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Oil and Politics in Latin America: Nationalist Movements and State Companies . By George Philip. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pp. xxii + 577. $49.50.

One of the worlds major oil-producing regions, Latin America also is an area where governments and oil companies long have been in conflict and where state oil companies have old roots. Despite the tradition of Latin American petroleum nationalism, few scholars did serious work on the economics and politics of oil in the region prior to the 1973 world oil crisis. Since then, major case studies have been published which examine oil policy and petroleum nationalism in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, but until Philip published the work under review, no suitable overview of petroleum affairs in Latin America as a whole existed. What we had was mainly journalistic, often polemical, and in general of little use. Philip's comprehensive, competent, and objective book is thus especially welcome. It consists of three major sections. The first provides an overview of foreign investment, state policy, and oil production in Latin America against the changing international political and economic background from the 1890s to the 1970s. Much of this material is familiar, and this 150 page section is a bit tedious, but it provides an essential introduction for understanding Latin American petroleum affairs. The second section examines the domestic political context of the oil industry in ten Latin American countries. It focuses on the emergence of nationalism and analyzes the birth of the major state oil companies in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Mexico, and Venezuela. These are, on the whole, sound case studies based on the secondary literature as well as on Philip's own research. Particularly valuable are the chapters on Ecuador and Bolivia, cases for which no reliable overviews previously existed. These carefully documented chapters are original and fascinating contributions to the literature. Philip concludes with an excellent section which analyzes the performance of six state oil companies: Pemex, Petrobras, Petropeni, Petroven, YPF (Argentina), and YPFB (Bolivia). The time focus here varies from country to country depending on the circumstances of nationalization: Pemex, YPF, and YPFB were established before World War II while the other three are more recent. But in each case Philip devotes attention to important questions that all these state companies have faced: politics and bureaucracy, price policy and financing, expansion upstream and downstream, relations with foreign contractors and oil companies, labor relations and the unions' impact on policymaking. This section is very useful, for it pulls together much hitherto unavailable information into an analytically rigorous and highly readable account of recent oil affairs. And, as in the second section, the analysis of the smaller countries (in this case Peru and Bolivia) is fresh and original. The analysis in all three sections will interest not only those who are concerned with Latin American petroleum affairs but also students of state corporations in general. The most successful state oil companies — Pemex and Petroven