Hydrocarbons and human resources: labor, social relations and industrial culture in the history of the oil and gas industry

This article examines the early twentieth-century oil workforce in the Mid-Continent petroleum region of the United States, focusing on the centrality of white supremacy within the oil industry. White oil workers and the communities where they predominated frequently perpetrated acts of racial…

Emerging in the midst of a painful war of independence and deeply intertwined with the contested claims to territorial and economic sovereignty, the Algerian oil industry, and its labour force, occupied a unique place at the forefront of the Algerian decolonisation process. This paper explores…

Economics was a major field of struggle for anti-imperialist oil experts and activists. Building on recent scholarship on oil anti-colonialism, this article argues that exploring the economic dimension of the struggle for sovereignty not only adds to our understanding of political and social…

This article sheds light on the arrival of petroleum in France, and more specifically in the Côte-d’Or department. While the first barrels were imported in 1861 to the Normandy coast, the earliest trace of a petroleum depot in this rural department surrounding the city of Dijon did not appear…

The Iranian oil nationalisation crisis, which ended in the coup that overthrew nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, is well known. An international Consortium of the world’s major oil companies replaced the dominance of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, but relatively little…

The oil and gas industry is generally imagined as a prototypical ‘men’s world’, with the multifaceted work women have performed largely invisible. This is being rectified by growing research on women workers in the industry. This paper introduces this literature and calls for further research…

This paper analyses employee needs in the Romanian oil industry during the interwar period. Three distinct periods will be explored: the aftermath of the First World War, the economic crisis of 1929-1933, and the outbreak of the Second World War. I will also present several pol- icies…

From 1966 to 2012, oil companies operated a massive refinery on the Island of St. Croix, United States Virgin Islands (USVI). Over time, this fossil fuel industry has impacted the local community, particularly low-income families of color, as well as the marine environment and air and water…