British Imperialism and the Unlikely Political Rise of Oil-Rich Micro-Kingdoms in the Late Twentieth Century

This essay reviews Naosuke Mukoyama's insightful book, Fueling Sovereignty: Colonial Oil and the Creation of Unlikely States (Cambridge University Press, 2024), which develops and tests a novel and compelling theoretical argument that explains how British imperialism and colonial oil extraction shaped the unlikely political rise and separate independence of oil-rich micro-kingdoms like Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Brunei Darussalam. After evaluating the significant theoretical insights and rich empirical contributions of Mukoyama's outstanding work, this essay outlines how the insights and empirical evidence from this book might inform and motivate future research on the developmental legacies of colonialism, the economic and political consequences of natural resource extraction, and theories of state formation and political regime transformations in the global periphery.