Black Gold: Britain and Oil in the Twentieth Century. By Charles More.

Abstract

Charles More’s Black Gold is a timely study of an important topic: Britain’s twentieth-century relationship with the oil industry. It tells a story that will become even more important for contemporary British historians when Alex Kemp’s much-postponed Official History of the North Sea Oil and Gas Industry is published (on latest estimate) in mid-2011. With that available and with the Lives in the [North Sea] Oil Industry oral life-story archive (in which as director of the project I declare an interest) accessible at Aberdeen University and the British Library, the stage will be set for critical discourse about the role of the offshore industry in shaping the trajectory of the UK’s recent socio-economic past. In the first generation of writing on the UK since the 1970s that trajectory is usually portrayed as almost predetermined, having required only, for it to be set on course, that the hour produceth the woman. But a striking feature of much of this literature is that the ‘accident’ of North Sea oil scarcely features as more than a footnote, when the extent to which it was an essential factor of the evolution of Thatcherism needs to become a central question.