Timothy C. Winegard. The First World Oil War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 416 pp. $36.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4875-0073-3.
Reviewed by Anand Toprani (US Naval War College)
Published on H-War (February, 2022)
Commissioned by Tammy Nemeth
Although there is a mountain of books and articles scrutinizing the causes, conduct, and consequences of World War I, it may come as a surprise that there is at present only one monograph devoted to the role of oil in that conflict. What is even more extraordinary is that Ferdinand Friedensburg’s Erdöl im Weltkrieg appeared in 1939.[1] This is not to say that there is not a rich literature concerning the strategic significance of oil during the era of the Great War. Besides Daniel Yergin’s The Prize, there are a plethora of works examining oil as an object of great-power competition within the Ottoman Empire and its successor states, where German, British, and American prospectors all expected to find significant quantities (especially in the territories comprising modern-day Iraq).[2] We also have a number of works examining developments within established oil suppliers to Europe such as Romania, Russia, Austrian Galicia, and Persia.[3]
For all their strengths, few of these works devote much attention to oil’s operational or tactical significance. Considering its title, one might expect Timothy Winegard’s recent book to be a successor to Friedensburg. That would be a mistake. Oil’s role in World War I occupies only a small fraction of the book—little more than a single chapter (chapter 4), much of which is devoted to British postwar planning starting in the autumn of 1918 to secure Mosul as the Ottoman Empire disintegrated. Rather, the “Oil War” to which Winegard refers is not World War I but rather the “Great Game”—the competition between Britain, Russia, and eventually France and Germany for influence in Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and the control of India starting in the early nineteenth century and lasting through WWI, and which restarted after World War II, now with the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia as the antagonists.
For Winegard, the nation-state is not his sole focus. Although he makes frequent references to the trenches of the western front, Winegard’s story is one of commercial competition rather than military conflict or even political rivalry. The protagonists are not the ones familiar to most students of international history—the governments of Britain, the United States, France, Germany, the Soviet Union; or even the competing ideologies of liberal capitalism, social democracy, fascism, and Marxist-Leninism—but rather the British and US major oil companies, whose interests were (in Winegard’s telling) synonymous with those of their host governments. Students of the oil industry understand this is a problematic approach. In fact, the companies’ relationship with their host governments was often contentious even in Britain, much less the United States. To illustrate, despite the British government being its majority owner, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company feuded with the Admiralty throughout the 1920s and 1930s over a host issues including the cost of naval fuel oil and the company’s willingness to cooperate with US firms in contested areas such as Kuwait.[4]
Although the book is not really about the military significance of oil, the Great War is nonetheless the centerpiece because it inaugurated a globe-spanning era of “oil imperialism” (pp. 7, 17)—great-power competition over oil (and natural gas) reserves that has fomented conflict and destabilized nations in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Latin America to this very day. Borrowing from the work of the idiosyncratic William Engdahl, Winegard argues at several points that out of this Anglo-American commercial struggle emerged an all-powerful Anglo-American oil “monopoly” or “cartel.”[5] This institution was and remains one of the foundations of Anglo-American global hegemony thanks to oil’s ubiquity as a source of power—whether military, economic, or financial (pp. 11-12, 18, 259, 286, 290, and 294).
The book is organized around nine chapters that unfold in a roughly chronological fashion. In his first chapter, Winegard paints in broad strokes the history of British engagement within the Ottoman Empire, the Caucasus, and Persia from the 1880s through to the Ottomans’ entry into World War I. The second chapter describes Britain’s increasing preoccupation with oil as a source of naval propulsion fuel before 1914. It then transitions to a brief history of the oil industry since antiquity before doubling back to the British government’s purchase of a 51 percent stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1914. It ends with a recounting of British efforts to secure Basra during the early stages of the war to protect Anglo-Persian’s oilfields and refinery at Abadan. Chapter 3 surveys British efforts to break the stalemate on the western front by supporting Arab nationalist movements against the Ottoman Empire, culminating with General Edmund Allenby’s campaign in Palestine in December 1917.
