The Early Oil Industry

Abstract

As we have depicted in the previous chapters, the evolution of Homo hydrocarbonum is not the product of an ingeniously conceived plan to master nature or some natural result of economic progress but the outcome of an intricate and remarkable process that started long before the modern times. In this chapter we will take a brief look at the birth of the oil industry and the political developments that contributed first to its unfolding and later to its economic and political power. Even though oil was known by other civilizations, only the North Atlantic powers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century attached such importance to this substance, which has maintained an unprecedented role in the geopolitical order ever since.