Mark Seddon

In September 2014 I was awarded a PhD in history by the University of Sheffield after completing a thesis entitled ‘British and US Intervention in the Venezuelan Oil Industry: A Case Study of Anglo-US Relations, 1941-1948’. My PhD research received internal and external funding and the resulting thesis was awarded the 2015 Betty M. Unterberger Dissertation Prize by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. After presenting my findings at its annual meeting, the Transatlantic Studies Association awarded me the 2014 Donald Cameron Watt Prize for the best paper by an early career scholar.

The thesis elucidates the role of state-private sector interaction within foreign relations and the effect of this dynamic on British and US policy towards Venezuela. It argues that multinational oil companies had the capacity to significantly influence events and their relationships with national governments played an important role within international politics. Indeed, in order to defend their interests in Venezuelan oil, Whitehall and Washington developed intimate ties with privately-owned companies operating in the country. This research provides a case study of the tensions within the Anglo-US wartime, and Cold War, alliance that were generated by rivalry over oil and exacerbated by the actions of private oil corporations.