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.

This paper will explicate the modern history of Iraq’s political economy since the establishment of the modern Iraqi state as a League of Nations’ mandate in 1920 through the current period. It will highlight three themes that have influenced the shape and direction of Iraq’s political economy: the state, oil, and war. It will do so in opposition to already existing literature that tends to emphasis one factor over the others, and also tends to treat Iraq in isolation from the regional and international context in which it exists and operates. While the political system may affect questions of redistribution and social justice, it is the state’s ability to extend its territorial and bureaucratic control that has historically led to the emergence, strengthening, or weakening of the national economy. The rentier state theses have been used by scholars from different intellectual (and sometimes opposing) intellectual traditions to understand Iraq’s political economy. In light of recent critical works, this paper will outline arguments of the “rentier state” approach and show their limitations in understanding the role of oil in Iraq’s political economy. It will do so by giving a historical account of the role of oil in Iraq’s modern history. War and armed conflict have shaped the focus of the economy (a classic war economy in the 1980s, the sanctions economy in the 1990s, and the various counter insurgencies since the 1930s) and thus must be understood as an integral element of the history of Iraq’s political economy.

Since the onset of the Arab uprisings in 2011, scholars have begun to focus greater attention on the growing political and military role of the GCC in the region, as well as the specificities of the Gulf’s own political economy. This paper engages with this emerging literature – as well as older writing on the Gulf – to offer a critical account of the GCC’s political economy in both its historical evolution and contemporary forms. The paper begins by locating the GCC within the wider international sphere, focusing in particular on the period following the Second World War, in which oil (and its associated financial surpluses) emerged as central to the balance of global power and the functioning of modern capitalism. It traces how these features have shaped the development of the state in the Gulf, to which is linked a powerful class of Gulf business conglomerates that have come to dominate all moments of accumulation. Viewed from this perspective, the paper argues that the Gulf is not an anomaly among states internationally, in which a ‘weak’ capitalist class is arrayed against a ‘strong, independent state’ (as much of the literature on the region contends). Rather, the nature of state power in the Gulf is reflective and supportive of a dominant business class – consisting of both ruling families and a larger network of corporate power. Having explored this relationship between state and capital in the Gulf, the paper then turns to examining three further significant features of the Gulf’s political economy: (1) the structural role played by the presence of a large migrant labor-force, lacking access to citizenship or basic political rights; (2) the significant internationalisation of Gulf capital that has occurred over the last two decades, concomitant with the rolling-out of neoliberalism (in both the Middle East and globally); and (3) the changing relationships and tensions between different GCC states. The paper will ask what these three features mean for the political dynamics of Gulf societies, as well as their impact on the GCC’s place in the wider Middle East. This discussion is situated in the context of the 2011 Arab uprisings and their aftermath; encompassing both the downturn in low oil prices that began mid-2014, as well as the on-going crises affecting numerous Arab countries.

In North Africa, historians long assumed that the colonization of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia was a financial boon for France and indeed could be explained through material interests (often known as the "colonial pact"). Yet more recently, scholars have highlighted that colonization ceased to be profitable for the metropole after 1930, even if important capitalist interests continued to benefit from state monopolies. This paper explores this tension and argues that economic calculations had long been viewed as a way of creating la plus grande France rather than maximizing profits for the capitalist system. Moreover, it asks a question: what can the concept of racial capitalism tell us about the intersection of economic and racial domination in the region? Starting with an overview of the different economic ties that bound France to these three territories, the paper focuses on the extension of the wine industry, which drew the early ire of metropolitan wine-growers. This was an early harbinger of the economic, political, and social tensions that would mark decolonization. The production of wine was indelibly linked to the creation of a settler identity, a clear example of how the importance of economic interests went deeper than the mere production and redistribution of material wealth. The second part of the paper looks at the postwar period and charts the transformation of the political economy in the last years of French empire. It highlights how economic theories such as "Cartierism," which claimed that France's colonization of the Maghreb was actually an obstacle to the country's postwar recovery, couched moral and racial arguments in economic terms. Indeed, contemporary debates on colonial development by French historians expose the ways in which the discussion of the "merits of empire" have used the economy as a site for defending a racial conception of French nationalism.