This is Thesis

For the past 2 years, I have been attending graduate school at Columbia University in a bizarre and very small liberal studies program nominally focused on "Islamic Studies." My program allowed me to pursue an incredible breadth of subject matter, from medieval Islamic philosophy and Qur'anic exegesis to Russian/Soviet colonial policy, Iraqi literature, Persian/Ottoman constitutionalism, and elections and political development in the Former Soviet Union (FSU to the cool kids).

This past semester, I dropped off virtually every map I usually inhabited to write my thesis. People often asked where I'd been, and my response was uniform - I was at the Library.

Some of my more masochistic acquaitences wanted to know more about the subject I was working on, but alas, at least for me, researching and writing the thesis are a vital part of even knowing what it is that I am researching and writing about. As a result, depending on when I was asked the question, different inquirers received different answers from a whole range of lucidity, mostly in the lower percentiles of said quality.

So now that it's all done, I thought I would post, purely for the sake of those interested, the results of my research and the conclusions I am contributing to the narrow little world in which they actually seem interesting.

Rather than expecting you to just dive in, here's some (quick?) background on my topic, methods, theoretical constructs, and the academic environment into which such a paper would be of interest.

The history of oil, that is, the history of what has become one of the dominant forms of commercial activity and among the most universal commodity on Earth, to say nothing of our primary fuel source, has almost always been told from an unabashedly Western perspective. This bias is best demonstrated by Daniel Yergin's The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. This little gem of pseudo/pop history is almost 800 pages long, and spends most of its time reveling in the glorious aura of 'great men' - and by this I mean Great Capitlists - like Rockefeller, or trumpeting the victorious conquests of (American) oil companies over "unruly" non-American oil producing nations. I'm not saying it has no redeeming value - in fact, I've had it recommended to me as the definitive source by current oil industry employees - but at best it tells only part of the story, and only from a very biased perspective.

Consider Baku. A small city located on the Apsheron Peninsula on the Caspian Sea in the province of Transcaucasia of the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Baku happens to have a long history of oil - dating back to at least the 10th century, with some references in the Bible - and not only that. From 1898 to 1902, the small city of Baku produced more annual oil than the entire US oil industry. It was THE oil center of the world for 4 years, and remained the #2 source for world petroleum production for at least 20 years before and after. Further, Baku was a laboratory for new inventions, and it was up to local innovation to overcome the failures of many supposedly 'advanced' systems from the American oil industry. The patter played itself out over and over again. American expertise was imported to Baku. It failed. New solutions were invented which worked better than the foreign expertise, and these were then taken back to America where they revolutionized that industry with a 10-20 year lag.

This is all fine and interesting, but it points at something more. If Baku was so important to the development of modern petroleum distillation and the practical invention of oil-powered steam engines, both of which radically transformed global capabilities of petroleum use in power generation, transportation, and private use - how can it be left out of Yergin's history? Of his 800 pages, the entire Russian oil industry gets a mere 20 pages, and most of that is spent decrying how backwards, primitive, unorganized, and volatile it was.

Indeed, the Baku oil industry was volatile. New oil sources were constantly being discovered on an area of land less than half the size of Manhattan. And the oil pockets they found produced such incredible quantities of oil that most reports in foreign newspapers were simply disregarded as preposterous fabrications. But there was trouble brewing in Baku. The relationship of the oil industrialists and the workers that produced the crude oil and its various refined products was dramatically different than in the American and later International oil models. Workers actually had rights. They had unions. They had power.

Build into an on-going discourse about the relationships of energy types (coal vs. oil) [See Mitchell] and the role that the technologies and material qualities of these 'carbon cousins' affected on the industries that produced them, I present Baku as a counter-example to traditional explanations of oil's ability to circumvent labor power. I demonstrate instead that even though Baku oil possessed all the same fluid advantages of oil in the American industry - and even a few it lacked - other elements such as the arrangement and organization of technical and manual labor and the transportation networks along which the energy flowed allowed workers in the Russian empire to maintain significantly more control of crucial energy resources. This played itself out most dramatically in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and subsequent destruction of the Baku oil fields.

I want to thus accomplish a few things.

1) write Baku back into the history of oil in a way that recognizes its significance and contributions.

2) provide an explanation for how the Baku/Russian oil industry developed such distinct machines and methods of extracting, refining and transporting oil on a regional and global scale.

3) explain how the particular solutions designed for the Baku industry inadvertently opened the possibility for labor to seize power of critical networks of energy flow through strike action and popular revolution.

4) demonstrate that oil is not universal; that the chemical properties of different crudes, their geological location, the machinery necessary to extract them, and the matrix of social relations under which it operates all affect in different spheres of oil production different trajectories, possibilities, and explanations. That different oil allows different futures.

5) To challenge the conclusions of my advisor, the venerable Tim Mitchell, in his exceedingly fine article, "Carbon Democracy" to take Baku into account and further the discourse about oil, energy, economics, local governance and international relations.

All of this operates not only within the literary backdrop outlined above, but I specifically followed Mitchell's lead in looking into the matter through an intellectual framework called Science and Technology Studies (STS). Building on the works of Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and others, I wanted to consider Baku oil with the assumption that human as well as nonhuman elements ('nature' like the oil itself, as well as 'machines' such as the drilling equipment) not only contributed to the final outcome, but had some agency in driving events toward their own goals. This adds up to a world-view in which nonhumans (machines, nature) have an effect on human socieites, and thus it is often termed 'techno-social' concepts, or individual components are 'socio-technics.' The whole construct relies upon the interconnectedness of humans with other components of the environments they inhabit, and especially the unintended (by humans) consequences these other components have on the humans who use them.

A good preparation for the paper might be to read Mitchell's argument, as my paper responds to it actively. Then again, that will only add to the burden of reading what is already a ridiculously long, technical, and often very dry, report.

Two other books that are NOT necessary to understand my paper, but which I found extremely interesting and useful despite having no focus on Baku, were Nature's Metropolis by William Cronon, and The Great Divergence by Kenneth Pomeranz. The former tells the history of Chicago's emergence as America's Second City through the lens of environmental history, while the latter is concerned with comparisons of industrial development, and essentially tells the history of the European Industrial Revolution from the perspective of China. Both very interesting, provocative, and unorthodox - just my cup of tea.

But I cannot make all of your decisions for you. If you've made it this far, you've shown great heart. If you care to follow the rabbit hole any further, why not go all the way?

Tim Mitchell. "Carbon Democracy." Economy and Society, vol. 38 issue 3 (2009), pp.399-432

Ryan Weber. "Power to the Petrol: How the Baku Oil Industry Made Labor Strikes and Mass Politics Possible in the Russian Empire (and beyond)." M.A. Thesis, Columbia University, May 2010.

Happy reading - thanks for your patience - and I'd be glad to answer any questions or respond to any critiques you have afterwards.

Weber

::(lame) Texpatriot