Petrochemical Empire

2021/07/31 by Adam Hanieh · 1 voice · 4 citations
Environmental Science · #American Environmental and Regional History

paper · doi:10.64590/kbq

Abstract

A materialist history of capital and empire, through the lens of the German-American petrochemical industry. What does it mean to see oil, not just as an energy source or transport fuel, but as primary material for contemporary commodity culture—the chemical basis for a synthetic world of things?

Cited by

• Degrowing a synthetic world: A critical realist perspective on petrochemical transformation
• The Monster ‘Within’: Capitalist Urbanization as Geometabolic Escalation
• The battle for plastic hegemony: the petrochemical historical bloc and the UN Global Plastics Treaty
• In the Silence of the Smokestack. Post-Disaster Public Relations in the French Oil Industry (1964–1971)

Discussions

• (1/3) Adam Hanieh on petroleum as plastics: "From the 1950s onwards, a wide array of naturally derived substances – wood, glass, paper, natural rubber, natural fertilizers, soaps, cotton, wool and met [bsky, 18 points, 3 comments]

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• Degrowing a synthetic world: A critical realist perspective on petrochemical transformation