Introduction

Since its discovery, oil has been an effective source of economic development, political power, military strategy, and socio-cultural change. Oil has always been the most profitable trading commodity, the cheapest energy source for industrialization, an indispensable means of civil and military mobility, and the fuel of modernization and globalization more recently. However, oil has also been materially scarce, spatially limited, temporally finite, and environmentally harmful. Therefore, oil has been extensively studied across disciplines, particularly International Relations (IR). The discipline of IR has mainly focused on the interstate oil politics and analyzed it from classical/neo-realist and liberal institutional theoretical perspectives. This book, however, investigates oil politics from a postcolonial critical perspective, taking into account the coloniality and postcoloniality of power structures. It examines colonization, decolonization, and postcolonization of oil in the Persian Gulf through the parameters of political order, formulated policies, market structure, concession system, imperial/national interests, and great powers rivalry. The colonization of the Gulf oil was undertaken by the British Empire, which exerted its military and political power over the oil regions, excluding rival colonial powers and securing oil concessions to its oil companies. The decolonization of the colonial oil order was realized with the increased oil awareness in the oil-producing Gulf countries. Meanwhile, the postcolonization of the Gulf oil has been gradually constructed by the United States, which restructured the colonial oil order in the context of the Cold War. Unlike Whitehall, which exploited the Gulf oil at the top of the oil wells, the White House maintained the exploitation at the New York Mercantile Exchange. This book uses qualitative, theory-testing, and comparative case study methods. From postcolonial IR theoretical perspective, it argues that British colonial and American postcolonial oil policies associated the Gulf oil with their national security concerns, used oil knowledge/technology as bargaining power, employed all tangible and intangible sources of power to protect their economic interests, but in doing so, each developed distinct political orders, institutional tools, and legitimizing discourses.