Oil and the Birth of Iraq

“But what about oil?” my friend M asks. “Wasn’t oil a factor in the settlement at the end of World War I?” The answer must be “yes,” but I wasn’t equipped to specify. Take it away, Peter Mansfield:

“[E]ven before the First World War there was little doubt that northern Mesopotamia was [a] potentially oil-rich area … On the eve of the First World War, the Ottoman government granted a concession to the Turkish Petroleum company (TPC) in which the Anglo-Persian Oil Company had a half interest together with Royal Dutch Shell and the German Deutsche Bank … Hence at the end of the war Britain, with its troops occupying Mosul and having expropriated the German interest in the TPC, was in a commanding position to control Mesopotamian oil. However, Britain had obligations to France under the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement which, in its original form, included Mosul in the French zone of influence. In 1919 Britain persuaded France to transfer Mosul to the British zone, in return for a guaranteed role in the development of Mosul oil. France also agreed to the construction of two separate pipelines for the transport of oil from Mesopotamia and Persia through the French spheres of influence to the Mediterranean.

It was at this point that the United States government intervened … [asserting that] an ‘open-door’ policy should be maintained in commercial matters in the mandated territories. This meant equal treatment ‘in law and in fact for the commerce of all nations’, but oil was the chief concern. The British government, on the other hand, felt that the USA already had enough oil of its own in Texas. A prolonged and sometimes acrimonious correspondence between the US State Department and the British Foreign Office monopoy of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the successor of the TPC, which was owned jointly in 23.75 percent shares by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later BP); Royal Dutch Shell; an American group which was ultimately reduced to Standard Oil of New Jersey and Socony-Vacuum (later Mobil); and the Compagnie Française des Pétroles (CFP), with [oil zillionaire] Calouste Gulbenkian holding the remaining 5 percent. … A major oilfield was discovered near Kirkuk in 1927, and by 1934 production was contributing substantially to Iraq’s revenues.

So Mansfield’s A History of the Middle East at 214-15. Pretty tight writing, for a guy who has been dead for ten years.

Fn: (Yes, this is a 2003 edition, “revised and updated,” but I’m betting that the quoted text is the original version).