Petroleum Geopolitics

Intellectual History

German economist Friedrich List maintained that economic growth of a nation must be premised on a robust combination of political and spatial controls over its territory, trade, and industry, and he advocated a spatial development policy based on railroad construction. Imperialist-minded geographers, such as Friedrich Ratzel and Ellen Churchill Semple, saw space as a political force in its own right and praised territorial expansion directed toward acquisition of strategically valuable assets. Colonization and resource grabbing were approvingly described as natural consequences of commercial expansion.

Although Halford Mackinder saw global land and sea configurations as historical constants in power projection struggles, James Fairgrieve described history as an advance in humans’ ability to control energy. He called attention to the future scarcity of coal and oil, and he hinted at the forthcoming redistribution of the world power, whereby the regions rich in energy resources would gain in importance at the expense of resource-poor nations. For Mackinder, the geographical “pivot of history” was to be found in the Eurasian heartland—the core area of what he called the World Island. For Fairgrieve, the center of global power was to be determined by the location of the strategic sources of energy.

Practical Needs

Petroleum geopolitics emerged in late-colonial pursuit of faraway sources of energy. Those were required to power military machines of both established and emerging hegemonic powers in Europe, North America, and Japan. The emergence of the automobile industry, the conversion of navies from coal to fuel oil, and the advent of military aviation increased the world petroleum demand and pushed U.S., British, and continental European companies to intensify prospecting for oil abroad. Armed forces’ dependence on oil increased exponentially since World War II, as military success grew dependent on adequate petroleum supplies.

The early players in the international scramble for energy resources, such as the U.S.-based Standard Oil, the U.K.-based Anglo-Persian Oil Company (British Petroleum), and the Netherlands-based Royal Dutch/Shell, had propelled their governments into the neocolonial struggle for concessions in Indonesia, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Mexico, Persia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Imperial Britain took the lead, fighting, in Lord Curzon's words, to keep control over “Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia” as the strategically located “pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for dominion of the world” (cited in Kearns, 2009, p. 215). This very same arc from the Middle East to India through the Caucasus featured several regions rich in oil, which Britain, concerned with growing oil dependency on the United States, wanted to keep for itself.

The collapse of the Russian empire and the ensuing loss of the British oil concessions in the Caucasus were deemed as justification for the British military aggression against Soviet Russia and intervention in Azerbaijan. The military campaign that began as an attempt to deny Germany access to Caspian oil resulted in the establishment of the British Oil Administration in Baku.

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