Chapter 4 is the only one focused on oil and World War I itself. Winegard has little to say about how oil transformed the “operational, logistical, and social dimensions of strategy on the battlefield, at sea, and in the air.”[6] Many contemporary observers were transfixed by the advent of oil-powered weapons systems such as tanks and aircraft, which presaged a new era in warfare. Equally important was the Allies’ widespread use of trucks to move troops and artillery.[7] During their counteroffensives of 1918 on the western front, the Allies’ fleet of aircraft and trucks outnumbered the Germans by three or four to one, while the disparity in tanks was several times greater. Nevertheless, it is still an open question whether the Allies’ greater supply of oil proved decisive to the outcome of World War I. The two best-known works on the subject, Friedensburg and a venerable article by W. G. Jensen, reach much the same conclusion. While the Germans’ relative shortage of oil constrained their war-making capacity and harmed morale, the imbalance in oil supplies was not a direct cause of Germany’s decision to seek an armistice in October-November 1918.[8]
Winegard is interested in a different story. Once it became clear to Germany in 1917 that Romania and Galicia’s oil production was insufficient, it shifted its attention to Baku, whose prodigious oilfields beckoned following the collapse of the Russian war effort in late 1917. Into this breach stepped a tiny force of British infantry—the so-called Dunsterforce. The book appears to have grown out of Winegard’s earlier article on the Dunsterforce.[9] Comprised of no more than 1,500 British and Dominion troops (the actual number is unclear), starting in early 1918, the Dunsterforce was supposed to travel from British-occupied Mesopotamia to the city of Tiflis (in what is today Georgia) via Persia and Azerbaijan. Its aims were, in contemporary parlance, “to train, advise, and assist” local forces to prevent the Central Powers from exploiting the Caucasus’s oil and agricultural wealth. Nearly one-third of the book (chapters 5 through 7 and a portion of 4) deals with the history of the Dunsterforce. Winegard and other historians have concluded that the Dunsterforce did have some meaningful success by denying the Central Powers the use of Caucasian oil for several weeks.[10] Nevertheless, such extravagant attention for a peripheral military operation—the Dunsterforce reached Baku in late August but had to withdraw less than three weeks later to avoid capture by the besieging Ottoman army—seems questionable, especially since Winegard never spells out the connection to his wider thesis “oil imperialism” after World War I.
Chapter 8 begins with the place of oil during the peace deliberations at Versailles in 1918-19. By this stage, Britain’s adversaries were no longer the now-defunct Russian and German empires, but rather its erstwhile allies and associates. One of the strengths of Winegard’s book is his description of the virulent scorn and contempt British leaders had for France and its imperial pretensions (pp. 215-216). He quickly moves on to British efforts to support White Russian forces in the Caucasus and restore oil production in the region during the Russian Civil War.[11]
Chapter 9 is a summary of key developments since the end of WWI. It begins with Wilson at Versailles, but then moves on to cover briefly the Russian Civil War, postwar Anglo-French oil negotiations, British policy in Iraq, and the Anglo-American “oil war,” which only ended (as Winegard implies) with the 1928 “Red Line” Agreement, which divided Iraq’s oil industry between a British, French, Dutch, and US consortium. Winegard then changes direction to summarize the role of oil in the histories of Iran, Iraq, and other Gulf Arab states since the 1930s. He then transitions to a history Canadian oil industry before returning to the Middle East and Saudi Arabia in particular, covering everything from the foundation of the kingdom to the emergence of Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s. Although Winegard is a Canadian, he makes a number of factual errors about how the oil industry in Canada operates, confusing oil concessions with leases (the latter are won through a competitive bidding process) and overstating the historical significance of the Athabasca tar sands.[12] As for the Middle East, Winegard claims Bin Laden was reacting to the divergence in fortunes between Europe and the Arab-Muslim world following Martin Luther’s break with the Catholic Church, which apparently “gave rise to the European Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment” (p. 266).
