Labnet: CFP - Oil and Energy Resources in Contemporary History

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From: Elisabetta Bini [mailto:elisabetta.bini at nyu.edu] 

CFP - Oil and Energy Resources in Contemporary History

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The Italian scholarly journal "900: per una storia del tempo presente,"
will be devoting its next issue to the question of "Oil and Energy
Resources in Contemporary History." The Editorial Board invites whoever
might be interested in this topic to send a 500 word abstract and a
short (max two page) CV to the editors of the 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 at analyzing the importance that energy
resources, and oil in particular, have had during the 20th century.
Recent debates about the "end of oil" and the insustainability of a
model of economic growth centered around it, and about the role of oil
and natural gas in defining contemporary international relations, raise
a series of questions on the importance of the present moment as a
historical watershed and its relationship to the past. In this issue, we
wish to examine the role that oil - in relation to other energy
resources, such as coal - has had in shaping contemporary political
regimes and economies, as well as labor relations and international
relations. 

The international and transnational dimension is particularly central to
any discussion of oil, and forces us to rethink a series of key moments
in the history of the 20th century, such as the Second World War, the
Cold War and the 1970s. This issue seeks to analyze the ways in which
the substitution of oil for coal transformed international relations,
relations among European empires and between single empires and their
colonies, as well as the process of decolonization and the emergence of
the United States as a world power. Furthermore, it aims at
understanding how oil affected the process of state and nation-building
in oil-producing countries, and the establishment of consumer
democracies in post-World War II Western Europe and the United States.  

Recent scholarly work has devoted an increased attention to the working
conditions tied to the extraction, refining and distribution of oil.
Compared to the scholarship about coal miners, however, studies about
oil workers are still few. This issue seeks to examine the forms of
control and violence (on the part of both firms and states) that have
characterized the "age of oil," both in oil-producing and in
oil-consuming countries. Moreover, it wishes to reconstruct the forms of
labor organization and collective mobilization that have emerged in oil
fields, refineries and oil companies.