Oil, Money and Decolonization in South Asia

Abstract

Why did oil become a privileged object for debating economic sovereignty during the Cold War? Recent scholarship has attempted to answer this question by drawing attention to decolonizing struggles for oil nationalization across Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. At the core of these inquiries is the presumption that a global proliferation of oil production after 1945 — now referred to as ‘the great acceleration’ — reflected a growth in global demand for fossil fuels, and that oil’s economic significance thus motivated new political claims over national oil reserves. This article takes a different position by turning to one of the earliest projects to build a post-colonial national oil programme, India’s Oil and Natural Gas Commission, under the socialist politician K. D. Malaviya. Using Malaviya’s project to trace the international politicization of oil in the 1950s and 1960s, it demonstrates how sovereignty over oil was used to contest the structures of unequal currency valuation and foreign debt enforced by the Bretton Woods institutions and the Western bloc. Rather than a source of fuel, Indian politicians understood the struggle over oil as a struggle about money, and the power of global financial interdependence in demarcating the political horizons of post-colonial sovereignty.