Winegard then jumps continents again to offer a short history of the Latin American oil industry, with particular emphasis on Mexico’s nationalization of its oil industry in 1938. Unfortunately, he does not reflect upon the more strategically significant fact that Venezuela rather than Iran or Iraq ended up becoming Britain’s primary supplier of oil after World War I.[13] He then returns to the Caucasus, starting with the role of oil in the collapse of the Soviet Union before moving on to the fate of the post-Soviet oil industry in the Caucasus. After discussing the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, Winegard jumps back to the Russian wars in Chechnya in 1990s and then forward to the war with Georgia in 2008. He finally concludes with the Azeri-Armenian struggle over the Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s. To say this chapter lacks a connective tissue or coherent focus would be an understatement.
The conclusion does not offer a recapitulation of the book’s thesis and key findings, but rather is largely speculative, focused on the likelihood of oil’s enduring significance as an object of geopolitical competition in the future—albeit one in which the “Anglo-American petroleum cartel” must contend with opposition from rival national oil companies in the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. Winegard is rather sanguine about the ability to find cleaner substitutes for petroleum but warns this is impossible because “oil is the epicenter of the global economy and the balance that provides homeostasis to world finance, economic markets, and war” (p. 286). None of this can be true if we accept the rest of the Winegard’s book, which is a catalogue of the ways in which the global scramble for oil has destabilized the international system and global economy.
On a more prosaic level, Winegard conflates “Dutch Disease” (p. 266) with the “resource curse.” Under the latter, countries dependent on exports of raw materials or precious minerals tend to suffer from weak economic growth, greater inequality, and authoritarian rule.[14] Dutch Disease—a phrase coined by the Economist in 1977—is a slightly different phenomenon. When Holland became an exporter of natural gas in 1959, the influx of foreign exchange into the country boosted the value of the Dutch guilder. This made Dutch exports less competitive and stimulated the movement of labor to the natural gas sector or domestic services, thereby contributing to Holland’s deindustrialization. Dutch Disease explains why even a country that has become wealthy from resource exports can still suffer from high unemployment, inflation, trade deficits, and weak or nonexistent growth as the rest of its economy atrophies and foreign investment evaporates.[15] It is not, however, synonymous with the “resource curse”, as evidenced by the fact that Holland is a still a prosperous liberal democracy.
Except for a belated acknowledgement in the epilogue of the geopolitical consequences of the “shale oil” revolution since 2014, Winegard has little to say about the United States as an oil producer during the twentieth century. Arguably, the most important strategic lesson of World War I was “that a general conflict in Europe could no longer be resolved with reference to European resources alone.”[16] For the European Allies, their only secure source of oil in wartime was the United States, which provided 80 percent of Allied consumption during both world wars and accounted for roughly two-thirds of global oil production during the first half of the twentieth century. By contrast to the United States or even Venezuela (the world’s largest oil exporter by the late 1920s), the “enormously powerful Anglo-American oil cartel” (p. 259, quoting Engdahl) in the Middle East was a mere sideshow. Without such a vibrant domestic oil industry and experience in Latin America, the US companies would have never had the technical or financial wherewithal to compete with the British in the Middle East or Central Asia, much less the global markets to distribute the oil.
Considering recent trends in the historiography of international and military history, wherein scholars are embracing a multinational (and therefore multilingual) perspective, Winegard’s book is stubbornly Anglo-centric. His use of primary sources to support his analysis of the Dunsterforce is commendable, but for the rest of the book, his only noteworthy primary sources are British Cabinet papers—to the exclusion of those of the Ministry of Fuel & Power, Treasury, Foreign Office, and Committee of Imperial Defence, all of which would be indispensable to any study of British oil strategy. Accordingly, Winegard depended on secondary works to flesh out his narrative. The fact that such sources exist belies his claim that the “pivotal role of oil in the calculation of British strategy and war aims in Mesopotamia, Persia, and the Caucasus during the First World War has been overlooked” (p. 9). Winegard would have better served his readers had he explained how his findings build upon the work of earlier scholars, and whether he has anything new to offer. Moreover, he does not always make full use of the sources he does cite. Winegard includes William Stivers’s study of British strategy in the Middle East is his bibliography, but he does not use it when discussing the 1921 Cairo Conference. This is a regrettable oversight, as Stivers sheds light on how Britain planned to administer Iraq indirectly even after it became nominally independent.[17] Conversely, Winegard narrates the suppression of the 1920 Iraqi uprisings but pays little attention to how Britain expected to preserve its influence thereafter (pp. 247-251).
