Book Description

This dissertation analyzes the historical process that culminated in the 1972 nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) -- a consortium that included four of the world's largest and most powerful corporations. I draw on IPC archives, recently declassified U.S. Government documents, and the Arab press to trace the impact of Iraq's 1958 "Free Officers' Revolution" on IPC interests in Iraq. I show that the Revolution set in motion a process of institutional development that resulted in the complete nationalization of the Iraqi oil industry at a relatively early date, and I emphasize the agency of a particular group of Western-trained Iraqi technical experts in producing this outcome. Moreover, I examine U.S and IPC efforts to counter Iraq's radical movements and offer an original interpretation of the relationship between the American government and the international oil industry. I show that the Iraqi challenge to the IPC undermined the stability of an implicit "corporatist bargain" between the U.S. State Department and the major American oil companies, and that the breakdown of this relationship was part of a larger crisis of American hegemony in the early 1970s. In so doing, I reveal powerful underlying factors that continue to drive the historical encounter between the U.S. and the Middle East.