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Karl Ittmann, "Fuelling Empire: The British Imperial Oil Complex, 1886-1945" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Mark Klobus
Limu Imu and Doug.
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Carl Itman
Here we have the Limu Emu in.
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Marshall Poe
Its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
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Mark Klobus
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Carl Itman
Cut the camera.
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Mark Klobus
They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty.
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Carl Itman
Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary unwritten by.
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Mark Klobus
Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
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Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go. Go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Mark Klobus
Hello everyone and welcome to New Books in British Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Mark Klobus and today I'm speaking with Carl Itman, author of the book Fueling Empire, the British imperial Oil Complex, 1886-1945. Carl, welcome to the New Books Network.
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Carl Itman
Hello. It's really a pleasure to be here.
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Mark Klobus
It's a pleasure to have you on our show. I Was wondering if you could start us off by telling our listeners something about yourself.
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Carl Itman
Okay. I was trained as a British historian and then in the middle of my career switched over to studying the British Empire. Like a lot of my colleagues got a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and I just retired as a professor of history from the University of Houston this last spring.
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Mark Klobus
So what led you to write a book about the relationship of the oil industry in the British Empire?
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Carl Itman
Well, it's an interesting sort of coming together of different interests. I'll start by pointing out on a personal note, I was raised for a good portion of my life and live for a long portion of my life on the Gulf coast where oil is everywhere. I live in Houston, and the oil complex is enormous. And so just from being here and being around the oil industry, you start to take a deeper interest in it. I was also lucky that my department had two excellent oil environmental historians, Martin Melozzi and Joseph Pratt, and a group of other people, including people like Thai Priest, who were interested in the history of oil. And so I began to move towards their interest as I finished my second book. And that got me into the idea of looking at the oil industry from a British perspective. And that's really where I started my work, trying to figure out what would my approach be.
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Mark Klobus
It really is a fascinating subject that incorporates so much of what is happening in the late 19th and 20th centuries. You're talking in your book about empire. You're talking about energy economies, you're talking about strategy and global power. Now it's a subject that has other books have been written about, and you pay tribute to those books in your introduction. But you also explained that your book is carving out new territory. I was wondering if you could explain what you're doing in your book and what are you saying about the British oil industry, specifically the Imperial oil industry that really expands and deepens our understanding of it?
- [04:55]
Carl Itman
Well, I think there are a variety of ways of putting that. Start by saying that the British oil industry as a whole has really not been studied as a piece of the larger global oil industry. It has two very large companies, but in many ways, much of the story of oil is about American oil companies. And so I wanted to try to figure out a way to talk about the importance of the British oil industry, while at the same time recognizing how that industry is very different from the one that the United States built. And the most important one that really struck me from the beginning and really forms the core of the book, that the British build the second largest oil industry in the Western world without having any domestic oil reserves. In other words, this is entirely an overseas oil industry. And that, of course, leads you into questions of empire and British economic influence.
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Mark Klobus
And that is something that I really did appreciate from your book, because, as you note, there are some fantastic company histories out there, and there's some good books about the British state and oil, especially when it comes to questions about the transition from coal to oil, especially in, like, say, the Royal Navy. But the further I read, the more I did come to appreciate that there really hasn't been something about the industry as a whole, especially in that context. And it felt like, in some ways, you were taking a lot of these pieces and putting them together, but you were also finding these new ones about elements of it that have largely been left out of it. For example, your chapter about labor was especially fascinating, which kind of gets to. The imperial element was just a matter of the territories that Britain possessed, but the labor that they used to work the fields and produce the oil.
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Carl Itman
In recent years, the whole question of racial capitalism, that is the way in which race and. And ethnicity play a role in the development of sort of the economy of Europe and of the world, has really become important. 1. When I started looking at the British oil industry, you realized very quickly that 80% of the workers are not British, but in fact, are from their local economies, local societies, and no one has ever really talked about them. They are sort of a blank slate. And people weren't even sure there was any evidence available, because one of the problems with doing work in the archives is that it's written by the British, and they're really focused on what they're concerned with. So you have to tease it out of the archives and of the materials you can find to try to reconstruct the history that was there. But in many ways, it's just sort of covered over as well. It's there, but we don't really know anything about it.
