Mercantile States and the World Oil Cartel, 1900–1939

In the early twentieth century, the pattern of industrial energy consumption began its massive shift from reliance on coal to dependence on oil. This seismic event changed the world's strategic geography, overturned established relations between business and state, and resulted in global dominance for a select group of powerful oil multinationals. Providing a definitive history of these events, Gregory P. Nowell calls into question some common assumptions about the relations between international corporate struggles and national policymaking in such "mercantile" states as France.Nowell reveals how the men who organized the world oil cartel of 1928 maintained a coherent strategy of transnational regulation as they controlled new hydrocarbon technologies through elaborate patent agreements. The cartel's strategy, Nowell argues, became the common fabric from which individual states cut their national oil policies, among them such apparently diverse measures as the French oil import law of 1928, the Red Line agreement controlling Iraqi oil exports, and the Texas Railroad Commission. Focusing on France, the author examines policy decisions aimed at safeguarding longterm supplies of petroleum, including adjudication of conflicts between Standard Oil and rival European companies. Drawing on extensive primary sources in France and the United States, Nowell details the processes through which the cartel's transnational structuring shaped the energy goals of France and of other nations, guided these nations' institutional development, and helped determine the international distribution of market power and technology. His analysis of the broad sweep of world oil politics leads to a penetrating critique of major theories of international relations