Marta Musso Newnham College mm2015@cam.ac.uk |
Marta Musso completed her BA and MA in History at the University of Turin and is now a PhD candidate in Economic History at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Professor Martin Daunton. She previously worked as an archivist and media producer on several public history and oral history projects.
Marta's working title is "The Politics of Oil and Decolonisation in Algeria, 1956-1971. Towards a European energy policy?" and she aims to investigate the impact of the oil industry on Algeria and on the parallel process of European integration.
After World War II, the boom in oil consumption in industrialised countries – a manifestation of the new global order – coincided with the beginning of the process of decolonisation. Anticolonial movements sought to gain control over their own resources using Western dependence on oil as a weapon; simultaneously, European countries such as Italy and France were seeking control over North African resources to reduce their dependence on Anglo-American and Russian supplies. In particular, the Italian national oil company ENI promoted a pan-European energy project based on Algerian hydrocarbons, with the intention of starting a new form of economic and political integration with the former European colonies.
In a wide perspective, the research aims to contribute to the debate on a range of fundamental and broader issues of the Oil Age, such as the degree to which a country's foreign policy and economic system are influenced by the oil industry; the relations between private oil companies, SOEs and governments; the unresolved frictions between oil consumer and oil producer countries.