Cursory engagement with sources beyond Britain is a significant shortcoming in a book ostensibly describing the machinations of an Anglo-American cartel. Closer attention to US sources, for example, might have disabused Winegard of his assumption that the US government thought about oil the same way the British did. For example, President Calvin Coolidge’s formation of the Federal Oil Conservation Board in 1924 was not about securing access to foreign oil (p. 256), but rather promoting conservation of domestic resources.[18] Given the importance of France in British machinations, Winegard should have consulted the works of Edward Peter Fitzgerald and Gregory Nowell on French oil policy. Doing so would have kept Winegard from repeating two common myths: first, that U-boat attacks in late 1917 brought France to the brink of an oil crisis (p. 103); and second, that Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau ceded French rights to Mosul under the Sykes-Picot Agreement to Prime Minister David Lloyd George during bilateral talks in London in December 1918 to safeguard French predominance in Syria and Lebanon (pp. 215-222).[19] The shortage of tankers in late 1917 was not due to U-boats (losses having peaked at 700,000 tons in June, the same month the Allies instituted convoying) but rather a commercial feud between Standard Oil and Shell. Standard resented that Shell had been gobbling up market share in the Far East and redirected some of its tankers to compete. Following French complaints, Exxon shifted additional tankers to supplying France, and the “crisis” ended.[20] As for Mosul, the French never had exclusive control over that province under Sykes-Picot—they were required to share equal commercial rights with British firms. Since France lacked oil firms with the necessary capital and technical expertise to develop Iraq independently, it decided to part with its nominal rights in order to secure British goodwill.[21]
Building upon Fiona Venn’s work, Winegard makes much of the supposed Anglo-American “oil war” after 1918.[22] Unfortunately, he does not use the works of Stivers and Michael Hogan, which offer a counterargument to Venn.[23] Stivers and Hogan both contend that there was far more cooperation between the United States and Britain when it came to oil than the sensationalistic postwar accounts Winegard prefers to cite allege.[24] Closer attention to Stivers’s work would have disabused Winegard of the notion that US officials in 1918-19 were motivated solely by fears of the imminent exhaustion of US oilfields. On the British side, Winegard’s description of Admiral Edmond Slade’s efforts in 1918 to promote a more aggressive oil policy is superficial. Slade had been part of the original team dispatched by the British government in 1913 to assess the viability of the Persian oilfields and Anglo-Persian as a commercial endeavor. Slade then joined Anglo-Persian as one of its two government directors while remaining on the public payroll as an adviser to the Admiralty during the war. Geoffrey Jones demonstrated that Slade’s advocacy on behalf of Anglo-Persian and polemics against Shell alienated many in Whitehall.[25] The fact that the British government decided at war’s end to occupy Mosul for its oil was not only due to Slade writing a single memorandum in July 1918 (reprinted as an appendix to the book), as Winegard implies. Finally, while it is reasonable to conceive of the 1914-45 period as a single “Thirty Years War” (p. 15), Winegard might have consulted alternative accounts such as Adam Tooze’s The Deluge. Tooze posits that the postwar order was more robust than we credit it today, and only collapsed under the shock of the Great Depression.[26]
The absence of foreign-language primary or secondary sources is perhaps the book’s greatest handicap. Winegard’s mentor, Hew Strachan, castigated Anglophone historians of the war who ignored foreign-language sources for their “laziness” and “monolingualism.”[27] Winegard should have heeded such guidance. Besides Friedensburg’s invaluable study, the use of German sources would have enriched his analysis of the Anglo-German feud before 1914 over Mesopotamia. Winegard claims that the British forced the Germans to accept a subservient role by the spring of 1914 (pp. 29-31, 61-62) through the “Foreign Office” Agreement of March 1914, which reorganized the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC) under British control through Anglo-Persian. According to internal Deutsche Bank records, however, the Germans were satisfied with the terms. True, the Deutsche Bank retained only a quarter of the shares in the TPC, while Anglo-Persian gobbled up half. Nevertheless, the bank was pleased because the agreement gave the TPC access to the City of London’s credit market, and Germany lacked the financial means to develop Mesopotamia’s oilfield independently. Moreover, the TPC agreed to make the first third of any Mesopotamian oil it exported available on equal terms to both the British and German navies.[28]