- [07:44]
Mark Klobus
You start, though, by focusing upon the role that the British state plays in all this. And it's one that is not just as the British imperial state, but it's also the British national state. I was wondering if you could talk about the relationship between the British state and the oil companies, which is so fascinating about how it sometimes is symbiotic, occasionally it's antagonistic, but it is so integral to. To understanding your subject throughout the text.
- [08:19]
Carl Itman
I think that that's. I mean, the sort of dichotomy between private and state that often drives our thinking about economic life really is difficult. To sustain this. If you look at the British oil industry and the British government's participation, what's interesting is there's been a lot of work done on the British state at the very highest levels. So we, not, we know a lot about the Admiralty and Winston Churchill and the policymakers. But no one ever talks about the British state at the level of the colony or of the dependent states, say in Iran or in Burma. And I was very interested in trying to get away from just the top level of decision makers, senior politicians, very well known, powerful people. And look at how the British colonial system, the officials who are on the ground have to deal with the question of oil after policy is set at the level of Whitehall and in Westminster. And so that's when I started to think about what is this relationship. And the second thing is that people talk about the influence of oil companies in sort of a general way about their ability to pressure governments or the way in which they shape oil markets to their advantage. But no one has ever really talked about them in a sustained way as actors than political actors themselves, acting in sort of what we would consider to be state like ways. You know, building roads, schools, building hospitals, acting like governments in many ways, while at the same time living under either a colonial administration or in Iran and Iraq under independent governments that are under British pressure. And so it's sort of three things at once. National policy, how individual colonial officials or colony officials in various oil states try to deal with the question of oil. And then how pressure from oil companies and their behavior in these various states influences the relationship between the state and oil. It's a long and complicated story, but I can say that at various times the British government is not aware of what oil companies are doing. And oil companies always talk about patriotism and serving the empire and serving the nation. But they're also multinational, self interested corporations trying to maximize profit. Which means their interests don't always align with that of the British government or more importantly the oil states themselves. In other words, much of what the oil companies do is, is basically at the cost or at the expense of local oil societies. They take revenues, they pollute the environment, they're very coercive in their use of force. And so that kind of behavior and the ways in which the British government can or can't respond to me was fascinating. You have, you know, in Iran, British officials are ordered around by the, the company officials of British Petroleum in a way that I think most people would find shocking having studied the British Empire.
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Mark Klobus
It's understandable though, when you make the point that you do in that chapter about the knowledge deficit among British officials, about how you have these officials who are famously incredibly well educated that go to the finest schools, they can declaim sometimes in Latin and Greek, and yet they're so profoundly ignorant of, of geology and of technology and how they're reliant upon these executives and these geologists who are not part of the British state but are coming from outside. And then you have that national element which is where so much of that expertise resides with outsiders, Americans, for example. And there you have the problem of, okay, there's this knowledge base we could draw upon, but can we really trust that their interests are aligned with those of the state? And so they become. They become very dependent upon the guidance of that group because, and it seems like in a sense there's almost this implicit agreement that the state is going to help these companies in there because otherwise they're blind men in the darkness, needing uncertain as to how best to take advantage of this vitally important energy source.
