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Oil Slick
| Article
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19814 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
2,397 Words |
| Author
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Milton R. Copulos
Milton R. Copulos is president of the National Defense Council
Foundation and the author of over 450 publications on energy
and the environment, including Energy Perspectives (1979) and
The Oil Industry, Yesterday and Today (1987). |
THE PRIZE: THE EPIC QUEST FOR OIL, MONEY, AND POWER
Daniel Yergin
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991
877 pp., $24.95
Like take-out Chinese food, Daniel Yergin's best seller, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, is palatable but ultimately unsatisfying. While the book is a facile and generally readable history of the oil industry's growth and development, it seldom rises above the obvious and provides little real insight into the complex interrelationships that govern energy markets today.
Despite the lionization it has received in the press, Yergin's work is less a scholarly examination of the issues arising from oil's growing importance, in both the national and world economies, than a relatively mundane popular history of petroleum, albeit a carefully constructed one. This is not to say that popular histories are not useful, and for the layman, Yergin's book can certainly help provide some sense of the historic context that underlies the recent crisis in the Persian Gulf. For more serious students of energy policy, however, it falls far short of the mark.
Yergin's central thesis is this: "Though the modern history of oil begins in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it is the twentieth century that has been completely transformed by the advent of petroleum [because] oil has meant mastery throughout the twentieth century." What the Japanese, Germans, and French--all of whom are totally dependent on imported oil--might say about this remains to be seen.
To expand on his thesis, Yergin outlines what he terms the "three great themes" that run through the history of oil. These include the rise and development of modern capitalism; the inextricable link between oil, global politics, and power; and the evolution of what he terms "hydrocarbon man." It is clearly the first two themes that fascinate Yergin, and they dominate the book. Indeed, the third is never developed in any significant way, and it hardly warrants inclusion.
His linkage of the development of modern industrial capitalism to the development of oil stands up best, but that should come as no surprise. There can be little doubt of oil's critical role in the evolution of the American industrial state or oil's contribution to America's rise as a powerhouse of world commerce. Indeed, during the 1870s and 1880s,
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