Crude Capitalism

The world’s leading scholar of oil gives us a majestic account of how it became our daily bread. Read and run for your life. – Andreas Malm“The trail of the serpent reaches into all the practices of man,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, of chattel slavery, and “requires a certain shutting of the eyes.” So too today does oil. It’s everywhere and that’s why everything feels greasy. Adam Hanieh’s excellent Crude Capitalism forces us to unshut our eyes, to see the way fossil fuels penetrate all aspects of modern society, both concrete and abstract. An important book. – Greg Grandin, author of The End of the MythAdam Hanieh is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the role of oil in the global economy. In Crude Capitalism, he has provided a field guide for navigating the difficult terrain in which we now find ourselves: situated between an accelerating climate crisis and an economy structured around fossil fuels. His insightful dissection of the often invisible ubiquity of fossil fuels in our lives - reaching far beyond energy into the food we eat, the clothes we wear and the medicines we prescribe - is integral to understanding not only why we remain so stuck in our fossil-addicted present, but critically how we might move beyond it. – Adrienne Buller, author of The Value of a WhaleWait no longer. At last, we have a critical history of petro-power that brilliantly links commodities, capital, and climate change. Crude Capitalism is a truly stunning book, tracking the history of oil through war, imperial rivalry, global finance, and world ecology. The result is an utterly compelling work, one we urgently need both to understand the world-and to change it. – David McNally, author of Blood and Money: War, Slavery, Finance, and EmpireAdam Hanieh’s analysis of Crude Capitalism, written in the tradition of Andreas Malm’s now classic work Fossil Capital, provides a powerful historical account of how the world oil economy is inextricably connected both to contemporary capitalism and to the current climate crisis. Following the penetration of fossil fuels into every part of the modern capitalist mechanism, Hanieh demonstrates definitively that there are no partial solutions to the planetary emergency, only ecosocialist ones. – John Bellamy Foster, author of The Dialectics of EcologyA rewarding reconsideration of oil’s ascendance on the world stage. * Publishers Weekly *An essential contribution to debates around oil dependency and the struggle for climate justice. * Green Left *Excellent … an invaluable read in the growing area of radical oil studies * Ephemera Journal *Crude Capitalism tackles its big, difficult themes with precision and attention to detail. It is beautifully presented and organised. * Ecologist *Fascinating … a masterful historical examination of oil’s foundational importance to the restructuring of international financial and monetary systems at a time of acute crisis at the commanding heights of the globalizing capitalist market economy. – Alec Fiorini, Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global ProductionA fascinating and enormously useful examination of the role oil has played in the development of global capitalism … [Crude Capitalism] should be widely read, seriously studied and taken into the struggle for climate justice. – John Clarke * Counterfire *An excellent book for understanding the fundamental causal connections between our economic system and the destruction of our environment wrought by the rise of oil. * Labour Hub *Importantly, Hanieh’s book isn’t limited to studying oil as a liquid fuel, but “what oil becomes as it circulates within capitalism” as a transport fuel, energy source and as petrochemicals, as well as its connections to food, financial systems and its centrality to the US dollar as the dominant global currency. – Susan Price * Green Left *A must read … Crude Capitalism is withering in its critique of the oil industry’s corporate greenwashing. – Pete Cannell * rs21 *Crude Capitalism provides an indispensable context for analyzing the world capitalist system and oil’s peculiar role in producing and maintaining its geopolitical structure-thus challenging many of the truisms and shorthand assumptions of the global left. – Kai Bosworth * Spectre Journal *A compelling explanation of how this world of too much oil came to be … Hanieh’s book … offer[s] valuable methodological provocations and tools to progressive lawyers. – Ntina Tzouvala * International Journal of Law in Context *[A] densely packed yet highly readable history of our interaction with oil at every step from its extraction to its consumption. – Alex Gendler * Brooklyn Rail *

Adam Hanieh is Professor of Political Economy and Global Development at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies (IAIS), University of Exeter, and Research Fellow at the Transnational Institute (TNI). His most recent book, Money, Markets, and Monarchies: The Gulf Cooperation Council and the Political Economy of the Contemporary Middle East (Cambridge University Press, 2018) was awarded the 2019 British International Studies Association International Political Economy Group Book Prize.