Adam Hanieh, Petrochemical Empire, NLR 130, July–August 2021

A materialist history of capital and empire, through the lens of the German-American petrochemical industry. What does it mean to see oil, not just as an energy source or transport fuel, but as primary material for contemporary commodity culture—the chemical basis for a synthetic world of things?

https://doi.org/10.64590/kbq 130 , July Aug 2021 Adam Hanieh Petrochemical Empire Share T he last two decades have witnessed an extraordinary surge in radical scholarship on oil. Starting with Timothy Mitchell’s path-breaking work on the transition from coal to oil and its part in the emergence of ‘carbon democracy’, a series of important contributions have sought to weave oil more fully into the narration of 20th-century capitalism. footnote 1 Scholars have retold the story of oil from the perspective of anticolonial protagonists in Latin America and the Middle East, situating these against t

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