Britain moves for oil supremacy

British interests benefi ted from the much-discussed retreat of the United States during Versailles into a neo-isolationism. The U.S. Congress turned away from Wilson’s support for the British League of Nations idea, as well as most features of the new world order emerging out of the Carthaginian Versailles deliberations. With America in the background, Britain could move aggressively in Europe, Africa and the Middle East to establish her vital long-term hegemony.

But it became increasingly clear that the powerful American banking and petroleum interests were anything but isolationist. British power must either defeat this threat, or effectively co-opt it into a new Atlantic union.

BRITAIN MOVES FOR OIL SUPREMACY

The ink on the Versailles treaty had barely dried when the powerful American oil interests of the Rockefeller Standard Oil companies realized they had been skillfully cut out of the spoils of war by their British alliance partners. The newly carved Middle East boundaries, as well as the markets of postwar Europe, were dominated by British government interests through Britain’s covert ownership of Royal Dutch Shell and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.

In April 1920, without American participation, ministers of the Allied Supreme Council met in San Remo, Italy, to work out the details of which country got what oil interests in the former Ottoman Middle East. Britain’s Prime Minister Lloyd George and French Premier Alexandre Millerand formalized the San Remo agreement, which gave France a 25 per cent share of oil exploited by the British from Mesopotamia (Iraq), while it was agreed that Mesopotamia would become a British mandate under the aegis of the new League of Nations.

The French were given what had been the 25 per cent German Deutsche Bank share of the old Turkish Petroleum Gesellschaft, which was ‘acquired’ from the Germans, as part of the spoils of Versailles. The remaining 75 per cent control of the huge Mesopotamian oil concession was directly in the hands of the British government through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and Royal Dutch Shell. The French government created a new state-backed company, Compagnie Française des Pétroles (CFP), the following year, under the leadership of French industrialist Ernest Mercier, to develop its new Mesopotamian interests.