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Enterprise and Empire: Officials, Entrepreneurs, and the Search for Petroleum in Southern Nigeria, 1906–1914
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1982
Year
New TechnologiesEngineeringColonialismIndustrialisationPetroleum TechnologyTradeEconomic HistorySocial SciencesAfrican HistorySouthern NigeriaPetroleum ProductionPetroleum Refining ProcessAfrican DevelopmentUnconventional OilCommodity FrontierNew SourcesEnvironmental HistoryIndustrial RevolutionGlobalizationWorld Economic HistoryBusiness HistoryTransition ModelingSydney BrooksTechnologyPetroleum Engineering
the great worldwide search tor petroleum began early in the twentieth century as pioneering businessmen, eager for new sources of profit, and cautious government officials, anxious for new revenues to defray the rising costs of public administration, came to believe in petroleum as the fuel of the future. If the predictions of the new explorers could be trusted, the oil age could be expected to produce striking changes in the economics of industrialized nations. Perhaps even more dramatic would be the effect on hitherto worthless, or dubious, pieces of colonial property, suddenly transformed from barren wastes or tropical jungles into prosperous colonies. Given these possibilities, it is interesting to examine the history of exploration, particularly the relations between business and government, in one British colony, and to determine to what extent traditional structures and ideas conflicted with new technologies and new enterprises. The impression of changing circumstances was spreading widely in Edwardian England. The Royal Navy was converting from coal to oilfired ships. Commentators, like Sydney Brooks in The Nineteenth Century, worried that 'there is no bigger and no more obvious gap in our . . . Imperial equipment than the paucity of our supplies of oil'.1 British companies began to drill in Trinidad, the East Indies, Burma, and elsewhere. But the best source of oil was found in Persia, where the oil was already flowing, where there were reserves sufficient for the foreseeable future, and where the oil lay close to the surface and therefore accessible without the development of new technology. Persia had only one glaring weakness: it was not British. As the value of, and the dependence upon, oil increased, the British might be compelled to act in Persia in ways which would complicate their political and strategic position in the east. If a source of oil could be discovered within the Empire, it would reduce Great Britain's growing dependence on Persia.