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  • Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia
  • Karen J. Freeze
Alison Fleig Frank . Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. xx + 343 pp. ISBN 0-674-01887-7, $49.95.

Dirt poor agrarian Galicia an oil empire? How did I miss that? Driven by incredulity to the Habsburg and Polish histories on my shelves, I found barely a sentence on oil in any of them. No wonder once eastern Galicia fell to Ukraine after the Second World War, behind the Soviet border proper, this colorful and instructive chapter in the history of Austria and Poland, of myriad Poles, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Canadians, and other actors lay dormant.

That is, until Alison Fleig Frank came along. Her pioneering and sophisticated book is the fruit of patient archival digging in five languages, a comprehensive command of the relevant literature, and cross-disciplinary, collegial interaction. It integrates technology and business into political, social, and economic history and proves that treasures may lie in forgotten episodes of the past. It is also a lively monograph suitable for graduate-level classroom use in European history, business history, and history of technology.

Six years before the birth of the American oil industry (Pennsylvania, 1859) and half a century before oil was discovered in the Middle East, clever minds in Galicia's capital city, Lviv, managed to refine the grimy substance that dirtied their fields and develop a lamp to make practical its use for lighting. Suddenly oil had value, but as the first to exploit it, the Galicians had no model to follow. All of them, Frank argues strongly, would mismanage their opportunities and make irreparable mistakes.

Frank sets out to explain "why oil did not make Galicia rich" and achieves a fascinating account of oil producers, worker-peasants, government bureaucrats, landowners, and an assortment of others, [End Page 602] often unsavory characters whose economic motives varied even within their respective groups and whose identities were overlaid with multiple ethnic, religious, linguistic, and geographic markers. Frank finds that enlightened self-interest was lacking; short-sighted actions ignorant of long-term consequences prevailed. For example, the Austrian government failed to appreciate the value of oil and gave landowners the rights to all mineral deposits found on their property. It sealed its doom by not building an energy infrastructure—no railroad from the oil fields to naval ports and no oil storage facilities to insure supplies in case of war. Hundreds of oilmen, defying rationality, frantically dug within meters of each other; even after Canadian drilling technology was introduced in 1882, they continued wasteful practices. The industry did not consolidate nor did it vertically integrate to insure long-term wealth. The largely illiterate worker-peasants (only 24 percent could read in 1900) remained immune to organization that might have alleviated what contemporary sources described as inhuman living and working conditions; when they did riot, it was for other reasons—Frank cites anti-Semitic incidents in 1884 and 1897.

After the Great War, nation builders on all sides fought in vain over what only appeared to be a prize of inestimable and enduring value. The Poles managed to convince the Allies that their claim on Eastern Galicia—rather than that of the incompetent Ukrainians—should be supported; nonetheless, Frank argues, the military outcome of the Polish–Ukrainian war of 1918–1919, which killed 15,000 Ukrainians and 10,000 Poles, was decisive. Ironically, the Poles would not be able to exploit their victory: the Galician oil supply was disappearing.

Frank explains that a more rational, slower method of extracting oil might have saved hundreds of thousands of tons of oil from polluting the land or being reabsorbed in rock underground, but it could not create oil where there was none. Although it can never be certain why the oil fields dried up, Frank suggests that the chaotic and amateurish methods of extraction contributed to the final outcome, much as amateur archeologists may, in their enthusiasm, ruin a site for professional excavation.

Frank demonstrates that in studying a critical commodity, one can easily cross traditional boundaries of nation, state, and class and pose new questions. Through her well-documented claim...

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