New books offer fresh insight on history of oil, Cold War

Gregory Brew, Henry A. Kissinger Postdoctoral Fellow at International Security Studies and a historian of oil, modern Iran, and U.S. foreign policy, has co-authored two books that will be published in late 2022 and early 2023.

The Struggle for Iran: Oil, Autocracy, and the Cold War, 1951-1954 is the first comprehensive international history of the Iranian oil nationalization crisis and coup d’état of 1953 written with English and Persian sources and newly declassified CIA documents. The product of thirty years of archival research, it illustrates the ways in which Western powers sought to maintain control over Iranian oil, undermining Iranian democratic nationalism and laying the foundation for decades of authoritarian rule. The book is forthcoming in January 2023 from University of North Carolina Press and is available now for pre-order.

Petroleum and Progress in Iran: Oil, Development, and the Cold War is a history of how Iran became the world’s first “petro-state,” where oil provided the bulk of state revenue and supported an industrializing economy, modern middle class, and expanding administrative and military apparatus. Drawing on American and Iranian sources, Petroleum and Progress outlines how the Pahlavi petro-state emerged from a confluence of forces—some global, some local—and reflected the influence of American developmentalists and private oil companies. The book also details the origins of the U.S. Cold War alliance with Pahlavi Iran within the context of the global development movement and the emergence of a global fossil fuel economy. The book is forthcoming in December 2022 from Cambridge University Press.