For those who have been following the "American Thermidor" series on
http://www.bopnews.com - one of the people who has been writing about the effect of oil on economics for some time is Prof Cyrus Bina - author of several articles on the effect of oil on globalism.
Prof Bina will be one of the guests on http://news.mpr.org/programs/midmorning/ NPR's Mid-Morning, Starting at 9am Central, and hosted by Chris Lydon - better known around here for http://www.bopnews.com and his interviews with Joe Trippi.
If you want to understand why growth and peace are so elusive in our oilnomic and oilarchic world - this is one of the peopel to listen to. I'll try to call in...
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/ope-l/2003m04/msg00035.htm Shows how Prof. Bina's thinking - this in very academic form - draws from the ideas of political economy.
Here "Hegemony" means a centralized economic system based on a system of capital. That sounds dense, but let me spin it out. Societies don't just have individual pieces of capital - they have interlocking pieces. Farmers need to get food to market, which means roads, and markets, and banking systems to buy and sell it. All of these types of capital fit together.
Prof. Bina's point is that globalization of oil creates globalization of production, which, in turn, limits the autonomy of nation states. Something that conservative economists agree on.
The key, of course, is the creation of oil as the new basis for money.