Review of Space, Oil and Capital by Mazen Labban. Routledge Press, 2008. Economic Geography 86(1): 113-114

[Extract] Conventional geopolitical perspectives on oil posit that the world's total oil supplies have been depleted to such an extent that we are past the peak, and confiict and rising prices are to be expected. Political economy perspectives often reject such neo- Malthusian ideas and stress the importance of oil as a strategic commodity for the perpetuation of hegemonic power, in this case by the United States. Mazen Labban's insightful, dense, and short book (roughly 150 pages) applies a Marxian geographic analysis to the subject of oil with a focus on the Soviet Union, Russia, and Iran. In doing so, he provides a fresh perspective on the causes of global price fiuctuations and the geopolitics of access to the world's oil reserves. Labban argues that the scarcity or abundance of oil is a sociospatial relationship...