Petrol for the Padişah or Power Outage?: Toward an Ottoman History of Oil and Energy Michael Christopher Low

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Abstract

Although recent years have seen exciting advances in the environmental history of oil, the existing literature on the early years of petroleum exploration and extraction still relies heavily on Euro-American perspectives. As a result, it tends to fixate on the 1901 D’Arcy concession in Iran or the American discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, ignoring decades of oil exploration, concessions, and speculation in Ottoman Iraq, Syria, Eastern Anatolia, and the Red Sea from the 1870s onward.

Drawing on Ottoman archival materials from the Ministry of Forestry, Mining, and Agriculture (Orman ve Maadin ve Ziraat Nezareti) and the records of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s privy purse (Hazine-i Hassa), this paper seeks to demonstrate how Ottoman oil concessions and exploratory activities attracted British and German interest in Middle Eastern oil and natural gas beds long before World War I. Although the Ottoman state had surveyed many of Baghdad and Mosul’s potential oil fields prior to World War I, in an effort to keep these resources out of the hands of European joint-stock companies, the land and natural resources of these regions were placed under the administration of the Sultan’s privy purse. Thus, while the Ottoman state understood the potential value of these oil fields, by shielding them from European interests, this approach also deprived the empire of the capital and technical expertise needed to exploit its vast petroleum wealth. By highlighting this predicament, this paper seeks to assess how fear of foreign financial, technical, and infrastructural dependency warped Ottoman and Middle Eastern energy and infrastructural policies ranging from oil and coal to railways and electricity. By doing so, it attempts to reframe the well-worn story of Ottoman political decline in more material terms as a “power outage.”

Author

• Michael Christopher Low, Iowa State University