Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941–54 by David S. Painter (review)

SHORTER BOOK REVIEWS David S. Painter. Oil and the American Century: The Political Economy of U.S. Foreign Oil Policy, 1941-54. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. xii + 302 pp. Maps. American involvement in the politics of the world petroleum market is generating a large literature. Painter's contribution is likely to stand as the most thoroughly researched discussion of this subject for the years during and immediately following World War II. It therefore warrants attention from specialists, who will value the richness of the sources and the detail of the narrative. The analysis, however, may prove less compelling, for the simple reason that the author seems more concerned to present the comprehensive facts of his story than to draw generalizations from it. Despite the "political economy" of the title, and despite the explicit discussion of "corporatism" in the Introduction, the theoretical significance of this work is likely to come, if at all, more from readers inclined to place the material it presents within their own theoretical frame of reference than from the analytical discussions the author himself presents (typically) in brief paragraphs at the beginning and end of each chapter. Painter examines the relationship between different parts of the American government and various firms in the oil industry, as well the relationship between both public and private American actors and a number of foreign governments, including most notably those of the United Kingdom, Venezuela, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Iran. The themes that he pursues through all this are, in descending order of prevalence, the American government's use of major oil companies as instruments of its foreign oil policy, the obverse use of the U.S. government by major oil companies to promote a global environment and foreign-government decisions conducive to their success, and the conflicts within both government and industry over the means of ensuring security of oil supply for the United States. The unique contribution of the study probably lies in its detailed treatment of the conflicts within the American government over this issue. In the end, I was not persuaded that the American foreign oil policies reviewed in the study conform to the "corporatist" interpretation outlined in the book's introduction, which in any case was defined lamely as essentially one of public/ private cooperation or "symbiosis." In fact, in several of the sub-plots I saw patterns that instead conformed to a "statist" interpretation, where the preferred policies of the major oil companies were overshadowed by those dictated by the broader or longer-term strategic and diplomatic objectives of the American government. Perhaps relatedly, I was also a little disappointed that there was little' 122 Shorter Book Reviews clear evidence of the author's views of the American national interest with respect to world oil. At the very end of the book we learn, almost as an afterthought, that Painter faults the American government for its inattention to a fundamentally different approach to energy security based on conservation. But throughout the story he has actually told us, I detected nothing to suggest whether or not the national interest of the United States also might have been better served by, say, more accommodation of the national aspirations of producing countries such as Mexico, greater use of multilateral regimes rather than unilateral actions in evolving solutions to world market problems, or the showing of less favour to the "majors" than to the "independents." Could it be that in both the analytic and political realms the salience of the "corporatist" model is greater where the question of the national interest is less overtly contested? J. N. McDougall Department of Political Service University of Western Ontario Elliott J. Gorn. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986. 316 pp. Illus. In this history of bare-knuckle prize fighting, Elliott J. Gorn claims to side with the lions over the Christians. The book is a gripping advocacy of the perennial attraction-repulsion produced by boxing. The curious reader has no choice but to become part of the antebellum "fancy" who made their way on twelve vessels, twenty-five miles up the Hudson River to watch Tom McCoy fight Christopher Lilly. McCoy, having...