The many factual errors or exaggerations in Winegard’s book further limits its utility as a teaching tool. The Versailles Conference did not redraw “the map of the world” (p. 9). While the former German and Ottoman territories in the Middle East, Africa, and the South Pacific were divided into three sets of mandates, the exact boundaries were established later—in the case of the “Class A” Ottoman mandates, at the San Remo Conference of 1920. Likewise, Percy Cox, the British high commissioner to Iraq, drew the borders of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia (then known as the Kingdom of Nejd) in 1922. Iraq twice threatened Kuwait’s sovereignty (1961 and 1990-91), but the same cannot be said of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which disproves Winegard’s claim that Cox’s actions “remain the source of tension and dispute in our contemporary world” (p. 8). Winegard also says that “Romania was the only significant source of oil west of the Black Sea” during World War I but contradicts himself later by mentioning Austrian Galicia (p. 95).[29] The Battle of Kursk took place six months after the surrender of Army Group B at Stalingrad (p. 13), which ended the German bid to seize the Caucasian oilfields.[30] While oil has played at least a peripheral role in numerous conflicts since 1945, it seems a stretch to claim the North Atlantic Treaty Organization operations of 1990s in the Balkans were oil wars (p. 14). The Battle of the Frontiers began with a series of French, not German, offensives in August 1914. And finally, there was neither an “OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis in 1973,” nor did the British and US major oil companies control 85 percent of global oil production before then (p. 18)—the Soviet Union accounted for roughly 15 percent, and a wave of nationalizations starting with Algeria in 1971 was already eroding the companies’ share before the Arab oil embargo.
The aforementioned errors are drawn solely from the introduction, and the situation does not improve in later chapters. Winegard claims that “between 1870 and 1914, Germany amassed the most dynamic and all-encompassing economic and industrial growth seen in the past two years” (p. 45), which would be true if you ignored the United States.[31] Abadan was not “the largest refinery” on the eve of World War I, and William Knox D’Arcy was not the man who “struck” oil in Persia in 1908 (p. 53), but rather, the long-suffering George Reynolds, who went on to make major discoveries in Venezuela in 1922. Winegard cannot decide whether Wilhelm Wassmuss or Oskar Niedermayer is the “German Lawrence” (pp. 62, 88). He misquotes the aforementioned Engdahl by claiming that Alsace-Lorraine and the Ruhr contained 75 percent of Germany’s iron ore and one-quarter of its coal (p. 217) in 1918. In fact, Engdahl said those figures arose from Germany’s territorial losses under the Versailles Treaty.[32] Western oil companies did not return to Baku in the 1920s “on shaky concession arrangements” (p. 254). Turkey never adopted “the ‘Open Door’ policy so longed for by American business” (p. 256)—the “Open Door” in this instance was a phrase the members of the Turkish Petroleum Company concocted to claim that their 1925 concession in Iraq was not monopolistic, when it in fact it was designed to exclude outsiders.[33] Exxon did not “control” North Persia in the 1920s (p. 259)—after fruitless negotiations for a concession it gave up in 1927.[34] John Cadman did not negotiate “on behalf of the Crown’s 51 per cent share” after Iran cancelled Anglo-Persian’s concession in 1932 (p. 259). The British government’s influence in the company was limited to two members of the board, who had veto rights only under certain specific conditions.[35] The claim that “Saudi oil accounted for 14 per cent of America’s total petroleum production” (p. 264) is bizarre since oil was not discovered in Saudi Arabia until 1938 and exports to the United States did not begin until 1947.[36] The “twin pillars” policy neither started in the 1950s, nor was it an Anglo-American initiative (p. 265). Rather, it was a US policy to provide virtually unlimited military sales to Iran and (to a lesser extent) Saudi Arabia after Britain opted to withdraw from East of Suez in 1971.[37]
