The Political Economy of World Energy: A Twentieth Century Perspective.

• Author: Jones, Clifton T.

This book provides a detailed and well-documented narrative description of global patterns of energy use and production during the twentieth century. After a brief introductory chapter, Chapter 2 starts the narrative with a discussion of energy's role in the industrial maturation of the West from 1900 to 1918, when coal still provided most of the world's primary energy requirements. Chapter 3 moves on to describe developments in the energy sector during the interwar years, when alternatives to coal such as electricity, oil and natural gas were rapidly gaining market share, especially in the U.S. This period also saw the rise of the multinational oil companies and the emergence of producer nationalism in the oil-exporting lesser developed countries (LDCs). Next, Chapters 4 and 5 trace the crucial role played by access to energy supplies in military strategy during the Second World War, and explain the growing frustration of the oil-exporting LDCs with the hegemony of the multinationals, leading to the creation of OPEC in 1960. Chapter 6 then shows how post-war economic growth led the West and Japan to significantly increase their dependence on energy imports under the assumption that cheap oil would always be available.

Chapter 7 covers some already well-traveled ground in assessing the West's policy responses to OPEC's first oil price increase in 1973, while Chapter 8 chronicles the somewhat more neglected reactions of the (now former) Soviet bloc and the Third World. Chapter 9 then extends these two policy assessments to the second oil price shock following the Iranian revolution of 1979. Interestingly, except for a few, lightly populated oil-exporting states such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, Clark finds that the energy crisis seems to have had little permanent impact on many LDCs. Heavily populated net oil exporters such as Mexico and Nigeria failed to take full advantage of their sudden revenue windfalls, as they incurred huge debts under the assumption of ever higher oil prices yet made little real progress towards balanced development for their people. For many poorer net oil-importing LDCs such as Tanzania, sharply higher oil prices did not significantly derail their feeble steps toward development, as much of their energy requirements still came from non-commercial indigenous sources. Consequently, the unexpected declines in oil prices of the mid-1980s brought no tangible relief to many oil-importing LDCs while only exacerbating the...