In 1901, the English financier d'Arcy received a concession to develop oil in Iran. This was the beginning of the largest oil monopoly, British Petroleum Co., one of the seven multinational corporations currently operating in the capitalist world for the trade, production and processing of oil. As the English historian J. R. R. Tolkien rightly pointed out. Jones, the early history of the oil business, including the history of British oil companies, is surrounded by myths, and much remains unclear to this day1 . Jones himself and another English historian, R. Ferrier, have recently published studies on this issue. Although none of them are sensational and not all of the authors ' conclusions can be accepted, the first documentary material they used in the archives of British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell, as well as British government departments and private archives, sheds additional light on the backstage history of the d'Arcy concession 2 .
Attention to the history of the oil business is also connected with the strengthening of imperialist expansion in the Middle East, the origins of which go back to the time when the d'Arcy concession was obtained. Neither then nor later was there any doubt that the British enterprise, along with its economic goals - the development of the oil deposits of Persia, as Iran was then more often called-set political goals that corresponded to the colonial ambitions of England, its desire to establish its dominance over a strategically important area of the Middle East. Everything we know about this concession and the subsequent creation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, formed on the eve of the First World War, clearly demonstrates the military-political nature of this action. The British concession, and later the oil company in Iran, was a step towards preparing England for World War II.
As early as the end of the 19th century, the British Admiralty showed interest in the" fuel re-equipment " of the Navy. However, the first experim ...
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