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Carl Itman
Well, I mean, they are, in many ways, it's funny, they are blind to it. Timothy Mitchell and other people talk about petro knowledge, which is sort of the knowledge required to produce and distribute petroleum. Officials don't have that knowledge. And that's the case from the very beginnings of the oil industry all the way through the 1980s and 1990s. And one could argue even today that oil companies, whether American or British, really have almost a monopoly on knowledge about oil. And so it's very difficult for governments to assert themselves even when they seemingly have the upper hand, because it's very difficult for them to assess, well, is this true or not true, as you suggested? It's also the case that the British government, when it first has this policy of trying to maximize, and that's how they look at it. The amount of oil that British oil companies control, they also wanted in colonies or dependent states where they exert political control, control. So not only do they want more British oil companies, but they want them in particular places, which puts them in an unusual spot. They're also really worried about what they see as monopoly capitalism, a sort of almost like a 19th, early 20th century trust buster attitude that, you know, monopolies will, you know, exploit us, when in fact they really don't understand that as a global market emerges, oil companies are collaborating together. There isn't one dominant player, they're fixing prices, they're determining market share. And so the real enemy isn't some monopoly oil company, but rather this sort of collusive environment in which oil companies work together to forward their sort of shared interests at the state, or sorry, sort of again, at the expense of the British government and oil states themselves. For example, during the Second World War, the British government is being charged inflated prices for oil that derive from monopoly or the oligopic position of price setting by the oil companies. And they don't realize this fully until after the war when they start investigating how much money they ended up spending because of inflated prices used by oil companies to price oil on a global scale. And that's just one example of many where the oil companies really hold you up a hand, but they also rely on the British state. When push comes to shove, they need protection, they need political support.
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Mark Klobus
And you have to question just how committed the British state was to breaking out of that, given the. It sometimes felt like a bit of an indifferent investment in expanding what we might think of as British national knowledge of geology and the oil industry. I'm thinking here of that chapter that you have about how the British, you know, the efforts the British put into developing both oil technology and oil expertise. And they certainly made an effort. And yet it's interesting how that effort that you describe throughout the 20th century is one that does not really seem to be wholehearted, that they're finding themselves in situations where they recognize the need and the desire, but they're not really making that commitment.
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Carl Itman
It's ironic that the government, having made this priority, really limits its focus to operations in foreign states. They don't look at the larger picture. And it also reflects the British state and British society's educational priorities. Even when petroleum science, as I call it, which is basically geology and engineering, become university subjects and are producing graduates, those graduates are seen as inferior to Oxford and Cambridge educated generalists who are usually preferred for both government and corporate leadership. And so even though government will collaborate with oil companies in creating this infrastructure of education to train British scientists, neither the government nor oil companies really value them as much as they should. And it's not really until the 1990s, 1980s, 1990s, that engineers and other oil specialists become dominant in the corporate sector.
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Mark Klobus
Do you feel that that might be tied in some ways to the discovery of domestic oil in the 1960s and 70s in the North Sea? Or was that just basically a sort of an acknowledgment and throwing in the towel about the, about the direction of human society?
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Carl Itman
Well, I'll sort of step back a minute and then answer your question. If we think about the British position, it's not really that different than the American position in the 1940s. Both the American and the British government sort of decide not to worry about collusion among oil companies and instead just worry about how much oil they produce. And that's partly they lack leverage and partly they don't want to disrupt oil production. And so if you look to the 1980s and the 1980s and 1990s, yes, there's oil production and yes, there's more knowledge, but even then they don't have the experts who can actually step in. If they nationalize British Petroleum, for example, and run the company, they would still have to run through the company, and that would not be a very useful or very. A very smooth relationship. There are more people in Britain who are familiar with the oil industry because of the growth of the oil industry in the post World War II period. So I think that's in some ways the people who began to inhabit Shell and British Petroleum are British trained and have long experience in the oil fields. And so the 1980s and 1990s, you finally have a cadre big enough and the prestige of science and technology has become great enough in the oil industry to sort of overcome this existing old boy network that sort of put technology and science as sort of a side issue rather than the central part of understanding the oil industry.
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Mark Klobus
But of course, by that point the imperial assets are gone and they're having to interact with more often with the local actors, the states and their much firmer control now over those industries in those regions.
