Oil and Nation: A History of Bolivia's Petroleum Sector (Energy and Society)

Oil and Nation places petroleum at the center of Bolivias contentious twentieth-century history. Bolivias oil Cote argues instigated the largest war in Latin America in the 1900s provoked the first nationalization of a major foreign company by a Latin American state and shaped both the course and the consequences of Bolivias transformative National Revolution of 1952. Oil and natural gas continue to steer the country under the government of Evo Morales who renationalized hydrocarbons in 2006 and has used revenues from the sector to reduce poverty and increase infrastructure development in South Americas poorest country.. The book advances chronologically from Bolivias earliest petroleum pioneers in the nineteenth century until the present inserting oil into historical debates about Bolivian ethnic racial and environmental issues and within development strategies by different administrations. While Bolivia is best known for its tin mining Oil and Nation makes the case that nationalist reformers viewed hydrocarbons and the state oil company as a way to modernize the country away from the tin monoculture and its powerful backers and toward an oil-powered future.