EH.N: CfP: Oil and Energy Resources in Contemporary History

[simone_selva@yahoo.it]

Call for Papers: Oil and Energy Resources in Contemporary History

The Italian scholarly journal "900: per una storia del tempo presente," 
will be devoting its next issue to the problem of “Oil and energy 
resources in contemporary history.” The Editorial Board invites whoever 
might be interested in this topic to send a 1000 word abstract and a 
short (max two pages) CV to the general editors of this issue, 
Elisabetta Bini (elisabetta.bini at nyu.edu) and Simone Selva 
(simone_selva at yahoo.it) by February 10, 2009. Successful applicants will 
be expected to email their articles by July 31, 2009.

This issue of "900" aims to explore the role and importance of energy 
sources as broadly defined throughout the twentieth century. Against 
this background, particular attention will be paid to oil and its 
by-products. The ongoing debate on themes such as “the end of oil,” the 
environmental effects of an oil-driven model of economic growth, as well 
as the pressing need to find an economic model of sustainable 
development based on new energy sources, brings before the attention of 
historians a range of problems and questions arising out of today’s 
energy crisis and its meaning of historical watershed.
We wish to investigate to what extent, if so, oil did influence on the 
one side the birth and rise of political regimes and economic structures 
throughout the contemporary world; on the other, the development of a 
modern system of labor and international relations. This research target 
will be picked up through a close attention to the interlocking 
relations between oil and coal in the history of energy resources.

Topics to be covered include the following:
a) Whatever reappraisal of oil history should be set against its 
international and transnational background. This framework requires 
historical work to rethink some key watersheds in the history of the 
twentieth Century, spanning from WWII through the postwar reconstruction 
up to the 1970s’ energy crisis. A comparison between coal and oil does 
make scholarly work to pinpoint a clear-cut distinction between the 
early rise of the nation state and the later settlement of an 
international relations system based on a cutting-edge distinction 
between oil producing and oil importing countries, and the emergence of 
new international relations among them. We will be trying to investigate 
how the historical shift from coal to oil changed international 
relations, with particular attention to both the changing balance of 
power among the European empires and between each of them and their 
respective colonies, as well as to decolonization and the post WWII 
ascendancy of the United States to world supremacy. Besides, we would 
like to examine to what extent the availability to the energy sources 
producing nations of a strategic raw material such as oil marked a 
pivotal turning point in the history and evolution of the economic 
models and political regimes adopted by the oil producing countries. 
Furthermore, the aim is at breaking down how this shaped the nation 
building process in these national contexts.

b) Recent scholarly works focus their reconstructions on the wage 
earners’ working conditions in the oil industry, be it either the 
drawing and processing firms or the retail trade companies. Thus far, 
however, these studies on the oil sector’s workers are few and 
unfinished if we compare them to the scores of historical works on 
miners produced over time. Therefore, 900 strives to figure out how 
either the state or the industry exercised their control on the 
workforce in the “age of oil” in both the energy producing and energy 
importing countries. Consistent with this perspective, we wish to 
contribute to the history of trade union organization and collective 
action which came about on oil fields, in petroleum refineries or in the 
oil manufacturing firms. Last but not least, we aim to catch to what 
extent -- in a century long time span -- the interlocking nexus between 
on the one side the international hegemony and its power structures, on 
the other the nation building process which the oil producing countries 
experienced, laid down the foundations for an economic model of 
governance, alternatively based on social integration or exclusion, 
built upon consumer capitalism. In turn, the overall research target is 
to break down whether or not energy sources account for different 
pathways of social cohesion and depoliticization as they came into being 
in advanced industrial societies along the last century.

Contact:	
Elisabetta Bini (elisabetta.bini at nyu.edu)
Simone Selva (simone_selva at yahoo.it)