Oil has played a major role in Venezuela’s economy since the first gusher was discovered along Lake Maracaibo in 1922. As Miguel Tinker Salas demonstrates, oil has also transformed the country’s social, cultural, and political landscapes. In The Enduring Legacy, Tinker Salas traces the history of the oil industry’s rise in Venezuela from the beginning of the twentieth century, paying particular attention to the experiences and perceptions of industry employees, both foreign and Venezuelan. He reveals how class ambitions and corporate interests combined to reshape many Venezuelans’ ideas of citizenship. Middle-class Venezuelans embraced the oil industry from the start, anticipating that it would transform the country by introducing modern technology, sparking economic development, and breaking the landed elites’ stranglehold. Eventually Venezuelan employees of the industry found that their benefits, including relatively high salaries, fueled loyalty to the oil companies. That loyalty sometimes trumped allegiance to the nation-state. North American and British petroleum companies, seeking to maintain their stakes in Venezuela, promoted the idea that their interests were synonymous with national development. They set up oil camps—residential communities to house their workers—that brought Venezuelan employees together with workers from the United States and Britain, and eventually with Chinese, West Indian, and Mexican migrants as well. Through the camps, the companies offered not just housing but also schooling, leisure activities, and acculturation into a structured, corporate way of life. Tinker Salas contends that these practices shaped the heart and soul of generations of Venezuelans whom the industry provided with access to a middle-class lifestyle. His interest in how oil suffused the consciousness of Venezuela is personal: Tinker Salas was born and raised in one of its oil camps.

"Crude Nation tells the story of how ruinous mismanagement has resulted in the economic implosion of Venezuela, the country with the largest oil reserves in the world"--

This book advances the theory that a potential leading export sector—in this case, the oil sector—is capable of inducing economic growth even in peripheral countries where the product line is primary in nature. In Venezuela the oil sector has contributed directly and indirectly to the development of the country's overall economy, particularly from 1936 to 1973, when that sector met the criteria of a leading sector, i.e., one that expands rapidly and obtains a large specific size relative to the economy as a whole. Oil investment in Venezuela contributed to the fiscal sector, the foreign sector, GDP, income, backward and forward linkages, the multiplier and accelerator effects, and the retained value of total expenditures. In spite of recent efforts to diversify the production and export mix, the Venezuelan economy continues to remain heavily dependent on oil production for export. During the midcentury decades of solid growth, it became evident that government oversight was needed to ensure that the numerous contributions flowing from the oil sector would be put to good use. Overall, it appears that the contributions were well utilized by the Venezuelan government, although there was plenty of room for improvement. Income distribution problems and other social inequities continued to beset the development process, leaving the economy rigid and inflexible. Consequently, when the oil sector faltered (1974 to 2000), Venezuela was unable to shift into other product lines. Political disarray soon followed, and with it a pervasive aura of economic uncertainty that persists to this day.

This study provides an analytical history of Venezuela's oil industry, its pioneering efforts in heavy oils and the production of orimulsion fuel. It is also a look into Venezuela's oil history.