Crude History

One salutary feature of these oil histories from political scientist Timothy Mitchell and geographer Matthew Huber is that they avoid the word “crude” in their titles. After a series of books and documentaries in recent years riffing on this theme—crude politics, crude democracy, crude impact, crude awakening, crude world, crude domination, and crude reality—it is refreshing to see new contributions that frame the subject somewhat differently. Mitchell intends to trace oil's “materiality” (p. 2), and Huber attempts to demonstrate its “ordinariness” (p. xi). Although they offer original observations on oil's relationship to “democracy” and “freedom,” both studies nevertheless fail to dispel the impression that oil has almost magical powers to bless, or more often “curse,” societies. Crude in substance if not in name, these studies caricature rather than clarify the role of oil in modern history.

Mitchell's Carbon Democracy, which in the last few years has become a gateway text into oil for many social scientists and cultural theorists, is anchored by one big idea: that modern democracy and mass politics are inseparable from carbon-intensive forms of social and economic development. The opening chapter on “Machines of Democracy” explains how the nineteenth-century emergence of industrialization, imperialism, and democracy were linked to the exploitation of coal, which provided energy in such exceptional quantity and density that it reordered social relations on a global scale. Coal liberated populations, first in England and then elsewhere, from dependence on biomass energy gathered from large areas of land. It also created demand for new sources of organic energy to provide industrial inputs and sustain industrial workforces, setting in motion agrarian and colonial transformations beyond Britain and Western Europe.

Mitchell takes this argument further than other scholars have done, claiming that the characteristics of coal also politically empowered the new working class in industrializing countries. With its spatially concentrated mining sites, labor-intensive forms of extraction, and easily bottlenecked transport networks, coal gave workers a newfound ability to disrupt or shut down the flow of this essential source of energy and thus make new political demands. “Between the 1880s and the interwar decades, workers in the industrialized countries of Europe and North America used their new powers over energy flows to acquire or extend the right to vote and, more importantly, the right to form labour unions, to create political organizations, and to take collective action including strikes” (p. 26). These changes also “enabled” mass-based parties, social insurance, public pensions, and even the first women's movement.

There is a certain appeal in Mitchell's effort to interpret larger societal transformations in terms of the adoption of this revolutionary fuel. The reductionism of this argument, however, will not win over many historians who work on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries or social scientists who study democratic transitions. Mitchell's definition of democracy is both too limited and too malleable. He asserts that democracy can have two meanings (and only two?). One refers to “ways of making effective claims for a more just and egalitarian world,” and the other is a way of governing through popular consent “as a means of limiting claims for greater equality and justice” (p. 9). Coal, as a fuel that expanded the opportunities for making political claims, is an example of the former. Oil, whose physical characteristics constrained working-class power and democracy's potential, demonstrates the latter. Fluid and lighter than coal, oil could be shipped in large quantities across long distances, and it flowed through infrastructural assemblages too varied and dispersed to be easily blocked by organized labor.

The key to the switch from coal to oil and to the stunting of a more broad-based democratic politics was, in Mitchell's telling, the abundant oil reserves of the Middle East. Following World War I, Western statesmen preserved colonial dominance in...