Some Recent Histories of International Oil

Abstract

The history of the petroleum industry outside the United States has attracted little attention from mainstream economic historians. The secretiveness of non-American oil companies and governments partly accounts for the neglect. A contributing factor, however, may have been a reluctance to become entwined in the political and diplomatic compexities in which the world oil industry has operated. The interdisciplinary approach required to understand the industry is out of sympathy with the narrow specialization favored by many in the profession, especially in the English-speaking world. The three books are characteristically not the products of economic historians, although the material presented will I hope stimulate more interest in the world oil industry from that quarter. R. W. Ferrier, a business historian, provides the first of a three-volume history of the single wholly-British member of the seven sisters. His story begins in 1901, with the securing of William Knox D'Arcy of an oil concession covering practically the whole of Iran (or Persia, as it was then known). Oil was found in 1908, a date marking the beginning of the Middle Eastern oil industry, and the AngloPersian Oil Company (British Petroleum's predecessor company) was formed in 1909. In 1914 the British government acquired a 51 percent shareholding in the company. By 1932 (Ferrier's terminal date) Anglo-Persian had become a fully integrated oil major. Erik D. K. Melby and George Philip, who are political scientists, focus on governments rather than companies. Melby analyzes the oil policy of French governments between 1918 and 1969. Philip's book is a densely written survey of the Latin American oil industry in the twentieth century, focusing on the transition from an industry dominated by the large international oil companies to one dominated by state-owned oil companies. All three books considerably extend our knowledge of the oil industry outside the United States. Over the last 30 years a body of scholarly business histories of American oil companies have been published. These have ranged from the Hidys' pathbreaking study of Standard Oil of New Jersey (R. W. and M. E. Hidy, Pioneering in Big Business. The History of the Standard Oil Company [New Jersey] 1882-1911 [New York, 1955]) to Giebelhouse's recent excellent study of a small independent (August W. Giebelhouse, Business and Government in the Oil Industry: A Case Study of Sun Oil, 1876-1945