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Carl Itman
I mean, Britain becomes an importer of oil in the post 45 period from places like Iran and Iraq. And when it loses control in those areas, it basically becomes a consumer with some specialized knowledge and access. What's interesting is that for 70 years or 60 years, the British exerted enormous control over oil states. And this ability to force oil states into sort of dependence on the British state and forcing them to deal with British oil companies allows the British to overcome that distance and sort of remoteness of these societies. Now, after the 1970s, when you have OPEC and nationalization, that goes away, but for a very long time, the British were quite successful. And it's kind of an ironic thing to say at coercing other states into doing their bidding.
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Mark Klobus
What you describe is you often talk about this coercion, but you also talk about the degree to which the British state supported these industries. And I'm thinking here about your chapter regarding labor relations, which again, I've already mentioned, but it was really fascinating to see the scale of labor. We talk about empire As I mentioned, in terms of territory. But here you have, you know, this effort to not just, you know, develop indigenous or draw upon indigenous labor pools, but also they're bringing in labor on from other parts of the empire. And the state provides support for ensuring that that labor is obedient, is not disruptive, and is perfectly willing to use all the tools of the state, even up to military force, to ensure that these workers are working and without demanding too much in the way of pay and relief.
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Carl Itman
That's very true. One of the ironies of the British Empire and its emphasis on its liberation, the liberating effects or its bringing of the rule of law, is that for the most part, the rule of law is denied to people like oil workers. They're not allowed to have freedom of assembly. They're not allowed to unionize. They have no legal status within colonial society, really. They have no legal status within their own, say in Iran, Iraq. They are not even defined as a separate category of workers. And so in many ways, what the British are able to do is use the absence of state power, whether it's in Iran and Iraq or in Burma and Trinidad, to create a system where British governments, British colonial civil servants, and the oil companies can really control the labor market in a sort of unprecedented way, to sort of regulate how work is done, to allow oil companies enormous power over their workforces. Most of the sort of welfare reforms that occur are done by the British oil companies when they offer medical and treatment. It's done entirely to keep those workforces as healthy as possible, to make them productive, not to give them any benefits that they can claim by right. If you're fired, you no longer have healthcare. So it's a big disincentive to go on strike.
- [22:33]
Mark Klobus
I was reading this, reading that chapter, it just reminded me so much of the Kafala system that you see today and how there's. And I don't know enough about the Kafala system to figure out the chicken or the egg here, but it was just really interesting. See how a lot of the practices that critics of the Kefala system charge towards with the abuses, you can see it how the British were doing it, for example, if they struck, for example, the easiest way to handle this, just to ship them back. And under the terms of their contract, they have to pay for that very powerful disincentive for that reason alone. But you also have. You describe as well that the tensions between having, say, Indians in. In Burma working in the Burmese oil industry and how that ends up exacerbating Tensions, which really plays into a very traditional British imperial strategy, which is playing local groups off one another so as to remain as to maintain themselves as the arbiter of power.
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Carl Itman
That's exactly right. The British in the 19th century facilitated this global system of labor migration. So South Asian and Chinese workers, Middle Eastern workers, are moving throughout their own regions. Some of it is driven by economic factors within Asia or in the Middle east, but it's also driven by the actions of British government to encourage labor migration and to regulate it. And oil companies are able to tap into these streams of migration to supplement their labor forces. Like you say in. In Burma, they recruit Indian, mostly Muslim workers, most of them from Chittagong in Bengal, and they bring them over as specialized groups of workers who are sort of isolated from the general population and even from the rest of the Burmese labor force. These same people from Bengal will end up in Iran working for the Anglo Persian Oil Company, the forerunner British Petroleum. And so they're able to create these specialized groups of workers who are dependent upon being allowed to stay. Now, they're well paid, they're very frequently highly skilled, but in many ways they remain dependent on the oil companies. And the differences in their pay and sort of privileges they have compared to indigenous workers, say Burmese workers or Iranian workers, is noticeable. And it generates sort of ethnic tension that's sort of an undercurrent in all of these societies in the 20th century, where in any of the oil states, you see these simmering ethnic conflicts and the labor practices of British oil companies and the ways in which the British government encourages this sort of bringing in of migrant workers just exacerbates these tensions. And, for example, you have Kurds and Christians at war with one another in Kirkuk and in the surrounding area, but they're also working in the oil fields together. And so it's difficult to sort of stop these tensions without essentially removing one group or changing the way in which ethnic groups are treated by the oil companies and by the British state.