Winegard’s use of primary sources is sometimes careless. The Petroleum Department did not “question” its existence as a separate bureaucratic entity in 1919 (p. 222).[38] Winegard later quotes an anecdote from Edith Wilson, who teased her husband at Versailles for redrawing borders “like a lot of little boys playing a game.” Winegard claims that Wilson’s response (“the result of it hangs, in my estimation, the future peace of the world”) was pure balderdash: “Wilson’s estimation included the oil concessions of the Middle East, and a thinly disguised altruism did not hide his primary motive of promoting American economic prospects” (p. 236). He does not provide any evidence to substantiate this claim—nor can he, since Wilson evinced little interest in the affairs of the oil industry, which figure little within his published papers. Within his administration, the push for a more aggressive foreign oil policy came from two places. The first was the Navy Department, which was concerned about its long-term supplies following the shift from coal to oil and pressed for a stronger US presence in Mexico.[39] The other place was the State Department, where officials such as Under Secretary of State Frank Polk or the State Department’s economic adviser Arthur Millspaugh challenged what they considered to be a deliberate British campaign to monopolize the control of oilfields in the Eastern Hemisphere.[40] Contrary to Winegard’s claims (p. 238), it was these officials rather than Wilson who drafted the official note of May 17, 1920, to the US Senate criticizing British policy.[41]
Winegard misunderstands esoteric concepts concerning operations of the oil industry. For example, in chapter 9, he mischaracterizes the “Gulf-Plus” system of oil pricing that accompanied the Achnacarry “As Is” Agreement of 1928, in which the major oil companies agreed to preserve existing market shares to stabilize prices. Gulf-Plus, as Winegard describes it, was the use of a single price—the one at the Gulf of Mexico—for any oil bought and sold around the world irrespective of its point of origin (p. 259). This is inaccurate. Gulf-Plus meant that the price consumers paid for oil would be the same as if the oil was bought and shipped from the Gulf of Mexico. In other words, Gulf-Plus pricing imposed a baseline for what is known as the cif price—that is, inclusive of cost, insurance, and freight. That meant that oil companies had to charge different fob prices (free on board, i.e., price exclusive of freight) to account for the fact that, for example, oil traveling from the Middle East to India had to travel less than oil traveling from the Gulf of Mexico to India. The difference between the freight from the Gulf of Mexico and from the actual point of origin was known as “Phantom Freight.”[42]
Winegard also neglects to explain the context of Gulf-Plus and Achnacarry (pp. 258-259). These were attempts to impose order on a chaotic market characterized by oversupply. Higher prices for Middle Eastern or South American oil might have been bad for consumers, but they kept high-cost US oilfields in business, which proved vital during World War II. Moreover, the system collapsed soon after WWII, and no single entity today controls the price oil. This is contrary to Winegard’s claims that the “Anglo-American establishment … remains just as economically, politically, and militarily powerful, and motivated, today (as does the American pricing and policing of global oil)” (p. 259), and is evidence of a shaky grasp of contemporary affairs. Calling Russia, Venezuela, and Iran the “Axis of Diesel” is only charming if you overlook the fact that Venezuelan and Iranian refining capacity is one-tenth that of the United States, while Russia’s is one-third.[43]
It is difficult to overstate the historical significance of World War I. Besides planting the seeds for more destructive conflict, the war ended decades of progress in liberalizing global economic relations, created the political basis for extremist ideologies such as fascism and Marxist-Leninism to thrive, and signaled the beginning of the end for Europe’s colonial empires. On a military level, a war that began with armies relying on the implements of the nineteenth-century warfare ended with them fielding those of the twentieth. Richard Overy once observed about World War II that “it would be wrong to argue that oil determined the outcome of the war on its own, though there could scarcely have been a resource more vital to waging modern combat.”[44] It seems fair to argue that the same judgement applies to World War I. Perhaps one day we will get a book that does justice to such an important subject.
Anand Toprani is associate professor of strategy and policy at the US Naval War College. He is the author of Oil and the Great Powers: Britain and Germany, 1914-1945 (2019), which received the Richard W. Leopold Prize from the Organization of American Historians. The views he has expressed are his own and not necessarily those of the US government.
