Historians have long considered the 1970s to be a “pivotal decade” that transformed the world. The oil shocks exposed the fragilities of cheap energy imports, which had fueled Euro-American economic expansion in preceding decades. As the postwar Bretton Woods system of the dollar’s convertibility to gold became a thing of the past, the global economy convulsed. Within the United States, the economic pinch felt because of the Vietnam War and its social effects led to a fragmented political landscape characterized by mistrust of and exhaustion with the “global.” Against this backdrop, the new political right that rose opposed big government, framing citizenship and belonging through ideology. In decolonized parts of the world, the 1970s saw increased hopelessness. As an anti-imperial project, political decolonization foundered while economic decolonization remained unattainable. Calls for a New International Economic Order at the United Nations by countries from the Global South met with acute animosity from former colonial powers, whose companies were often preoccupied with maintaining colonial control of natural resources in postcolonial times. By the end of the decade, the world had metamorphosed into a battleground characterized by increased economic inequality and a proliferation in hot wars of the Cold War.

The political, social, economic, and geopolitical transmogrification of the globe in the 1970s cannot be understood without underscoring the role of energy—— its real and perceived scarcity, its connections to identity and ideology, its spillovers across various forms of natural resources, its infrastructures, their social lives, and violent struggles to control its supply. In this panel, we explore these themes through an examination of interconnected energy histories viewed from different vantage points from the North Sea to Nigeria, from nuclear to coal, oil, and gas. Ewan Gibbs sheds light on Britain’s narrative of energy self-sufficiency in the 1970s through a discussion of fears of oil scarcity of the 1960s. He shows how this encouraged policymakers to base Britain’s energy future around coal and nuclear while treating gas and oil as precious commodities. Trish Kahle shows how energy crisis in the United States was really a crisis of “energy citizenship,” as the rights and obligations of belonging in an energy intensive society came under new scrutiny, particularly for Appalachian coal miners who felt the obligations of energy citizenship much more acutely than most Americans. Gaetano Di Tommaso foregrounds inequalities created and expanded by the oil shocks in the Gulf of Mexico, drawing particular attention through the notion of petro-racial capitalism in Louisiana. . Jayita Sarkar de-exceptionalizes the nuclear by foregrounding the vulnerabilities of the US nuclear industry in the face of oil money, reduced government subsidies, increased government oversight, and overwhelming civil society mistrust. She challenges the significance of the Three Mile Island accident, which is often blamed for overturning hopes of a nuclear industry revival, painting a more complex picture of global capitalism. Eminent historian of energy, Giuliano Garavini, author of The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century, serves as chair and commentator for the papers.