Energy and Society series (WVUP)

West Virginia University Press is excited to announce the inaugural title in its series Energy and Society – Oil and Nation: A History of Bolivia’s Petroleum Sector, by Stephen C. Cote.

Oil and Nation places petroleum at the center of Bolivia’s contentious twentieth-century history. Bolivia’s oil, Cote argues, instigated the largest war in Latin America in the 1900s, provoked the first nationalization of a major foreign company by a Latin American state, and shaped both the course and the consequences of Bolivia’s transformative National Revolution of 1952. Oil and natural gas continue to steer the country under the government of Evo Morales, who renationalized hydrocarbons in 2006 and has used revenues from the sector to reduce poverty and increase infrastructure development in South America’s poorest country.

Cote's book is the first in the new series Energy and Society, edited by Brian Black. The series is designed to provide a space for the unfettered expansion of the discourse on the human relationship with energy: from the processes of developing fuels to the policies governing them, from the consumers who require energy to the governments that administer and seek it, and from the very way we define the idea of energy to promising frontiers of the future. Feeding off the development of the environmental humanities and the recognition of the Anthropocene epoch in Earth’s history, series books will cross national borders as well as boundaries of our understanding of energy in human life.

Authors and others interested in learning more about the Energy and Society series should visit WVU Press's website: wvupressonline.com/series/energy_and_society