Annual Gillian White Lecture 2023
| Dates: | 13 March 2023 |
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| Times: | 17:00 - 19:00 |
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| What is it: | Lecture |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | Adults, Alumni, General public |
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| Speaker: | Laleh Khalili |
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Crude Knowledge: Decolonisation and Hydrocarbon Epistemes
Decolonisation in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s included demands for sovereign control over and new ways of
accounting for, pricing, taxing, distributing, and regulating the global South’s natural resources.
Oil was pivotal, and exemplary, in this regard. In 1957, 63.9% of the world’s oil was “owned” by US
companies and 14.5% by BP or Shell. By the 1980s, “ownership” had largely passed on to the state-owned
hydrocarbon companies, a process that historian Christopher Dietrich has called “the most concentrated
nonviolent transfer of global wealth in human history.”
How did this massive political economic transformation shape knowledge production about hydrocarbons in
the Arab and Anglophone worlds? And how did the content and form of writing and knowledge about oil and
gas map global inequalities that persist even after the ostensible “control” of oil has passed on to the
producer states?
Laleh Khalili is a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London and the author of
Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007); Time in the
Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford 2013); and Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and
Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020). She is currently working on a project on the
entanglements of oil in every aspect of modern life.
The event will be followed by a drinks reception in the Classics Foyer, Samuel Alexander Building
Speaker
Laleh Khalili
Role: Professor of International Politics
Organisation: Queen Mary University of London
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
Samuel Alexander Theatre
Samuel Alexander Building
Manchester
