Daniel Yergin's seminal book The Prize (2009) traces the history of the oil industry from its beginning in the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Yergin's account highlights the importance of oil and oil markets for almost every aspects of the economic and political life of Western nations. As he argues, the rise of the oil industry is intertwined with the rise and development of capitalism and modern businesses. Not just that oil gradually replaced coal as the most important fossil fuel, the oil industry is also perceived of as the engine of technological advancement and economic power in its own right. Standard Oil, for example, dominated the American oil industry for well over one hundred years, and it is, as Yergin argues, no coincidence that the top ten companies in the 2008 global ranking of the Fortune 5000 index included six oil companies.
Significantly, Yergin's book highlights the importance of oil for global and national economies such as the United States and analyzes U.S. and British foreign policies under the paradigm of geostrategic considerations, as they pertain to the access of oil. The Gulf War of 1991 was, as Yergin points out, a geostrategic war, fought to ensure American access to oil from Kuwait. Although this insight is today common knowledge, Yergin describes in detail how official rhetoric about human rights abuses by Sadam Hussein served as a pretext to justify a war that was primarily led for geostrategic and economic reasons (Little, 2008). Yergin and Little (2008) thus identify a governing principle of U.S. foreign politics, namely that the United States chose to selectively defend human rights if their violation happens to intersect with geostrategic considerations.
Yergin's narrative of the "history of oil" starts in the mid-nineteenth century when oil was first exploited on the American continent. Speculators earned unprecedented profits, as $1 invested would in some cases resu...