Oil and the great powers

ABSTRACT

With the twentieth century, oil became essential for war. Britain and Germany sought to assure their national requirements independently of the other great powers. Both failed. Germany lost two world wars. Britain won its wars but lost its peacetime dominance of the world economy. Oil and the Great Powers, by Anand Toprani, is a deeply researched and readable account of the role of oil in the twentieth century rivalry of the great powers. I discuss its findings from the perspective that every commodity, no matter how important, has at least some inessential uses.

KEYWORDS:

• Essential commodities
• oil
• great powers
• security
• world wars

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Anand Toprani, Oil and the Great Powers: Britain and Germany, 1914 to 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

² Mançur Olson, The economics of the wartime shortage: A history of British food supplies in the Napoleonic War and in World Wars I and II (Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 1963), 9.

³ Olson, Economics of the wartime shortage, 146.

⁴ ’UK asks Qatar to become gas ”supplier of last resort”,’ Financial Times, 5 November 2021.

⁵ Olson, Economics of the wartime shortage, 146–147.