Notes
[1]. Ferdinand Friedensburg, Erdöl im Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1939).
[2]. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991); Marian Kent, Oil and Empire: British Policy and Mesopotamian Oil, 1900- 1920 (London: Macmillan, 1976); and Helmut Mejcher, Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq, 1910–1928 (London: Ithaca Press, 1976).
[3]. Maurice Pearton, Oil and Romanian State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971); Robert Tolf, Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry (Stanford, CA: Hoover University Press, 1976); R. W. Ferrier, The Developing Years, 1901-1932, vol. 1 of The History of the British Petroleum Company (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle: Iran's Oil Nationalization and Its Aftermath (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994); and Alison Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
[4]. For disputes concerning the terms of the Admiralty’s supply contract with Anglo-Persian, see Warwick Michael Brown, “The Royal Navy’s Fuel Supplies, 1898-1939: The Transition from Coal to Oil” (PhD diss., University of London, 2003), 185-87. Brown’s thesis is a masterpiece of logistical history and deserves a wider audience.
[5]. Engdahl is a dubious source with a penchant for conspiracy mongering. For example, he suggests that British intelligence may have orchestrated the Teapot Dome Scandal and President Warren Harding’s death to prevent the United States from recognizing the Soviet Union so that a rival of Anglo-Persian, Sinclair Oil, could acquire concessions in the Caucasus and on Sakhalin Island. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (London: Pluto, 2004), 66-67.
[6]. David Deese, “Oil, War, and Grand Strategy,” Orbis 25, no. 3 (1981): 526
[7]. James Laux, “Trucks in the West during the First World War,” Journal of Transport History 6, no. 2 (1985): 64-70.
[8]. Friedensburg, Erdöl, 121-28; and W. G. Jensen, “The Importance of Energy in the First and Second World Wars,” Historical Journal 11, no. 3 (1968): 538-45.
[9]. Timothy Winegard, “Dunsterforce: A Case Study of Coalition Warfare in the Middle East, 1918-1919,” Canadian Army Journal 8 (2005): 93-109. See also Timothy Winegard, “Dunsterforce,” August 16, 2017, https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/dunsterforce.
[10]. Edward Lemon, “Dunsterforce or Dunsterfarce? Re-evaluating the British Mission to Baku, 1918,” First World War Studies 6, no. 2 (2015): 133-49.
[11]. It is a shame that Winegard’s book appeared a year before the publication of Matthew Gharzarian’s “Obstruction as Power: Rethinking Britain's Caucasus Occupation 1918–20,” International History Review 39, no. 4 (2017): 654-66, which offers an alternative perspective on Britain’s postwar occupation of the Caucasus—namely, that it was meant to obstruct the export of Caucasian oil.
[12]. My thanks to Tammy Nemeth for educating me about the intricacies of the Canadian oil industry.
[13]. B. S. McBeth, British Oil Policy, 1919-1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 86-120.
[14]. Terry Lynn Karl, Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and Petro-States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Michael Ross, Oil Curse: How Petroleum Wealth Shapes the Development of Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).
[15]. C. W., “What Dutch Disease Is, and Why It’s Bad,” The Economist, November 5, 2014, https://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2014/11/economist-explains-2.
[16]. Ian Lesser, Resources and Strategy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 41-46.
[17]. William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918-1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), 76-107.
[18]. Gerald Nash, United States Oil Policy, 1890-1964: Business and Government in Twentieth-Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1976), 72-97.
[19]. Both of these myths have refused to die. See, for example, Luigi Scazzeri, “Britain, France, and Mesopotamian Oil, 1916–1920,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 26, no. 1 (2015): 25-45.
[20]. Gregory Nowell, Mercantile States and the World Oil Cartel, 1900-1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 94-110.
[21]. Edward Peter Fitzgerald, “France’s Middle Eastern Ambitions, the Sykes-Picot Negotiations, and the Oil Fields of Mosul, 1915-1918,” Journal of Modern History 66, no. 4 (1994): 697-725.