- [25:44]
Mark Klobus
And that's another aspect of that control that they exert, which that they're in these remote regions and they're in an environment that is basically created for them by these oil companies. The chapter you have on infrastructure, and you've already, you know, alluded to it earlier, is one that goes into just the extent of it in ways that, as I'm reading, I'm thinking, you know, this. This seems so obvious, and yet you're piecing together the fact that the roads, the housing and everything has to be provided by these oil Companies, they're changing the physical face of the. Of these. Of these places. And they're doing so in ways that add to that sense of leverage. And yet you also describe. This was the other part I thought was really interesting, the sort of the. How they had. The people involved are diluting themselves, the people governing this, because they're talking about how we're all in this together. And yet they're creating a model version of that imperial state in which you have your white executives, your specialists are living very luxurious lives, while the locals and the important laborers are living in very arduous conditions.
- [26:59]
Carl Itman
Well, I think that's part of the contradiction of this imperial oil industry. In one sense, it was seen as this perfect solution that gave British control. But the ways in which that control was exerted created conflict, created tensions, created a political backlash. One of the reasons that labor unrest is so common in the British Empire, which I think when I started studying, I realized I hadn't understood that before, is that the pay and conditions are absolutely dreadful. And they don't improve over time. They're essentially subsistence level wages. You don't learn a lot of new skills that you can apply to other industries. So you don't really have any sort of portable knowledge. And you're also working in absolutely dreadful, very dangerous conditions. The oil industry even today, is probably the most dangerous industry in the world on a large scale. And so these kinds of conditions breed a backlash. So this notion that you have this imperial world where you divide workers apart and you have this imperial complex with white people who are all in charge, it's true, but it doesn't control the people who are working and living in this oil complex, as I call it. Their response to these conditions is going to force a series of political and labor clashes that really begin to undermine the ability of the British to control the oil industry. And that's one of the reasons it unravels so fast after 1945, that they were already slipping in the 1930s. When I talk about the crisis of the oil industry in the late 30s, it's happening in the British Empire in places like Burma and Trinidad. But it's also happening in Venezuela, in Mexico, where you have nationalization of oil. And the United States, we have a series of wildcat strikes in the late 1930s. So there's sort of a global pushback against oil companies. And the British Empire is part of that pushback. And in some ways, they can't engineer their way out of this.
- [29:01]
Mark Klobus
It also points to the real limits of their use of surveillance and security to control these populations. And that's something that really goes back to the very beginning about this, especially after World War I. You describe how it really is interesting how on the one hand, it's an effort that is on a shoestring. We're talking about just a few dozens of people tasked with this, and yet they had this enormous remit to monitor, surveil, arrest these people in order to avoid any hint of unrest. You add to that, of course, the element of the concerns about communism in the interwar era and the fears of that infiltration, that the British state is going to jump with both feet on any sort of sign of disturbance, and yet it's not solving a problem, it's just basically ignoring it.
