An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr George Roberts (Postdoctoral Fellow 2021):
African Oil Crises and the Global Seventies
Abstract:
The oil crises of the 1970s are regularly identified as a turning point in the contemporary history of Africa. The dramatic rise in petroleum prices increased African states’ oil bills, depressed export markets, created consumer goods shortages, and drained foreign exchange reserves. However, the repercussions of the oil crises in Africa have yet to be subject to historical examination. My project addresses this lacuna. It throws light on the responses of African elites at a national, continental, and global level, showing how they engaged with new transnational networks and international institutions to pursue agendas which increasingly revolved around capital transactions rather than anticolonial solidarities. Rather than view the 1970s as a time in which African elites embraced insular nationalisms and became marginalised from the global economy, this project demonstrates how they were deeply embedded in processes of ‘globalisation’.
My work-in-progress talk will first ‘trail’ an online workshop I am co-organising with IASH’s support on ‘Third World Oil Crises’ from 25-27 August. Examples drawn from the diverse range of submissions demonstrate how the oil crisis can serves as a critical juncture for opening up new histories of decolonisation and globalisation as they manifested themselves in local contexts. Then it will explore a number of dynamics which my own project will trace. These include the reconfiguration of ‘African-Arab’ relations in the aftermath of the oil crisis. Framed by participants through the politics of revolutionary solidarity, closer analysis reconsiders this moment of renaissance as instead replete with tensions which were instrumental in the destruction rather than resurrection of the Third World project. Another strand examines the little-known Club de Dakar, a consortium of francophone West African businessmen and powerful European economists, industrialists, and statesmen set up in 1974. This group appropriated the rhetoric of North-South collaboration to promote private business rather than transforming the global economy, in the name of a revived ‘Eurafrique’. Through these examples, the presentation will present African responses to the oil shock as attempts to rework the new global economic landscape amid a time of state failure and narrowing post-colonial horizons.
Please use the link below to join the seminar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/81322391722
Passcode: Vr8f3ew2