British Diplomatic Oil Crisis: Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Geopolitical Rivalries in the Persian Gulf: Drawing a Lesson? Or Sir Anthony Eden‘s Delusion of Grandeur.
Iranian Oil
Company’s head office at Khorramshah. Accompanied by a crowd,
the Governor announced that the oil was nationalised. Musaddiq had taken an
uncompromising stand on the issue of British imperialism. ‘He is obsessed by
a single idea, the nationalisation of oil and the elimination of what he
considered the maleficent influence of the Oil Company from Persia,’
30 wrote Sir Francis Shepherd from Teheran to the Foreign
Office, in one of his reports.
The British Government expressed its sense of
indignation in the following
way:
It was British enterprise, skill
and effort which discovered oil under the
soil of Persia, which has got the oil out, which has built the refinery,
which has developed markets for Persian oil in 30 or 40 countries, wharves,
storage tanks and pumps, roads and rail tanks and other distribution
facilities, and also an immense fleet of tankers. This was done at a time
when there was no easy outlet for Persian oil in competition with the vast
American oil industry.
None of these things would or
could have been done by the Persian Government
or the Persian people.31
The role of
oil in Britain’s energy requirements was getting more vital year
by year, as domestic and other coal supplied became even more expensive and
inadequate in quantity.
-
PRO, London, FO371/91535/
EP1531, The General Political,
Sir Francis Shepherd, British Ambassador in Teheran, to the Foreign
Office, Confidential, 14th May 1951. -
PRO, London, FO371/91599,
The General Political Correspondence of, Sir Donald
Fergusson, the Permanent Under Secretary of the Ministry of Fuel and
Power, to Richard Stockes, who knew the region at first hand through
his engineering firm, Ransome and Rapier, Tom Secret, Private and
Personal, 3rd October 1951.Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177