[22]. Fiona Venn, “Oleaginous Diplomacy: Oil, Anglo-American Relations and the Lausanne Conference, 1922–23,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 20, no. 3 (2009): 414-33.
[23]. Michael Hogan, “Informal Entente: Public Policy and Private Management in Anglo-American Petroleum Affairs,” Business History Review 48, no. 2 (1974): 187-205; and William Stivers, “International Politics and Iraqi Oil, 1918-1928: A Study in Anglo-American Diplomacy,” Business History Review 55, no. 4 (1981): 517-40.
[24]. See Francis Delaisi, Oil: Its Influence on Politics (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1922); Pierre l’Espagnol de la Trameyre, World Struggle for Oil (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1924); Anton Mohr, The Oil War (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1926); Louis Fischer, Oil Imperialism: The International Struggle for Petroleum (New York: International, 1926); and Ludwell Denny, We Fight for Oil (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1928).
[25]. Geoffrey Jones, State and the Emergence of the British Oil Industry (London: Macmillan, 1981), 177-207.
[26]. Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 (New York: Viking, 2014).
[27]. Hew Strachan, The First World War, Volume I: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xvii.
[28]. Inge Baumgart and Horst Benneckenstein, “Die Interessen der Deutschen Bank am mesopotamischen Erdöl,” Jahrbuch für Wirtschaftsgeschichte 29, no. 1 (1988): 49-60; and Dietrich Eichholtz, Die Baghdadbahn, Mesopotamien und die deutsche Ölpolitik bis 1918 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2007), 41-65.
[29]. Galician production was low by global standards, averaging less than nine hundred thousand tons per annum during the war, but even this figure was slightly less than half of the two million tons the Central Powers consumed annually on average during the war. Friedensburg, Erdöl, 21, 14.
[30]. Anand Toprani, “The First War for Oil: The Caucasus, German Strategy, and the Turning Point of the War on the Eastern Front, 1942,” Journal of Military History 80, no. 3 (2016): 815-54.
[31]. Paul Kennedy, Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), 242-49.
[32]. Engdahl, Century, 83.
[33]. John DeNovo, American Interests and Politics in the Middle East, 1900-1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), 199-200.
[34]. Michael Rubin, “Stumbling through the ‘Open Door’: The U.S. in Persia and the Standard-Sinclair Oil Dispute, 1920-1925,” Iranian Studies 28, nos. 3/4 (1995): 203-29.
[35]. Ferrier, BP, 645-46.
[36]. DeGolyer and MacNaughton, Twentieth-Century Petroleum Statistics: Historical Data (Dallas: DeGolyer and MacNaughton, 2004), 37. See also Anand Toprani, “The French Connection: A New Perspective on the End of the Red Line Agreement, 1945-1948,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 2 (2012): 261-99.
[37]. Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 117-55.
[38]. Long to the Cabinet, February 27, 1919, CAB 24/76, British National Archives, London.
[39]. Josephus Daniels, Our Navy at War (Washington, DC: Pictorial Bureau, 1922), 280-84; and Peter Shulman, “‘Science Can Never Demobilize’: The United States Navy and Petroleum Geology, 1898–1924,” History and Technology 19, no. 4 (2003): 365-95.
[40]. Anand Toprani, “An Anglo-American ‘Petroleum Entente’? The First Attempt to Reach an Anglo-American Oil Agreement, 1921,” Historian 79, no. 1 (2017): 56-79.
[41]. Restrictions on American Petroleum Prospectors in Certain Foreign Countries, May 17, 1920, 66th Congress, 2nd Session, Document No. 272 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1920).
[42]. US Senate, Select Committee on Small Business, International Petroleum Cartel: Staff Report to the Federal Trade Commission, Submitted to the Subcommittee on Monopoly of the Select Committee on Small Business, United States Senate, August 22, 1952 (reprint, Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1975), 352ff.
[43]. OPEC Annual Statistical Bulletin: 2017, http://www.opec.org/opec_web/static_files_project/media/downloads/publications/ASB2017_13062017.pdf.
[44]. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995), 233.
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Citation:
Anand Toprani. Review of Winegard, Timothy C., The First World Oil War.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2022.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=48614
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