Introduction

This introduction discusses the aim and scope of the volume and presents the single chapters. It points out that the book brings together the works of scholars who situate oil workers and the social, political, economic, spatial, and cultural dimensions of labor relations at the center of their analysis. The contributions are cross-disciplinary, and based on the historical archival investigation, or anthropological and sociological field research. While the role of oil workers and class and labor relations in the global oil industry was a major focus of scholarly attention during much of the twentieth century, the period since the 1980s has witnessed a marked decline of interest in the topic, to the extent that at present the analysis of the vital role of labor in all aspects of the global oil complex is either overlooked, or dismissed as of little significance. The contributors to this volume aim to reopen this important but neglected dimension of the social history of oil, by shedding light on the historical and contemporary experiences of people working in a wide range of jobs to produce oil and its byproducts in a number of major petroleum-producing regions that include Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Europe, the United States, and Africa.