New book charts oil's rise as cornerstone of modern capitalism
A political economist's new book traces how oil became central to capitalist economies and global power through vertical integration and endless accumulation.
Adam Hanieh's newly published book Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market offers a sweeping account of how oil became woven into the fabric of capitalism since the 1800s — framing the commodity not as an independent force, but as a product of capitalism's own structural logic.
The work arrives at a moment when oil's grip on the global economy remains visceral. In the first half of 2026, the world economy's vulnerability to oil prices became apparent following the US and Israel conflict with Iran, a reminder of how this single commodity retains the power to destabilize entire economies.
A different lens
Hanieh, a political economist, said his central motivation was dissatisfaction with how oil's history is typically told. Much conventional narrative treats oil as possessing some kind of innate power, separate from capitalism itself. His book takes a different approach.
"I try to foreground what these are. Things like the drive towards endless accumulation, the incessant speeding up of production and consumption, mechanisation and so forth."
Rather than a straightforward history of oil, the book positions itself as a history of capitalism seen through oil — examining how capitalist imperatives shaped the commodity's central role in modern economies.
The author also deliberately broadened the geographical scope beyond the dominant US-centric narrative. While the United States is "obviously crucial to the story," according to Hanieh, the world's oil-centred system emerged through wider global relations: colonial extraction, Soviet industrial development, post-Soviet Russia's transformations, and the more recent rise of China and East Asia as major nodes in energy demand, refining, and petrochemical production.
Beyond the pump
A distinctive angle of the book is tracing what happens to oil after it leaves the ground. Rather than focusing narrowly on liquid transport fuel, Hanieh examines the petrochemical industry — plastics, fertilisers, synthetic fibres — and oil's critical role in contemporary financial systems.
Standard Oil (1870–1911), the Rockefeller-controlled company, receives significant attention as a foundational moment. The book credits John D. Rockefeller with a key strategic insight: the power that flows from controlling the entire value chain through which oil moves. Standard Oil integrated refining, transport, storage, pipelines, marketing, and finance into a single corporate structure, using command over railroads and pipelines to squeeze rivals, lower costs, and reshape markets.
According to the reporting, much of the subsequent history of the oil industry has revolved around this basic lesson — that corporate power derives from vertical integration and mastery over the infrastructures through which oil circulates. These corporate structures were tightly bound to the broader architecture of American capitalism itself, including tax systems, corporate law, banking, and capital markets.
In tracing these connections, Hanieh argues that oil's centrality to modern economies is not accidental or inevitable, but rather a product of capitalism's own demands for accumulation and expansion.