Paper Abstract: Throughout the Americas in the first decades of the twentieth-century, sovereign nations struggled to assert control over subsurface petroleum resources and the vast new wealth that they represented. Earlier land laws often left unsettled who owned the oil. Governments seized on these legal ambiguities and on changing political sentiments to assert a national interest and sovereign claim. In the process, they threw into doubt how private oil companies could secure access and profitably develop oil resources. Drawing on oil company correspondence, diplomatic records, and journalistic accounts, this paper investigates the hemispheric struggle over oil rights in the early twentieth century, focusing specifically on United States fears that Mexico’s new revolutionary constitution would spread to Colombia and that Colombian initiatives would, in turn, embolden the Mexican government to expand its reach. Company lobbyists and state resource managers alike used constitutional legal conflict as an essential strategic tool. By looking at the struggle over subsoil rights from a hemispheric perspective, we seek to understand how corporate interests, United States foreign policy, and local political agendas intersected in a battle over the property regimes that regulated oil production before World War II.
Workshop based on a precirculated paper. Please email environmentalhistory@yale.edu for a copy of the paper.
Mariana Díaz Chalela is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history at Yale University. Her research interests include the history of international development, state formation, agrarian reform, and the role of law in shaping historical change. Her dissertation, “Borrowing Out of Poverty: Credit and State Formation in the Making of Rural Colombia (1929-1980),” examines the history of agricultural credit policies in Latin America and their connection to state formation and land politics. Her research has been supported by The MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the Tinker Foundation, the Social Science Research Council and the John Rovensky Fellowship in Business and Economic History. Before coming to Yale, Mariana earned her law degree and an M.A. in History at Universidad de los Andes and worked as a lawyer in Colombia.
Paul Sabin is the Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor of History at Yale University, where he teaches and writes about environmental and energy history. Sabin’s most recent book, “Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism” (2021), examines the evolution and impact of the public interest environmental law movement in the United States since the 1960s. His previous book, “The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over Earth’s Future,” explores contentious debates over population growth and resource scarcity. He also is the author of “Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940,” which shows how politics and law shaped a growing dependence on petroleum in California and the nation. Sabin serves as Faculty Director for Yale Environmental Humanities.
With support from The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund and The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale