D’Arcy Concession

In 1901 the government of Persia (modern-day Iran) and the British entrepreneur William Knox D'Arcy signed an agreement known as the D'Arcy Concession. The D'Arcy Concession opened Persia's oil resources for exploration and ultimate exploitation. While large oil-drilling operations already existed, primarily in Russia and the United States, the explorations started as a result of the D'Arcy Concession would open up the entire Middle East to exploitation of its oil resources. Eventually, Middle Eastern nations would take back control of their resources and use them to influence economic and political events.

Since the end of the nineteenth century few commodities have affected economics, politics, war, and even ordinary life as much as oil. A smelly nuisance that occasionally seeped up from the earth with few possible uses that anyone could imagine, it has become the staple of life. Industrialized nations have become totally dependent on energy, in large part generated by petroleum products, principally oil. That oil was crucial to economic survival became a commonplace truth in the twentieth century and continues to be so into the twenty-first. The nineteenth-century German military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote that war is the extension of policy by other means. After the D'Arcy Concession was signed, war and policy became an extension of the efforts to secure the main supply of energy that exists: oil.