Servants of oil: History and implications of American oil development in the Persian Gulf, 1928-1960

This work examines the entree of American oil companies in the Persian Gulf in the late 1920s and early 1930s up to the formation of OPEC in 1960 and finds the present U.S. entanglement in the Middle East related to those first three decades of American oil exploitation. As American oil companies aligned with the British and their colonial history and the U.S. government and its increasingly hegemonic and pro-Israeli foreign policy, the industry came to represent a new American imperialism, which intensified anti-Western sentiment in the twentieth century. With the formation of OPEC and nationalization, oil-producing states gained control over the production and pricing of crude; however, those states assumed ownership of an industry that dominated their domestic economies and only functioned within the Western system. While oil provided regional leaders with economic and political power, it also linked them to the West and made them servants of oil.