1993/01/01 by David S. Painter · 2 citations
Energy · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Engineering · #Global Energy and Sustainability Research #Natural Resources and Economic Development #Power (physics) #Foreign policy #Petroleum industry #Great power #Economic history #World War II #Oil reserves #International relations #Political science #Economy #Law #History #China #Politics #Economics #Engineering #Petroleum
paper · doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.1993.tb00167.x
openalex publication_date 1993/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
Daniel Yergin. The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. New York: Simon … Schuster, 1991. 876 pp. Maps, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 24.95 (cloth). 16.00 (paper). No one, least of all scholars of U.S. foreign relations, should have to be reminded that oil has been central to world power in the twentieth century. As Daniel Yergin points out in his Pulitzer Prize-winning study, throughout this century oil has been “an essential element in national power, a major factor in world economics, a critical focus for war and conflict, and a decisive force in international affairs” (p. 773). Thus, it is strange that many diplomatic historians neglect oil: Oil is barely mentioned in Paul Kennedy's best-selling Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and receives only passing attention in John Lewis Gaddis's popular survey, Strategies of Containment, to name only two prominent examples.1 This lack of attention is unfortunate, because understanding the history of oil is fundamental to understanding the history of international relations in the twentieth century. As Herbert Feis noted over forty years ago, “the outstanding feature of oil geography is that, while the demand for oil is world-wide, the great sources of supply are few and separated.” Indeed, for most of the century, the major industrial powers, with the significant exceptions of the United States and the Soviet Union, have had meager domestic oil production; and, with the same two exceptions, the major oil producers have had very little industry. (Until the 1980s when they were joined by China, the Soviet Union and the United States were also the only Great Powers that possessed substantial supplies of both coal and oil.) Because of this disparity, access to external sources of oil has been both a key source of rivalry among the Great Powers and a key factor in relations between the industrial and the nonindustrial worlds.2 Moreover, possession of ample domestic oil supplies and control over access to foreign oil reserves have been key, and often overlooked, elements in the power position of the United States relative to its rivals.