#25 — Sunday, 22nd June 1901
Yesterday was the longest day of the year. The sun hung over the Northern Hemisphere like a lamp that refused to be extinguished, and in Scandinavia the bonfires were lit, and in England the light lasted until ten o’clock, and the century — twenty-five weeks old, just beginning — paused at the top of the year’s arc, balanced between the long bright slide into summer and the slow shortening that leads to winter.
I want to use this pause to tell you about a piece of paper.
It was signed three weeks ago, on the twenty-eighth of May, in the Sahebgharaniyeh Palace in Tehran, and it has not been on the front page of any newspaper you would have read, and it will not be discussed in any parliament this year, and the man who signed it — the Shah of Persia — does not fully understand what he has given away, and the man who received it — a British businessman named William Knox D’Arcy, who lives at 42 Grosvenor Square in London and has never set foot in Persia and never will — does not fully understand what he has received.
The document is eighteen articles long. It is written in French, because French is the language of diplomacy, the neutral tongue that neither side owns. It grants D’Arcy the exclusive right to prospect for, extract, transport, and sell petroleum, natural gas, asphalt, and mineral wax throughout the entire Persian Empire — minus five northern provinces, excluded to appease Russia — for a period of sixty years.
Sixty years. The entire territory of one of the oldest civilisations on Earth, signed away by one man to another, for six decades. The price: twenty thousand pounds in cash, twenty thousand pounds in shares of a company that does not yet exist, and sixteen percent of the annual net profits — if there are any profits, if there is any oil, if the desert yields what the geologists suspect it might yield but cannot yet prove.
The Russian envoy was conveniently away on a hunting trip when the document was signed. The extra five thousand pounds that D’Arcy’s representative offered to speed the Shah’s decision was not mentioned in the official record. The concession was written in French, translated into Persian with the same meaning — the document itself specifies that in the event of any dispute, the French text shall prevail, which is the document’s way of saying: your language does not count.
I wrote about oil in January. Spindletop — the gusher in Beaumont, Texas — was the century’s first eruption, the moment when the earth announced that it contained an energy source so abundant and so powerful that it would reshape every city, every road, every war, every border on the planet. I said then that oil was going to be the century’s blood. I meant it literally. The century will bleed oil. It will fight over oil. It will build its economies on oil and heat its homes with oil and move its armies with oil and poison its air with oil, and the places where oil is found will become the most strategically important places on Earth, and the people who live above the oil will discover that living above something valuable is not the same as owning it.
The D’Arcy concession is the moment the oil story stops being American and becomes global. Spindletop was a local discovery — a man drilling a well, a gusher erupting, a boomtown springing up around it. The D’Arcy concession is an imperial acquisition — a man in London buying the underground of a country he has never visited, backed by a government that sees the concession not as a business deal but as a move in the Great Game, the shadow war between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia that Kipling named and Kim embodied and that will, in its various forms, outlast both empires that are currently playing it.
Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of India, has described Persia as one of the pieces on a chessboard upon which a game is being played for the domination of the world. He is not being metaphorical. He means it. Persia sits between Russia and India, between the Ottoman Empire and Afghanistan, between the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. It is a corridor, a buffer, a prize. And now, beneath its surface, there may be oil — the substance that the century is beginning to understand will be more valuable than gold, more powerful than coal, more important to the machinery of empire than any raw material since cotton.
D’Arcy does not know if there is oil. He will spend seven years and half a million pounds looking for it, drilling in heat that exceeds fifty degrees, in terrain patrolled by bandits and tribal warlords who do not recognise the Shah’s authority or any concession he grants. D’Arcy’s fortune — made in Australian gold, at the Mount Morgan Mine in Queensland — will drain away into the Persian desert, and he will nearly abandon the search, and he will sell most of his rights to the Burmah Oil Company, and then, in 1908, at Masjid-i-Suleiman, the drill will strike oil, and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company will be born, and the company will become Anglo-Iranian and then British Petroleum and then BP, and the century will have its second gusher, and this one will not erupt in Texas but in the ancient heartland of civilisation, and the consequences will be — I am trying to find a word large enough — the consequences will be everything.
Let me tell you what I can see from where I stand.
In 1914, Winston Churchill — the young backbencher who gave his maiden speech four months ago, the man who said if I were a Boer I hope I should be fighting in the field — will be First Lord of the Admiralty, and he will make the decision to convert the Royal Navy from coal to oil. Coal is British. Coal comes from Wales and Yorkshire and Durham, from mines like Senghenydd, from the labour of men like Thomas Ellis. Oil is foreign. Oil comes from Persia. But oil is faster, cleaner, more efficient — a ship powered by oil can refuel at sea, can carry more armament, can outrun a coal-fired vessel — and the strategic advantage is irresistible, and Churchill will make the conversion, and the British government will buy a controlling stake in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and the Empire’s energy supply will shift from its own ground to someone else’s, and the shift will make Persia — and later Iraq, and later Saudi Arabia, and later Kuwait — the most fought-over places on Earth.
In 1953, the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran — Mohammad Mossadegh — will nationalise the oil industry, will say that the wealth beneath Persian soil belongs to the Persian people and not to a company in London, and the British and American governments will overthrow him in a coup, and the coup will install a Shah who will rule for twenty-six years until a revolution overthrows him too, and the revolution will install a theocracy, and the theocracy will outlast the century, and the root of it — the first thread in the tangle — is this piece of paper, signed three weeks ago, in a palace in Tehran, by a Shah who needed the cash and a businessman who wanted the oil.
Sixty years. Eighteen articles. Written in French.
The century is half light and half dark — that is what the solstice means. Yesterday the balance tipped. From now on, the days get shorter. The light recedes. The dark advances. And somewhere under the Persian desert, in rock formations laid down a hundred million years ago, a substance is waiting — black, viscous, ancient — that will give the century its power and its wars and its wealth and its pollution and its geopolitics and its particular, petroleum-scented version of progress, which is progress that moves very fast and costs more than the price on the pump.
The Shah signed the paper. D’Arcy, in London, opened the envelope. The earth kept its counsel. The oil waited.
It is still waiting. Not for long.
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