Counter-shock: The Oil Counter-Revolution of the 1980s

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The oil price collapse of 1985-6 had momentous global consequences: non-fossil energy sources quickly became uncompetitive, the previous talk of an OPEC 'imperium' was turned upside-down, the Soviet Union lost a large portion of its external revenues, and many Third World producers saw their foreign debts peak. Compared to the much-debated 1973 `oil shock', the `countershock' has not received the same degree of attention, even though its legacy has shaped the present-day energy scenario. This volume is the first to put the oil `counter-shock' of the mid-1980s into historical perspective. Featuring some of the most knowledgeable experts in the field, Counter-Shock offers a balanced approach between the global picture and local study cases. In particular, it highlights the crucial interaction between the oil counter-shock and the political `counterrevolution' against state intervention in economic management, put forward by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the same period.

Reviews

The wide variety of perspectives adopted makes this volume complex and opens up important areas of future research ... A work that straddles economic history, political history and more specifically international relations, which illuminates in particular a significant historical junction to which contemporary history has not paid sufficient attention. * Biblioteca (Bloomsbury translation) *
An important book, thoroughly crafted/planned by its editors [and] co-written by 20 contributors, mostly foreign and Italian academics. * Alberto Cl, Energia (Bloomsbury translation) *

Author Bio

Duccio Basosi is Assistant Professor of History of International Relations at the Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He has worked extensively on the international political economy of the 1970s and 1980s. Between 2011 and 2016 he has coordinated the research project The Engines of Growth: A Global History of the Conflict between Renewables, Fossil and Fissile Energies 1972-1992, funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. Giuliano Garavini is Senior Braudel Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Humanities at NYU Abu Dhabi. He headed the Padua unit of the project `The engines of growth: for a global history of the conflict between renewable, fossil, and fissile energies, 1972-1992', funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. He is the author of After Empires. European Integration, Decolonization and the Challenge from the Global South, 1957-1986 and co-editor of Oil Shock. The 1973 Crisis and its Economic Legacy. Massimiliano Trentin is Assistant Professor of History and International relations of the Middle East at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna. He works on the International History of the Middle East and North Africa, with a special focus on the interplay between diplomacy, economics and development. He is the author of Engineers of Modern Development: East German Experts in Ba'thist Syria, 1965-1972, and editor of The Middle East and the Cold War: Between Security and Development. He is the Principal Investigator of the PRIN National Research Grant from the Italian Ministry of Scientific Research for the project The Making of the Washington Consensus: International Assets, Debts and Power 1979-1991.