It was 1912, European tensions were rising and Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, was concerned about power. The proposed shift from coal-fuelled ships to more efficient oil-fuelled ones would redraw Britain’s geopolitical map. Oil was not widely available in the British Isles, Churchill would later recall observing. So the country would have to “carry it by sea in peace or war from distant countries”. Doing so would not be easy, but it would grant Britain what he called “the prize of the venture”.
Churchill was prescient. To understand the global history of the 20th century, it helps to see it as a struggle to control the extraction and transport of fossil fuels, particularly oil and gas – and to harness them for political ends. Such was the world history told by Daniel Yergin, the American author, in his 1990 book The Prize. The turning point of the Second World War? The Battle of Stalingrad, and Hitler’s race for the Caucasus oil fields. The end of the West’s postwar economic golden age? The 1970s oil crisis, in which Arab states cut production and unleashed inflation on the global financial system. Saddam Hussein did his bit for Yergin’s thesis by invading oil-rich Kuwait four months before the book’s publication. The Prize arrived in bookshops as American warships were sailing for the Gulf. Yergin’s own prize would be a Pulitzer.
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