Oil Futures: Petrochemical Services and the Culture of U.S. Global Power after 1973

In 1973, global oil prices skyrocketed and stagflation beset the United States.  Long lines at the pumps forced many Americans to do without petroleum, while rising unemployment and high prices left consumers hopeless.  In historical scholarship, 1973 marks the beginning of American decline domestically and internationally, the hopes of the postwar era foreclosed.

Yet the 1973 oil crisis did not universally spell disaster in the United States.  In Houston, Texas, for instance, the city experienced a boom during the oil shocks.  In particular, the city’s robust oilfield services industry, which provided oil tools, construction management, and consulting services for oilfields across the globe, witnessed tremendous growth.  As oil production and refining increasingly took place abroad, Houston-based companies such as Brown & Root, Schlumberger, and Hughes Tool retained a powerful position in the industry without controlling extraction and refining.  For the white-collar workforce these companies employed in Texas and around the world, the rise of OPEC and the reduced extraction and refining occurring on US soil were not liabilities but opportunities.

This paper traces the evolution of the oilfield services industry during the 1960s and 1970s and its success in promoting a new vision of US global power in the wake of the oil shocks. As an earlier vision of American empire faded, one which highlighted American production and the power of American market leadership as the keys to global prosperity, a new vision of US global power positioned the US not as a center of manufacturing and production but as a white-collar headquarters offering expertise in logistics, engineering, and management to the world.  Whereas most work on this period emphasizes the decline of a triumphant US market empire after 1973, this paper emphasizes the shifts in US global power and the new domestic politics that accompanied them.