doi: 10.1093/jahist/jas065 © he Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Organization of American Historians. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. 236 he Journal of American History June 2012 Americans were the irst people to become mass producers and mass consumers of oil, the most powerful fuel and versatile substance ever discovered. During the twentieth century, oil spawned a world-class industry of U.S. oil irms, service companies, and marketers. It produced vast networks of wells, pipelines, reineries, chemical plants, terminals, service stations, and power plants to deliver cheap energy. hese complexes served as engines of investment and employment throughout the nation. As the chief transportation fuel, a major source of heat and electricity, and the building block for a proliferating array of consumer goods, oil underpinned a steadily rising U.S. standard of living. 1 he control of oil also helped elevate the United States as the supreme global power. In World War I, as Britain’s Lord Curzon declared, the Allies “loated to victory upon a wave of [mostly American] oil,” powering its ships and tanks. In World War II, America’s oil abundance proved decisive in both the European and Paciic theaters. 2 In the postwar period, American-controlled oil underwrote European and Japanese reconstruction. Oil thus became a key component in the exercise of American hegemony over a relatively prosperous world order, after an era in which an unstable balance of power produced two world wars sandwiched around a global depression. As the century wore on, however, the United States and its oil industry steadily yielded control over the substance. he shifting of the center of oil production from the United States to the Middle East both solidiied and destabilized American global power. In the 1970s, pressures on domestic oil supplies, accompanied by the transfer of oil ownership from American and European irms to sovereign states in the Middle East and elsewhere, created economic and political shocks that weakened the foundations of American supremacy and reverberated into the twenty-irst century. 3 Just when the decline of the American oil empire appeared irreversible, technological breakthroughs in extracting hydrocarbons from new geological frontiers (for example, sub-salt and pre-salt deepwater, shale, and tar sands) surprisingly regenerated North he Dilemmas of Oil Empire Tyler Priest Tyler Priest is a professor of business history and director of global studies at the C. T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston. Starting in fall 2012 he will be an associate professor of history at the University of Iowa. he author thanks Brian Black, Juan Carlos Boué, Jay Hakes, Ed Linenthal, homas McCormick, Karen Merrill, Joseph Pratt, Landon Storrs, and anonymous readers for their insights on this essay. Readers may contact Priest at typriest@gmail.com. 1 Harold F. Williamson et al., he American Petroleum Industry: he Age of Energy, 1899–1959 (Evanston, 1963). 2 Daniel Yergin, he Prize: he Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York, 1992), 183, 328–88. 3 On U.S. hegemonic decline, see homas J. McCormick, America’s Half-Century: United States Foreign Policy in the Cold War and After (Baltimore, 1995). by guest on April 23, 2016 http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from