The global interior: mineral frontiers and American power

Megan Black’s The Global Interior reconsiders the United States’ rise to global dominance in the mid-twentieth century by emphasising how US officials ‘brought together Cold War strategy and economic globalization’ (p. 119) to promote US resource interests. Her study analyses the United States’ hunt for oil and strategic minerals – those vital to US civilian and defence industries but in short supply domestically – as a central feature of US economic expansion and geopolitical influence. This perspective is not new, but Black makes the original argument that the US Department of the Interior (DOI), the ‘innermost arm of the American state’ (p. 17), was the agent that ‘spearheaded’ the development of overseas extraction and the commitment of the United States to ‘resources globalism’ (p. 127). The Global Interior posits that US overseas expansion in the mid-twentieth century was less a product of the East Bloc-West Bloc conflict than a continuation of earlier continental expansion and settler colonialism, which, as historians have long established, was also shaped by Interior. The overarching thesis is that Interior used cooperation rather than coercion – mainly through apolitical forms of technical assistance and resource surveys – to incorporate the oil and mineral frontiers of the world into a US hinterland. Interior’s foreign activities thus ‘wrested domestic meaning from foreign space’ (p. 5) and perpetuated the myth that the United States was not an imperial nation. As the winner of several book awards, The Global Interior is likely to influence a generation of historians who study US Cold War strategy and US multinational trade and investment. The research and analysis that inform its claims about the DOI’s global ambitions thus warrant close examination. Black writes,