1869, Ep. 108 with David Wight, author of Oil Money

1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast

Transcript here: https://otter.ai/u/V9_hJ8g_LNN_6GbE3BthCMqRXmU This episode we speak with David Wight, author of Oil Money: Middle East Petrodollars and the Transformation of US Empire, 1967–1988: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501715723/oil-money/ David M. Wight is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. We spoke to David about how the sheer number of Arab and Iranian petrodollars in the 1970s and 80s inspired the interest and even awe of many Americans, the wealth of new information from declassified governmental records and popular Arab and Iranian media that David uncovered in his research, and the radical proposal then White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld made in 1974 for a very unique collaboration between the United States and the oil-exporting countries of the Middle East.