1st Edition
Oil Exploration, Diplomacy, and Security in the Early Cold War The Enemy Underground
Introduction
1. The Allied Shadow: International Pressures and the Italian Oil Industry
2. From Iraq to Africa: the Quest for French Energy
3. Oil Diplomacy in Wartime Algeria
4. The Midstream Shift
5. Transnational Counterattack Against Soviet Oil Plans
Conclusion
Bibliography
Biography
Roberto Cantoni is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow within the Security
Studies Chair at CERI, Sciences Po, and an Associate Researcher at
LATTS—IFRIS, France. In 2014 he defended his PhD on oil exploration,
diplomacy and security at the University of Manchester, UK. In the same
year he won the Society for the History of Technology’s Levinson Prize. He
currently works on the politics of epistemic vulnerability in the nuclear age.
"What is "petroleum" if not the quintessential diplomacy device of the last one hundred years? Cantoni shows that its exploration mobilized Western intelligence agents; permits to extract cast the struggle for post-colonial independence of key African states; and piping technologies unnerved NATO officials at the height of the Cold War. Admirably researched, this book takes the reader on an amazing journey through the underworld of surveillance operations and secret negotiations that the global quest for controlling the "black gold" defined; a compelling study for anyone interested in twentieth-century history and its international dimensions."
Simone Turchetti, The University of Manchester, UK
"Robert Cantoni’s study is valuable in reminding historians of the centrality of oil prospecting to broader diplomatic intrigues during the Cold War and of the intimate connection between hydrocarbons, international diplomacy, surveillance, and energy security."
Jeremy Kuzmarov, University of Tulsa, US
