This chapter examines how oil wealth has fueled authoritarian resilience – dictatorship without significant outbreaks of civil war – in oil producers (petrostates) exposed to Muslim conquest. While the chapter’s analysis corroborates existing research that oil rents can hurt democracy, it makes four original contributions relevant for understanding why oil wealth has engendered authoritarian resilience in conquest petrostates. First, it identifies a tension in existing scholarship: the negative relationship between oil wealth and democracy but positive relationship between oil wealth and civil war, particularly in dictatorships. Second, this clarification is important in understanding why greater oil wealth in conquest petrostates has hurt democracy but has not fostered civil war. Third, the chapter introduces a new type of rent that is intricately tied to oil production in many conquest petrostates. The chapter argues that an implied security guarantee from the United States government has comprised an additional geopolitical rent which has augmented the military capacity of conquest petrostates to thwart insurgency. Finally, the chapter that oil wealth has not hindered a trajectory towards greater democracy in non-conquest petrostates.

In Sudan the era of the oil boom resulted in a flood in labor remittances that circumvented official financial institutions, thereby undercutting the state’s fiscal and regulatory capacity and fueling the expansion of the informal foreign currency trade. Initially, developments in Sudan paralleled those in Egypt as the boom witnessed the rise of an Islamist-commercial class that formed as a result of its successful monopolization of informal financial markets. However, in contrast to Egypt, by 1989 Sudanese Islamists were able to take over the levers of the state via a military-coup. This development was made possible by Sudan’s weaker state capacity and the extreme weakness of its formal banking system. As a result, the financial power of the Muslim Brotherhood continued to increase in relationship to the state as they continued to profit from participation in the lucrative speculation in black market transactions and advantageous access to import licenses.

This chapter opens by stating the main research question, namely whether power sharing reduces civil conflict or not. After briefly illustrating successful and unsuccessful cases of power sharing, we introduce our approach, which builds on a stream of work in conflict research stressing how exclusion of ethnic groups increased the risk of civil conflict. If this relationship is correct, one would expect the reverse to be true as well. That inclusion of ethnic groups through both territorial and governmental power sharing brings peace is indeed our working hypothesis. Still, there are good reasons to expect that this relationship may be more complicated. There are four main challenges that need to be addressed. First, it is essential not to lose sight of how power sharing is channeled through practices rather than merely being expressions of formal institutions. Second, analysts need to consider full samples rather than focusing only on cases that experienced conflict. Third, rather than being exogenously imposed, power sharing is usually enacted with an eye to future outcomes and is therefore profoundly endogenous to conflict. Finally, it is insufficient to analyze territorial power sharing without considering how pacific outcomes may hinge on whether this type of power sharing is being combined with governmental power sharing at the center. In fact, a failure to come to grips with these difficulties go a long way toward explaining why some researchers find no conflict-reducing effect, and sometimes even a conflict-increasing impact.

In Sudan the era of the oil boom resulted in a flood in labor remittances that circumvented official financial institutions, thereby undercutting the state’s fiscal and regulatory capacity and fueling the expansion of the informal foreign currency trade. Initially, developments in Sudan paralleled those in Egypt as the boom witnessed the rise of an Islamist-commercial class that formed as a result of its successful monopolization of informal financial markets. However, in contrast to Egypt, by 1989 Sudanese Islamists were able to take over the levers of the state via a military-coup. This development was made possible by Sudan’s weaker state capacity and the extreme weakness of its formal banking system. As a result, the financial power of the Muslim Brotherhood continued to increase in relationship to the state as they continued to profit from participation in the lucrative speculation in black market transactions and advantageous access to import licenses.

This chapter considers the impact of The Wars of the Roses on late fifteenth-century historiography. It outlines the ways in which English historical writing had begun to change in the years preceding the civil unrest and examines how the dynastic conflict exacerbated those changes, triggering new developments in how historiographers approached the task of writing history in flux. Surveying a range of texts from lesser known works, such as the chronicles of John Vale and John Herryson, to more influential accounts, like the chronicles of John Hardyng, the Chronicle of the Lincolnshire Rebellion, and the Second Continuation of the Crowland Chronicle, the chapter charts the impact of sustained political instability on late medieval historiography. It features authors’ flair for rewriting the past for rival bloodlines, their increased reliance on genealogies, newsletters and official documents, and the emergence of the first governmentally sanctioned histories.