The Significance of Oil

The Middle East without oil would be a very different region. In addition to changing the face of large parts of the area, oil has helped shape the policies and alignments of all the countries of the Middle East not only with each other but also with the world's great powers. These outside powers, in their turn, have found their oil interests and their oil ambitions in the Middle East spilling over into their more general relationships with each other, thus helping a process which has made the region a centre of international tension over long periods of time. Early British oil interests in the area merely reflected late nineteenth-century British interests of a more general nature. These arose out of imperial connections with India and the Far East which demanded the establishment of coaling stations and of territorial enclaves to protect both them and routeways such as the Suez Canal. As a result of these imperial developments, Britain then took an earlier interest than any other outside power in the possibilities of oil from the Middle East. Even so, the region was well behind other parts of the world in the development of oil resources. By the time the Anglo-Persian company finally discovered oil in Persia in I908, and started to work the discoveries under the stimulus of participation by the British government, which sought British owned and controlled oil for its navy, the oil industry elsewhere in the world had almost half a century of history behind it. Britain's strategic and military domination of all areas of the Middle East outside Turkish control acted as a restraint

Economic history · Economics · Economy · Geography · Government (linguistics · Middle East · Navy · Oil reserves · Petroleum · Petroleum industry · Political science · Engineering · History · Law · Natural Resources and Economic Development

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