The new edited volume Oil Spaces: Exploring the Global Petroleumscape is a significant contribution to the growing field of historical scholarship focused on the relationships among the world’s primary energy sources (biomass, coal, oil, and gas), commodity flows, and cultural production. The book takes a broad view of petroleum’s “diverse spatial emanations” (7)—defined as spaces of exploration, extraction, distribution, transportation, consumption, and mediation—in describing the physical and social geographies that have accumulated over the past 150 years and that have reinforced our current petroleum path dependency. Drawing on studies conducted by philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre and urban researchers Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, among others, editor Carola Hein and the contributing authors present the petroleumscape as an analytical model for exploring the circular production of oil-related spaces and their representations around the planet.1 This collection of fifteen essays follows upon a 2017 conference of the same name; marking the culmination of a decade of scholarship, it offers a well-edited, richly illustrated introduction to the work in this emerging subfield.2The book is structured into three thematic parts: part I explores case studies of oil’s territoriality; part II, its materiality; and part III, its environmental imaginary. Hein and Alan Lessoff’s description of the petroleumscape in the United States, from the industrialization of oil in the 1850s to the growth of the petrochemical industry in the 1950s, introduces and anchors part I. The chapter provides a layered history of fossil fuel–based path dependencies reinforced by the behavior of corporate actors in spaces and markets ranging from Philadelphia to Houston. The remaining chapters in part I build on this foundation while also effectively challenging the petroleumscape concept. Ben de Vries’s history of military conflict in the Sumatran oil fields shows how the need to manage the destruction and reconstruction of refineries led to the disintegration of colonial and corporate interests. Stephen J. Ramos analyzes the territorial production of British mapping practices in the Persian Gulf from the early nineteenth century to the 1950s to raise questions about the causality of oil discovery and the implausibility of “a definitive before and after oil” (78). Nancy Couling extends such analysis to the Norwegian North Sea and the persistence of an extractive logic in the contemporary narratives of offshore renewables.Part II questions the cultural dimension of oil’s materiality. Nelida Fuccaro describes the solidification of oil’s circulatory patterns in Arab oil towns and offers histories that are both “spatial, political, social, and discursive formations of foreign capitalism and imperialism” and “harbingers of indigenous modernities” (142). Laura Hindelang’s contribution stands out as the only chapter to take up Arjun Appadurai’s model of global flows (or “scapes”) through a comparison of water and oil infrastructures in Kuwait, where the commodification of water laid the groundwork for that of oil. Part III repositions the petroleumscape concept to imagine energy transitions and post-oil futures. Imre Szeman, who has become a kind of ambassador for the emerging field of the “energy humanities,” and coauthor Caleb Wellum offer a buoyant framework (and an important literature review) for the range of historical and theoretical claims that energy-oriented humanities scholars might make. In the best illustrated of all the chapters, Pieter Uyttenhove widens the book’s theoretical framework to argue for affluence and decadence as two consequential sides of the same carbon-based coin in the city of Antwerp.The book also contains valuable contributions not entirely bound by its partitioning. “‘Production First, Livelihood Second’: The Life and Death of Worker-Peasant Model Villages in a Chinese Oil Field,” by Hou Li, and “Power Stations and Petroleum Heritage in Italy: The Case of Porto Tolle,” by Chiara Geroldi and Gloria Pessina, stand out for their compelling explanations of the connections between territorial productions and typical practices. Hou’s chapter is a fast-paced summary of her previously published research on the housing and settlement patterns in the Daqing Oil Field, while Geroldi and Pessina’s contribution draws upon new research conducted as part of an industrial heritage consultancy on ten decommissioned thermoelectric power stations in Italy. Both essays approach their subjects with real purpose and care. Similar attention to the everyday beauty of territorial and typical connections emerges in Fuccaro’s discussion of canteens and is hinted at in Couling’s mention of offshore interiors.Oil Spaces aims to define a concept of the petroleumscape that will “overcome the segmented, monodisciplinary, and localized approach to the spaces of petroleum” (10), but this broad ambition is not always tempered by a recognition of its limitations. It is unfortunate because it is at the historical and material margins of the above-mentioned petroleumscapes that we find the most revealing and enriching descriptions and interpretations, such as when the concept is deployed to address the traces of energy transitions beyond oil, or when it locates material differences instead of hegemonies. One wonders what revelations would have emerged if the volume’s case studies had been expanded beyond the predominantly secular examples presented.The petroleumscape concept also suffers from what energy historian Christopher Jones calls “petromyopia,” the over representation of oil in energy-oriented humanities scholarship, which then distorts a more complete and accurate understanding of energy systems.3 This myopia sustains the tenor of urgency throughout the volume, but especially in the more operative and speculative moments of part III. This is not to discount the very real crisis of fossil fuel dependency and anthropogenic climate change or its import to architectural history and historiography, but rather to acknowledge that the complex issue of energy production and consumption has rarely ever been only a matter of overcoming oil.4 In their contributions, for example, Ramos and Couling express skepticism regarding post-oil futurisms that challenge the petroleumscape concept in concrete and meaningful ways. The book is richer when it reflects the fugitive and dynamic character of the contemporary discourse on energy in the humanities, and it is less convincing when arguing for the validity of the titular concept.These comments notwithstanding, Oil Spaces gathers in print the most diverse and focused collection of oil-related architectural histories available to date and provides an essential point of departure for students and scholars interested in the subfield of the energy-oriented humanities. In the book’s preface, Hein implores readers to “drop your oil” (at the door) and to imagine recounting your personal and practical debt to petroleum and its refined products (vii). Such provocation echoes Edward Said’s famous quotation of Antonio Gramsci: “The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.”5Oil Spaces models diverse approaches that collectively reveal the traces of oil’s inventory in architectural history and, by extension, our own histories in relation to oil.