HISTORY OF ENERGY AND POLITICS
Full electronic syllabus
2014ja:NYU/Abu Dhabi

Here is the Auxiliary Resource Webpage, "Energy and Politics"
Here is the webpage devoted to recent News about Energy and Politics
Here is the table devoted to "Key Concepts" related to our topic

  Syllabus Table of Contexts
*--Course Description
*--Academic Calendar
*--Bibliography
*----Individual student purchases
*----Course Library (books reserved in classroom)
*----Main bibliography on topic [Course Resource Page]
*--Learning Outcomes and Methodologies
*--Grading


This bold ad is identified with transcribed TXT on the Auxliary Resource Webpage

Course Description, Academic Calendar, and Definitions

This calendar often includes reference to "our readings". Here is a definition of that phrase

 

January 5 (SU): Set objectives and define features of the course

Pillars and posts that underpin our 10-week topical time bridge

Definition of topic = Long-term and “global” history of energy and politics from the earliest industrial age to our own time

Definition of industrial age = Most recent four centuries, ca. 1600 to the present. The colloquium takes the long view, but it will devote 80% or more of its time and attention to the latest 150 years, an epoch that can be called the petroleum era

Definition of energy = Resources, methods and devices for producing heat, light, compression and movement (“work”) at “industrial levels”

Definition of politics = The colloquium will be an exercise in what can be called “focused world history”. Here the focus is on one major global issue = industrial energy and politics. Politics present themselves in two identifiable guises =

  1. Domestic politics = Exercise of nation-state executive, legislative and judicial authority, plus the actions of various social forces, economic enterprises, companies or corporations
  2. International politics = Projection outward of nation-state and transnational corporate power via example, diplomacy, economic incentive, and/or raw force. "Transnational" becomes a familiar adjective under this second point [ID]

Major historical trends that feed into creation of the 21st-century world

  1. Nation-state "sovereignty" [four "bulleted" paragraphs in SAC]
  2. “Imperialism” [SAC Narrative Extension]
  3. “Industrial Revolutions” [SAC Narrative Extension]
  4. “Civil society” [SAC Narrative Extension]
  5. The third phase of "European Revolutions" [SAC Narrative Extension]

We will create three working groups, and we will define Group Projects for each group =

We will define a certain portion of Recent website news articles about energy and politics
to be consulted within each working group =

Before next class =

January 6 (MO): Class discussion of readings above

January 7 (TU): Discuss our readings and share our discoveries of how they relate to our growing sense of "Key Concepts"

January 8 (WE): Industrial revolution and coal: Discuss readings above

January 9 (TH): From Coal to Oil: the Origins of Shell, the Nobels, and the Discovery of Oil in Russia

January 10 (FR): No class
January 11 (SA): No class
January 12 (SU): No Class

January 13 (MO):The Discovery of Oil in the USA (Standard Oil Co.) and WW1

January 14 (TU):The Paris Peace Conference, The Fate of the Ottoman Empire and the Quest for Oil in the Mideast: The Red Line Agreement

Before the next class: 
How do our several sources treat Enrico Mattei

January 15 (WE):Trip to Saudi Arabia
January 16 (TH):Trip to Saudi Arabia
January 17 (FR): No class
January 18 (SA): No class

January 19 (SU):World War II [WW2]: Germany, Japan and Italy (Enrico Mattei and "The Seven Sisters")

January 20 (MO): The Cold War, Iran, and Suez

January 21 (TU): Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC]

January 22 (WE):The Political Power of Big Oil

January 23 (TH): Energy and Politics, Present and Future

Readings (Course bibliography)
[throughout syllabus, points 1-4 below are often identified as "our readings"]

  1. Extended course-specific internet electronic syllabus
  2. Website texts accessed via hypertext links from the electronic syllabus [F/TXT/ on this very webpage for examples]
  3. Student's personal textbook, Yergin.Prize [ID] and journal [ID] to be purchased
  4. Library in Abu Dhabi classroom holding 30 or so of the most important English-language publications, available 24/7 for consultation. Each student will specialize on one of these library titles. Indexes and tables of content will serve as reference aids for discussions and draft essays, and for broadening our understanding of the "Key Concepts" we will be generating and refining from the earliest moments of our course [ID]
  5. The syllabus refers frequently to "our readings". The expression "our readings" stands for the textbook Yergin.Prize, your assigned library book, other titles on our rolling library cart [ID], and other of our readings for that day, some of them electronic [code = E-TXT]

    We will assign key titles from the classroom library to each student, one book per student. The purpose is to put one important book beyond the textbook in the hands of each student. Here is the Library Book Project associated with the assigned book = When the syllabus calls for consultation of the indexes of "our readings", each student will begin that process with their assigned book, and they will be prepared to share what they find (or do not find) at the next class meeting

The following coded list provides hypertext hops to an auxiliary "Resource Page"