Over the last decade, new scholarship has articulated a novel approach to understanding the political economy of oil. Drawing on this and on further research by the author, this paper proposes ten theses on the place of oil in understanding the political economy of the Middle East. Vital to industrial society, oil often seems to dictate the terms with which we think about it. Since capitalism depends on it, we assume, supplies of oil have to be continually secured, bringing repeated risks of conflict and war. However, this energy determinism grants too much power to oil, and it often says little about oil itself—how it is produced, shipped, used, and by whom. Nor does it consider the alternatives to a world built on oil, something we must rapidly address. The paper’s first three theses address the quasi-monopoly arrangements that were formed to manage oil production in the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century. The fourth and fifth theses consider how these monopoly arrangements were challenged in the second half of the 20th century, by those who worked in the industry, and by the states formed to govern the producing regions and to police challenges from labor. Four further theses cover the political economy of oil in the decades following the widespread nationalizations of the 1970s. The final thesis addresses how to write the historical political economy of oil in the face of catastrophic climate change. It poses this as a question not of how history shapes our understanding of oil, but how oil has shaped our understanding of history. We inhabit a historical mode of being, seeing ourselves as the products of unfolding historical processes. That mode of being was made possible by the extraordinary forces unlocked during the brief era of almost limitless access to fossil fuels. Human flourishing now depends on ending that era, reducing the global production of oil and gas almost to zero by 2050, a point closer in time than, say, the great expansion of the Gulf oil producing states in the early 1980s. This entails not just a new approach to the political economy of oil, but, starting from the vantage point of MENA, a new mode of thinking the relation between the economic and the political.