Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History. Hugh Williams

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СКАЧАТЬ By the end of the nineteenth century, Standard Oil was the biggest private business corporation the world had ever seen. In 1911, the United States Supreme Court ruled that its existence contravened anti-trust legislation and ordered that it be broken up. Standard Oil metamorphosed into household names such as Mobil, Exxon, Amoco and Chevron. John D. Rockefeller, no longer an active corporate executive but still a major shareholder with holdings in all of these new companies, became even richer.

      Oil was not the ‘driving’ energy of the world when Rockefeller’s huge corporation was broken up. Its main use was for lighting and lubrication –Vaseline was one of Standard Oil’s most successful products – and although valuable it was not seen as an essential part of a nation’s strategic needs. Coal was the fuel that drove the steam engines that kept manufacturing and transport on the move. But as the First World War developed and the motor car and the diesel engine came into use, oil became not just a commodity that made money, but a vital ingredient in national survival. It was Britain, a country without any oil of its own, that first recognised the importance of securing and maintaining oil supplies.

      In May 1908, a British engineer called George Reynolds was looking for oil in Iran. Rather like Edwin Drake in Pennsylvania nearly fifty years before, he had been sent there by an English millionaire, William Knox D’Arcy, who had bought the country’s oil concession from the Shah. Armed with his pipe, pet dog and pith helmet, and sustaining his work force with supplies of cider and library books, Reynolds was one of those indefatigable Englishmen who never chooses to give up. Money was running out, conditions were becoming intolerable and he was about to be called home, when he found what he was looking for. His employers founded the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which, by 1912, had built the world’s largest oil refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf.

      In 1914 the British government, prompted by Winston Churchill, who as First Lord of the Admiralty was determined to modernise the Royal Navy by moving it into oil-fuelled technology, secretly took a majority share in the company. Oil now lubricated the national interest. In 1951 the republican government of Iran nationalised the country’s oilfields, but fearing that it might align with the Communist East rather than the West, in 1953 the United States sanctioned the CIA to support a military coup that returned the Shah to the throne. Oil had also been discovered in Saudi Arabia, in 1938, and then in other parts of the Middle East. After the Second World War republican regimes that were hostile to Western interests came to power in countries such as Egypt and Libya. To defend their interests, America and Britain threw their support behind the old established kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. The West’s crucial dependence on oil has kept it closely involved in the politics of the Middle East ever since.

      The enormous wealth created by the discovery of oil became an important issue for the two men who had first gained most profit from it. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were probably the two richest men the world has ever known. As businessmen they were ruthless, sometimes prepared to bribe or threaten to get their way: the expanding world of American commerce was a cruder place than it is today. At the same time a greater awareness of the responsibilities of wealth was beginning to appear. In 1894, the US journalist and progressive reformer Henry Demarest Lloyd, who attacked Standard Oil for its business practices, published a book called Wealth Against Commonwealth in which he observed: ‘Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.’ In an attempt to head off such stinging and potentially damaging criticism both Rockefeller and Carnegie poured hundreds of millions of dollars into public works. In Rockefeller’s case the money went to Chicago University, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (today Rockefeller University), and the General Education Board that announced it would teach children ‘to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way’. In 1913 he and his son established the Rockefeller Foundation that remains one of the richest charitable organisations in the world. Carnegie too used his money to encourage education. His grand scheme was to fund the opening of libraries, and between 1883 and 1929 more than 2,000 were founded all over the world. In many small towns in America and in Britain, the Carnegie Library is still one of their most imposing buildings, always specially designed and built in a wide variety of architectural styles. In 1889, Carnegie wrote his Gospel of Wealth first published in America and then, at the suggestion of Gladstone, in Britain. He said that it was the duty of a man of wealth to set an example of ‘modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance’, and, once he had provided ‘moderately’ for his dependents, to set up trusts through which his money could be distributed to achieve in his judgement, ‘the most beneficial result for the community’. Carnegie believed that the huge differences between rich and poor could be alleviated if the administration of wealth was judiciously and philanthropi-cally managed by those who possessed it. Rich men should start giving away money while they lived, he said. ‘By taxing estates heavily at death, the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire’s unworthy life.’

      The names of Rockefeller and Carnegie live on through the philanthropic trusts their money endowed, permanent reminders of the wealth generated by oil and steel. In Azerbaijan, where the oilfields once competed with and might have overtaken their American counterparts, they remember another philanthropist. Zeynalabdin Taghiyev, the son of a shoemaker, went drilling for oil on rented land near Baku. In a repetition of what happened in other parts of the world, his partners gave up and sold him their shares. In 1873 he struck oil and became one of the richest men in Imperial Russia. He could neither read nor write, but used his money to build schools and theatres and to help pay for the pipeline that still brings water to the city of Baku from the Caucasus Mountains a hundred miles away. When the Red Army reached the city in 1920, Taghiyev’s house was seized. He was allowed to live the last four years of his life in his summer cottage not far away, but his second wife was not so fortunate. She died in poverty on the streets of Baku in 1938. The Bolsheviks turned his splendid residence into the Azerbaijan National History Museum, which is what it still is today. The fortunes of the world’s first oil tycoons were very different. In capitalist America their wealth was their greatest protector: in Bolshevik Russia it destroyed them.

       CHAPTER 8

       The Treaty of Versailles 1919

      The Treaty of Versailles formally brought the First World War of 1914–18 to an end. Its terms had the effect of making a defeated Germany feel impoverished and resentful. In trying to build a world of peace it laid down foundations that would lead to another war.

      In 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, an armistice was signed that ended the fighting of the First World War. Barely a month later, on 10th December, 75,000 soldiers of the German army marched back into Berlin. They were greeted at the Brandenburg Gate by Friedrich Ebert, a socialist politician who was the new Chancellor of the nation. ‘Welcome to the German Republic,’ he shouted. ‘Welcome home. You should march home with your heads held high. Never have men achieved greater things.’ Warming to his theme, he continued: ‘Your sacrifices have been unparalleled. No enemy has conquered you.’ With those words the mood of the new Germany was born. It was an undefeated country that had either been sold out by conspirators in its own ranks or was suffering from difficulties imposed by the punitive terms of an unfair treaty. The Kaiser’s Fatherland was not just a memory. It still existed. It could rise again.

       The Kaiser’s Fatherland still existed … it could rise again.

      Ebert was facing a situation that was in danger of running out of control. He and the other moderate socialists that he led, had supported the war as a necessary patriotic measure. He had not wanted to see the end of the monarchy and felt that the proclamation of Germany as a republic following the Kaiser’s abdication had been premature and needed to be ratified by a nationally elected assembly. But he was overtaken by events. By the time he addressed the first meeting of Germany’s new national СКАЧАТЬ