Abstract Ryan Cecil Jobson's The Petro-state Masquerade: Oil, Sovereignty, and Power in Trinidad and Tobago (2024) is a groundbreaking combination of careful historical research and in-depth ethnography that produces a timely intervention on the politics of fossil fuels in Trinidad. In this essay, the author engages with Jobson's book to argue for the necessity of (1) historicizing the petro-state as a term that carries imperial baggage, (2) rethinking the opposition between true and false in the conception of the “petro-state masquerade,” (3) considering the United States as a petro-state, even though it is seldom rendered as such, and (4) utilizing the work of Lloyd Best to think politics and power beyond the state form.
J. Brent Crosson (Sun,) studied this question.
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