- [30:05]
Carl Itman
Or it's pretending that ultimately you can use violence to replace politics. Which is an interesting. There's violence in sort of two ways in the British oil industry, the oil complex, as I call it. One is the sort of violence associated with the military and paramilitary police and the invasion of Burma and the conquest of Upper Burma to create a British oil industry there. The invasion of Iran and Iraq in the First World War. War, and the sort of horrible consequences of that, that sort of explicit violence by the state and the use of security forces to sort of obtain oil and secure oil, is one part of the violence. The other part of the violence, and that I think it goes to, your question about surveillance and control, is this sort of coercive environment in which people lived and worked, in which they didn't know who they could talk to, in which they didn't have rights, and in which, you know, if they didn't like what they were being paid, they had no real alternative. So that there's coercion on a sort of macro and a micro scale. And both of those generate pushback. And by the 1930s, there's an increasing politicization of the. Of the plight of the oil workers. So in the societies they live in, in places like Iran and Iraq, Trinidad and Burma, nationalists who are beginning to emerge in the interwar period as a significant political threat to the British Empire, begin to see the oil workers as a sort of an example of the ways in which the British exploit colonial societies. And also the control of oil itself is seen as a root of exploitation, that the society's resources are controlled by a foreign power, and most of the profits and benefits of this are being siphoned off to Britain to both public and private stakeholders. And so that. That allows oil workers and political groups to merge together in a way that in the long run is going to be impossible for the British to suppress. They create a British military industrial complex and they're dependent upon it, but the sort of tactics they use end up backfiring on them in the long run.
- [32:21]
Mark Klobus
And of course, they're so focused upon dealing with this internal threat that they don't really necessarily completely consider the external threat. And that comes in the Second World War, which is the point at which the British really start leaning even more heavily than ever on the oil industry at the very time that you had this massive disruption economically. And in the case of the Japanese in Southeast Asia, militarily, when they take oil fields away from the British.
- [32:53]
Carl Itman
No, it's an interesting story that for all their internal surveillance and focus on internal unrest in Burma in particular, they miss the whole story of protecting. Even though they're worried about Japan, they miss the opportunity to actually protect and defend the oil fields. They don't even have air cover for Rangoon, which means that the oil facilities are open to attack. And so all of their concern about securing them literally on the eve of the invasion isn't so much the Japanese threat, but the fact that they're afraid that Burmese nationalists are going to sabotage oil industry stuff. So they put soldiers all over the country to guard from sabotage. And when the Japanese invade, the military is incapable of responding effectively. They're essentially internal security forces rather than modern fighting armies.
- [33:46]
Mark Klobus
It reminds me of the assumption that Walter Short made at Pearl harbor, which is he's so concerned about the Japanese population that he lines up the planes, know, all nicely in a row, not, you know, which basically made them, you know, extremely vulnerable to the actual threat that the military, that the Japanese military poses.
- [34:02]
Carl Itman
No, I mean, in so many ways it's self, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, I mean, the British are fairly, let's, let's just say they're ruthless and pragmatic in many ways about, about oil. They recognize that places like Burma or Borneo, which we haven't really talked about, which is sort of a, a growing sector for the British in the 1930s, oil production, those are indefensible in their view, and they don't produce as much oil. And so they, they essentially make a decision that we will do our best, but we're not going to be able to probably do anything but destroy the oil facilities and retreat. And so they do that in places like Iran and Iraq, where oil production is far larger and far more significant, particularly for fighting a global war, given where the oil is produced. They make a Lot bigger effort. They're going to overthrow the Iraqi government, they're going to overthrow the Iranian government. They use Iraq as a base to attack Lebanon and Syria. The oil industry in the Middle east, particularly in Haifa, is supplying the British fleet in the Mediterranean and the British Air Force as well. So that there, when they need to, they will focus on what's absolutely critical and be ruthless in their use of force, no matter who they have to. They're basically punishing their own clients in Iran and Iraq, but they do so to absolutely gain control and not have any risk of losing access to oil.
- [35:29]
Mark Klobus
And of course, the irony is that in the end, they do end up losing that control and they do end up losing that position. But they don't lose it to the Japanese or the Russians or even the locals. They lose it to the United States.
