Carbon Democracy. As tumultuous events in Egypt unfold at speed, with former President Morsi currently in custody, we present Verso's updated reading list of key titles and articles addressing the challenges facing Egypt and the Middle East. Seamus Milne considers the current situation in Egypt in the context of the Arab Spring and its historical precedents in the "Spring of Nations" of 1848 in his latest article for the Guardian.
His latest book, The Revenge of History, follows the events of the Arab Spring as they unfold, as well as providing a rich geopolitical context for the uprisings. The Journey to Tahrir: Revolution, Protest, and Social Change in EgyptEdited by Jeannie Sowers and Chris Toensing The account of how it all began, this collection of reports from the region details the causes that underpinned the revolution before it amassed in scale. Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt's Road to Revoltby Hazem Kandil Continue Reading. The Nature of Oil: Reconsidering American Power in the Middle East. Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. New York: Verso, 2011. Toby Craig Jones, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Robert Vitalis, American Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2006. For most of those who consider themselves politically liberal, oil—along with environmental degradation and foreign occupation—form a kind of political axis of evil on the American political landscape. In the past few years, three new books in Middle Eastern studies have complicated this picture considerably. Robert Vitalis’ American Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier effectively destroys the notion that ARAMCO represented a benevolent corporation committed to the “social uplift” of its employees. Of the three books, Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil makes the most far-reaching claims for the importance of oil. The Government of Uncertainty: how to follow the politics of oil. Global production networks and the extractive sector: governing resource-based development.
This article explores the opportunities a GPN approach provides for understanding the network configurations and regional development impacts associated with extractive industries. The article elaborates two core claims: (i) that the application of the GPN analytical framework provides a way to make progress in a stalled policy debate regarding the linkages between resource extraction and socio-economic development (popularly known as the ‘resource curse thesis’); and (ii) that the encounter between GPN and a natural resource-based sector introduces distinctive issues—associated with the materiality and territoriality of extractive commodities—that, to date, GPN has not considered fully.
The article examines the global production network for oil as an empirical case of how extractive industries can provide (limited) opportunities for socio-economic development. JEL classifications © The Author (2008). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Timothy Mitchell | Columbia University. Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist who studies the political economy of the Middle East, the political role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge, the politics of large-scale technical systems, and the place of colonialism in the making of modernity. Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D. in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984.
He joined Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern Studies. He is now professor and chair of the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. Mitchell is the author of Colonising Egypt, a study of the emergence of the modern state in the colonial period and an exploration of the forms of reason, power and knowledge that define the experience of modernity. Richard-auty-oil-and-development-in-the-middle-east. Oil and Democracy revisited.
2012.03.19_the_oil_curse. America's Kingdom - Robert Vitalis. America's Kingdom - review by S hertog. Business History Review The Business History Review is a scholarly journal that seeks to publish articles with rigorous primary research that address major topics of debate, offer comparative perspectives, and contribute to the broadening of the subject. The journal is primarily concerned with the history of entrepreneurs, firms, and business systems, and with the subjects of innovation, globalization, and regulation.
It also covers articles on the relation of businesses to the environment and to political regimes. The Business History Review is published in the spring, summer, autumn, and winter by Cambridge University Press for Harvard Business School. Harvard Studies in Business History Harvard Studies in Business History is a series of scholarly books published by Harvard University Press. Course Development The business historians at the School engage in extensive course development for the three major MBA electives. AmericasKingdom. Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. In and out of Kingdoms. [A guest post by Tipu Sultan] Once, I Was An Oil Drop I was taught that oil was the most glorious thing that had ever happened to humankind.
My first memory of this education was at age six. I was inducted into the girl-scouts, along with some of the other girls in the corporate-garrison town-city of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where I grew up. We were made to dress up as oil drops for the annual Saudi ARAMCO Day Parade. Who dresses six-year-old girls in large black plastic garbage bags to be paraded around for two hours, in over a hundred degrees of heat? Saudi Arabia was a land, we were constantly told, that time forgot—until the Americans and the oil. In the 6th grade, I went on a school trip to the first museum I remember: the Saudi ARAMCO Exhibit. I have a vivid memory of the larger-than life size photographs of the first American geologists in Arabia in the 1940s, smiling confidently through their sunglasses as they sat in rugged clothes, in front of tents and oil wells. Robert Vitalis | The Middle East Center at Penn. Robert Vitalis joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in July 1999 as associate professor of political science and director of the Middle East Center.
He stepped down as Center director in July 2006. Penn promoted him to full professor in July 2008. Vitalis received his Ph.D. in political science from MIT in 1989. His graduate work included a three-year residence in Cairo where he studied Arabic and researched the political strategies of Egyptian business firms. He has continued to develop and expand the scope of his interests in historical comparative analysis in his second book, America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, which was published in October 2006 by Stanford University Press, and named a book of the year in the London Guardian. Education: Massachussettes Institute of Technology, S.M. 1984; Ph.D. 1989State University of New York - Stony Brook, B.A. 1978 Research Interests: Overseas Research Experience: Egypt, Israel, Gulf States Recent Publications:
Middle East Policy Council | America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier. Reviewed by G.J.H. Dowling, Author and journalist; ARAMCO government affairs (ret.) Verso, 2009. 354 pages. $19.95. This book by American historian Robert Vitalis was reissued in 2009 in a paperback edition, a testament in part, no doubt, to the unrelenting interest in U.S. -Saudi Arabian relations occasioned by the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
However, the principal ground for its appeal must surely be located in the nature of the work itself. Despite the scholarship and the invigorating quality of its expression, however, this is a flawed work. It is universally recognized that the oil concession catalyzed the American "penetration of Arabia" with Aramco at the vanguard of what would ultimately be a broad, substantial and sometimes contentious U.S. involvement with the kingdom. To be sure, Aramco has been discussed in a great many publications elucidating its significance in the reshaping of diplomatic, strategic and economic relationships. But for Dr. Dr.