Despite our attempts to achieve decarbonisation, fossil fuels are still at the centre of the world economy. Most of us still drive cars that run on gasoline, use electricity produced by burning coal, and use plastic for packaging – all of which involve the three major types of fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. So here are two questions: what impact have these fossil fuels had on the making of the world map of sovereign states? And, how have they operated differently from each other?
These questions are not as random as they may sound. The quest for natural resources drove colonial expansion, and the majority of states that exist today were born out of colonial rule and decolonisation. For example, sixteenth-century Spanish colonisers expanded rapidly into different parts of the Americas searching for gold and silver, and to maximise exploitation, they completely destroyed local polities and integrated what was left of them into their colonial system. The British Navy shifted its power source from coal to oil on the eve of World War I, which prompted them to take control of various oil fields in the Middle East and created a motivate for integrating some crucial areas in the region into the sphere of influence of the British Empire as mandates after the war. Consider this: what if Spanish America had no silver? What if the Middle East had no oil? And what would today’s world map look like then?
In my recently published book entitled Fueling Sovereignty: Colonial Oil and the Creation of Unlikely States, I show that oil played a critical role in the creation of states that would otherwise not have existed. In the first few decades after World War II, European colonial powers attempted to merge small colonial entities into federations to avoid a scenario in which dozens of fragile states would destabilise the international society. Many such colonial entities had no choice but to join a federation in the face of pressure from the colonisers or regional powers. Some, however, managed to reject such a merger project and achieved independence separately. Through comparative historical case studies based on archival materials on colonial entities on the island of Borneo and in the Persian Gulf, I demonstrate that this was because of precolonial oil production and what I call the ‘protectorate system,’ a type of colonial administration where the colonisers protected local rulers with internal sovereignty from internal and external threats. If you have oil, you do not want to share your wealth with your neighbours, and because you have oil, you get more protection from Western powers and more negotiation power in reshaping the process of decolonisation to your own benefit. In short, oil can lead colonial entities to become independent separately from the territorial frameworks they were pressured to become part of.
Oil and Decolonisation
The main discussion in my book is about oil, but oil is by no means the only important natural resource in the world. This begs the question: how are other natural resources different from oil in reshaping the character of the international order in? When you compare the impact of natural resources on international political outcomes, you need to pay particular attention to two factors: the commercial value and the timing of discovery relative to colonisation and decolonisation. Natural resources need to be regarded as highly valuable in order to affect decolonisation outcomes.
Compared with colonial oil, for example, colonial coal was much less valuable in the eyes of the metropole. To be sure, it is true that coal greatly affected imperial projects. Ever since the H.M.S. Devastation, the first British Royal Navy ship powered solely by steam, was launched in 1871, coal had been essential for European colonial powers in expanding into non-European lands. However, this was mostly domestic coal, not colonial coal. Major European industrial powers could produce coal in their own territory or import it from neighbouring countries; Britain, for instance, shipped Welsh coal to every corner of its empire. Producing coal in colonies, therefore, did not make much sense. In contrast to oil, coal was a low-value resource that the metropole was able to produce domestically; therefore, it did not produce enough wealth in colonies to affect the territorial configuration of formerly colonised states.
Natural gas, on the other hand, is as highly valuable as oil. In fact, it is usually considered to be the same as oil in political analyses; scholars tend to discuss the impact of ‘oil and gas’ together rather than treating them separately. When it comes to historical impact, however, natural gas is markedly different from oil simply because it is about a century newer than oil. Oil had been known to humankind since ancient times, but it began to be commercially produced after 1859, when Edwin Drake succeeded in pumping it from underground in Titusville, Pennsylvania. It became particularly valuable in the early twentieth century with the development of internal combustion engines.
Natural gas, however, became commercially valuable and tradable on a global scale only in the latter half of the twentieth century after the introduction of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Previously, it was considered a useless by-product of oil and was consumed locally at best. The first commercial trade of LNG occurred in 1964. By then, most colonies had already become independent or were expecting decolonisation very soon, so the debut of natural gas on the global stage was too late to affect the course of decolonisation.
What it did, instead, was to trigger movements to achieve secession from an existing sovereign state. In the post-1945 period, there has been a norm against secession. This is what scholars call the ‘territorial integrity norm’ or the ‘border fixity norm,’ which basically means that once there is a sovereign state, its territorial scope never changes. As a result, breaking away from a state has been extremely difficult, except for cases of decolonisation or the dissolution of countries in the Eastern bloc after the Cold War.
This, however, does not mean that everyone is happy with the existing state they reside in. On the contrary, there have been many dissatisfied peoples who pursue the struggle for secession. Natural gas exacerbates their grievances, for it creates the perception that the existing central state is depriving the locals in the producing region of the wealth they deserve. As a result, there have been many secessionist movements in gas-producing regions in the world, including Aceh in Indonesia and Kurdistan in Iraq. When it comes to state-making through decolonisation, however, natural gas was a little too late to party, failing to impact the territorial configuration of states.
If being late to the party of sovereignty prevented natural gas from affecting state formation, what was the consequence of arriving ‘too early’?
Arriving Too Early to the Party
We can now turn our attention to precious metals such as gold and silver. In terms of their value, they are directly comparable with oil. Although they have been recognised as valuable since ancient times, Europe never produced much of them in its history. Therefore, when the Spanish started their expedition to the ‘New World,’ they were partly motivated by a greed for gold. In fact, Columbus mentioned gold in his diary at least sixty-five times between October 12, 1492, and January 17, 1493. From the beginning of European colonialism, gold and silver were in the colonisers’ minds.
The result of this recognition of the crucial value of these ‘early’-types of natural resources during the process of colonisation was the decision to destroy existing local polities and integrate the leftover polities into a larger entity for the colonial administrative merit of scale. If the colonisers found gold in a ‘new’ land, they did not bother to share their revenue with locals. Rather, they would create a system that maximised exploitation. In the cases of separate independence, oil was found after the establishment of the colonial administration systems, which proved resistant to fundamental change. But in the case of precious metals in the Americas, they were found when the colonisers were designing that very same system. The search for precious metals facilitated further expansion into other parts of the continent, leading to the enlargement of colonies and the destruction of the local political order. In contrast to oil, which promoted separation, gold and silver during the period of colonisation promoted integration.
When you approach decolonisation, when to arrive there and what you bring with you are crucial in determining your future. If a colony wished to achieve independence, it needed to find valuable resources in the period between colonisation and decolonisation and be lucky enough to have the protectorate system in place. Otherwise, it would easily get subsumed into a larger entity.
Fueling Sovereignty revisits the origins of this process of state formation by examining, both comparatively and historically, how natural resources and colonial rule have interacted, reshaping the very international system we live in today.
