured around fossil fuels. His insightful dissection of the often invisible ubiquity of fossil fuels in our lives - reaching far beyond energy into the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the medicines we prescribe - is integral to understanding not only why we remain so stuck in our fossil-addicted present, but critically how we might move beyond it. -- Adrienne Buller, author of <i>The Value of a Whale</i> Wait no longer. At last, we have a critical history of petro-power that brilliantly links commodities, capital, and climate change. Crude Capitalism is a truly stunning book, tracking the history of oil through war, imperial rivalry, global finance, and world ecology. The result is an utterly compelling work, one we urgently need both to understand the world-and to change it. -- David McNally, author of <i>Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire</i> Adam Hanieh's analysis of Crude Capitalism, written in the tradition of Andreas Malm's now classic work Fossil Capital, provides a powerful historical account of how the world oil economy is inextricably connected both to contemporary capitalism and to the current climate crisis. Following the penetration of fossil fuels into every part of the modern capitalist mechanism, Hanieh demonstrates definitively that there are no partial solutions to the planetary emergency, only ecosocialist ones. -- John Bellamy Foster, author of <i>The Dialectics of Ecology</i> The world's leading scholar of oil gives us a majestic account of how it became our daily bread. Read and run for your life. -- Andreas Malm"

Praise for Money, Markets, and Monarchies -- : With Hanieh's Money, Markets, and Monarchies, scholars can no longer study the Gulf without taking into account its centrality to the making and maintenance of the capitalist neoliberal world, and vice versa. This book is a must read for anyone interested in these dynamics, and in the Middle East more broadly. -- Rosie B'Sheer (Harvard University) * Journal of Development Studies * Money, Markets and Monarchies opens a much-needed intellectual window into the political economy significance of the GCC's capital flows and how these flows are situated in the hierarchies of global power. -- Adeel Malik (Oxford University) * Journal of Islamic Studies, * Money, Markets, and Monarchies is a brilliant piece of scholarship that must be included in the collection of anyone interested in the Gulf and its economies. The outstanding depth and range of information regarding business conglomerates and operations between Gulf states and other countries in the Middle East and abroad gives the reader a panoramic view of how the Gulf looks like in terms of investment and political economy. -- Guirado Alons (Georgia State University) * Maydan * Adam Hanieh's book Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East is one of the most important works on contemporary Middle East. -- Farwa Sial * Developing Economics Blog * This book is unquestionably a major, important, and impressively researched contribution to our understanding both of the Gulf's political economy and its intertwining with that of the wider region and the globe. Anyone henceforth working in this field will need to engage with it. -- Gerd Nonneman (Georgetown University, Qatar) * Perspectives on Politics * This book is groundbreaking because it sheds refreshing light on the spatio-temporal dynamics of global capitalism by focusing on a region of the world often forgotten in these discussions and shows in the process that the GCC is deeply implicated in what happens in the three conventional sites of global markets beyond its supply of oil (...) This book combines primary data (interviews with UAE consultants in London) and secondary literature, the latter of which is quite a dizzying array of material drawn from a very wide range of sources (UN, IMF etc, etc). It must have taken years to put this material together. It is quite mind boggling really to think of the amount of work involved in putting this together. The book is a poster child of sublime work on contemporary IPE (...) There is no other comparable book that offers such an empirically rich account of this region and its embeddedness in global capitalism. The book is an impressive piece of work, and the result of hard industrial labour - given the broad span of political economy dimensions that are being covered; however, without losing sight of a clear argument and/or narrative. * British International Studies Association/International Political Economy Group Book Prize press release * Praise for Lineages of Revolt: Adam Hanieh's second monograph is a must-read book for students of Western Asian politics, for those interested in accounts of global political economy, and for those curious about twenty-first century imperialism. Scholars of Asian, European, and American politics have a direct stake in the groundbreaking 2013 book. -- Benoit Challand (New School for Social Research) * Arab Studies Journal *

""The trail of the serpent reaches into all the practices of man,"" said Ralph Waldo Emerson, of chattel slavery, and ""requires a certain shutting of the eyes."" So too today does oil. It's everywhere and that's why everything feels greasy. Adam Hanieh's excellent Crude Capitalism forces us to unshut our eyes, to see the way fossil fuels penetrate all aspects of modern society, both concrete and abstract. An important book. -- Greg Grandin, author of <i>The End of the Myth</i> Adam Hanieh is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the role of oil in the global economy. In Crude Capitalism, he has provided a field guide for navigating the difficult terrain in which we now find ourselves: situated between an accelerating climate crisis and an economy structured around fossil fuels. His insightful dissection of the often invisible ubiquity of fossil fuels in our lives - reaching far beyond energy into the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the medicines we prescribe - is integral to understanding not only why we remain so stuck in our fossil-addicted present, but critically how we might move beyond it. -- Adrienne Buller, author of <i>The Value of a Whale</i> Wait no longer. At last, we have a critical history of petro-power that brilliantly links commodities, capital, and climate change. Crude Capitalism is a truly stunning book, tracking the history of oil through war, imperial rivalry, global finance, and world ecology. The result is an utterly compelling work, one we urgently need both to understand the world-and to change it. -- David McNally, author of <i>Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and Empire</i> Adam Hanieh's analysis of Crude Capitalism, written in the tradition of Andreas Malm's now classic work Fossil Capital, provides a powerful historical account of how the world oil economy is inextricably connected both to contemporary capitalism and to the current climate crisis. Following the penetration of fossil fuels into every part of the modern capitalist mechanism, Hanieh demonstrates definitively that there are no partial solutions to the planetary emergency, only ecosocialist ones. -- John Bellamy Foster, author of <i>The Dialectics of Ecology</i> The world's leading scholar of oil gives us a majestic account of how it became our daily bread. Read and run for your life. -- Andreas Malm A rewarding reconsideration of oil's ascendance on the world stage. -- Publishers Weekly An essential contribution to debates around oil dependency and the struggle for climate justice. * Green Left *

Author Information

Adam Hanieh is Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS), University of Exeter, and Joint Chair in Middle East Studies at IAIS and the Institute for International and Area Studies, Tsinghua University, China. His most recent book, Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2018) was awarded the 2019 British International Studies Association International Political Economy Group Book Prize.

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