- [35:43]
Carl Itman
Well, that is the part of the story that's probably been told by so many different people. David Painter, in particular, has written about the sort of the shift in power between Britain and America and focusing on the oil industry. And it is one of the ironies that they've always been worried about the Americans, but by 1945, their resources are so depleted that they are dependent upon the Americans and can no longer sort of engage in sort of the independent activity that they had been able to do in the interwar period. So their ability to sort of put down any sort of unrest or to force oil states to agree to unfair conditions are really damaged by their lack of resources and the willingness of the Americans to basically say, look, you want more money, we'll give you more money right now. It's not that the Americans are less controlling. It's just that they're not going to argue about resources, the level of resources that have floated these oil states. They're just going to try to shape the ruling elites of these oil states to be friendly to the United States. So places like Kuwait or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, their concern isn't, are we going to pay them too much? It's rather, can we pay them enough to keep them happy and maintain stability? And that becomes a sort of. It builds on what the British have done, which is rely on undemocratic elites to control oil states in alliance with the British. Every colonial state in Iran and Iraq, you had those groups that were willing to collaborate with the British in exchange for resources and power. And so that's one of the reasons the British were able to sustain themselves, even though they weren't as great a power as they were before the First World War. After 1945, that's all going to unravel pretty quickly.
- [37:31]
Mark Klobus
And yet even in spite of that unraveling, there is still so much of an imprint that they leave behind, one that you point to exists in some forms for decades afterward.
- [37:45]
Carl Itman
In some ways, it's cultural. So, for example, American oil workers, I've known a lot of expats because of where I live. When they're working in the Middle east, they. They perform activities that date back to the British oil complex of the interwar years. And they talk about tiffins or just a sort of minor point. There's something called hash house harriers, who are people who run and they do sort of directed runs that goes back to what the British did in the Empire and did in the Middle East. Americans essentially take over those kinds of cultural patterns. And the British are still there. They're still disproportionately represented in the global oil industry, particularly in the Middle east and Africa. And that's sort of a legacy of empire that persists even after the British lose control of the empire and lose their sort of edge over oil states in the 1960s and 1970s.
- [38:40]
Mark Klobus
They're not as dominant, but they still are. They still have that. Not even a toehold. Sounds more like a foothold or even larger in. As a result of that imperial presence dating back 70, 80, 90 years.
- [38:56]
Carl Itman
In some ways, it reflects the evolution of the global oil industry. There's a variety of sort of stages after 1945. But one thing that's very interesting in sort of 45 through the early 70s is the extent to which British and American companies collaborate on projects and work together to produce oil in Kuwait or Bahrain or Saudi Arabia, less so in Saudi Arabia, but Iran before the revolution, the Iranian Revolution of 79. They're essentially joint ventures for all practical purpose. And in that environment, the British are able to have a significant role and significant influence. And it also allows the British to obtain oil at a better price and a more sort of secured supply than would have been the case if they were not part of that system. Hmm.
- [39:46]
Mark Klobus
We appreciate the time you've taken to speak with us, but before we go, could you tell us what you're working on now?
- [39:51]
Carl Itman
Well, I'm working on projects related to earlier work I've did, But right now, in terms of oil, I'm working on a piece to look at how the British Empire adjusted to offshore oil beginning in the 1930s, up until the 1950s, and how they tried to, what I call move the empire offshore and try to figure out how do you organize offshore drilling and what are the possibilities and prospects for that? And so it's a new legal and political regime that they're trying to create on the fly. This is happening while the Americans are beginning to, for the first time in the 1930s, really drill in the Gulf offshore in a sustained, significant way.
- [40:34]
Mark Klobus
Well, it sounds like a really interesting subject. I look forward to reading it when it comes out.
- [40:39]
Carl Itman
Well, one always says these things sound really interesting until you have to write them and then the reality hits home and it becomes a little more complicated.
- [40:51]
Mark Klobus
Well, Carl, thank you very much for taking some time out of your schedule to speak with us. I hope you have a wonderful day.
- [40:56]
Carl Itman
You too. Thank you. I appreciate the time. And I always. Here's the one problem. You can never stop a historian from talking about their books.
- [41:04]
Mark Klobus
Well, in that case, it's to our benefit. Thank you.
- [41:07]
Carl Itman
Thank you.