History of Oil

Oil is among the most consequential resources humanity has ever unlocked – a liquid that lit the modern world, powered unprecedented prosperity, and also helped bankroll some of its most persistent threats to peace. What began as surface seepages in scattered corners of the globe became, in little more than a century, the lifeblood of industry, transportation, and war. Yet its greatest impact may lie not only in the engines it powered, but also in the ideologies it amplified. This black gold carried an unintended consequence: it poured trillions into states and movements still shaped by older doctrines of conquest, supremacy, and religious dominance. Petroleum did not create those doctrines. It gave them wealth, infrastructure, and global reach.

In the 19th century, the Middle East lay largely under the long-established Ottoman Empire. Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign demonstrated that outside powers could challenge Islamic rule. Meanwhile, Europe was expanding and remained deeply shaped by its Catholic and Protestant inheritance. The Jewish diaspora maintained a presence across Russia, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States, contributing significantly while still enduring anti-Semitism. Slavery had been challenged and, in many places, curbed. The U.S. Civil War brought emancipation, though deep racial prejudice continued to hinder the country’s progress toward a truly free society. The United States itself was emerging as a dynamic new power – rooted in democratic ideals, driven by capitalism, invention, and enterprise, and increasingly influential in world affairs.

At that stage, oil had not yet become the commodity that would power transportation, manufacturing, heat, and light across much of the world.

In 1859, Edwin Drake drilled a successful oil well near Titusville, Pennsylvania, striking oil at a depth of about 70 feet and helping launch a boom in kerosene production for lamp lighting. It was not a gusher; that distinction belonged to the Spindletop discovery near Beaumont, Texas, in 1901. Spindletop opened a massive new era of petroleum production, making gasoline and other petroleum products far more abundant and helping spur the growth of modern industry, including the automobile.

In Persia, oil was discovered in commercial quantities in 1908 after years of costly exploration financed by William Knox D’Arcy, a British investor who had obtained a concession from the Shah. The strike at Masjed Soleyman, with oil surging dramatically from the ground, revealed the first major commercial oil field in the Middle East. In 1932, oil was discovered in Bahrain. Saudi Arabia followed in 1938, when Dammam Well No. 7 finally confirmed commercial quantities after years of disappointment and uncertainty.

The Flood of Oil and Wealth

These discoveries, and the race to find more, fundamentally altered global economics and politics, even as cheap energy improved lives around the world and made many individuals and nations extraordinarily wealthy. The British Navy converted from coal to oil, recognizing the strategic importance of energy security. In Iran, resentment over British control and unequal treatment helped fuel anti-imperialist nationalism and eventually the nationalization of the oil industry. In Saudi Arabia, the 1933 agreement with Standard Oil of California laid the foundation for what later became Aramco, eventually the largest oil enterprise in the world.

For Saudi Arabia, oil transformed a poor and isolated desert kingdom into a global energy power. It stabilized a new state that had been weakened by the Depression and by reduced pilgrimage revenues to Mecca. It also strengthened a religiously dominant governing order. From that position of wealth, Saudi Arabia was able to promote Wahhabi and Salafi interpretations of Islam across the Sunni world and beyond, funding mosques, madrassas, religious literature, and clerical networks in other countries.

In this essay, I use the term Islamism to refer to politicized, supremacist, or theocratic movements that seek to impose Sharia through state power. That usage should not be confused with the beliefs or practices of most Muslims, many of whom reject such movements.

Oil and Islam

Since the articles on this blog deal with Islam, the question of oil and Islam naturally arises. In much of the Western world, Islam was often viewed less as a serious civilizational force than as an exotic or distant culture – colorful, romanticized, and poorly understood.

What should not be forgotten is that Islam’s foundational texts and long history predate petroleum wealth by many centuries. From the Rashidun Caliphate’s rapid conquests from 632 to 661 CE, which overran Byzantine and Sassanian territories across the Middle East and North Africa, through Umayyad expansion into Spain and Central Asia, Islamic empires spread by force as well as faith. The Ottoman Empire institutionalized practices such as the devshirme, the levy of Christian boys from the Balkans who were converted to Islam, trained as Janissaries, and used in imperial service. These developments were not created by oil. They long preceded it.

Winston Churchill saw in Islam a militant and expansionary force long before the major oil strikes of the 20th century. In The River War (1899), he described Islam in deeply hostile terms, portraying it as socially regressive, fatalistic, and resistant to progress. Whatever one makes of Churchill’s language, his warning was that Islam was not a spent force but a living and assertive one. He could not have foreseen the degree to which oil wealth would later magnify the influence of Islamist and fundamentalist movements. [1]

At that point, much of the Western world had only limited knowledge of Islam’s theological, legal, and imperial history. European views were often filtered through Orientalism, colonial assumptions, or superficial observation rather than deep engagement with Arabic sources, hadith literature, or the historical record of conquest, hierarchy, and subjugation. Beneath periods of relative calm lay older civilizational patterns that many in the West neither studied carefully nor understood clearly.

Oily Impact

Oil did not merely power modernity; it reshaped balances of power, enriched autocracies, and funded ideological export. It created wealthy states, powerful elites, and new forms of geopolitical leverage. In some cases the effects were beneficial. In others they were deeply destructive.

Oil wealth turned a once-regionally bounded puritanical movement into a well-financed transnational force. It built institutions, funded clerical influence, and helped crowd out more local, moderate, or plural expressions of the faith.

In short, oil did not create the ideology or the impulse toward dominance. It supercharged them. Pre-existing doctrines supplied the software; petrodollars supplied the hardware and the distribution network. The result was accelerated inequality, suppressed dissent, and the export of zealotry that the West often underestimated until the Iranian Revolution, 9/11, and the long chain of proxy conflicts that followed.

In the Middle East, the flow of wealth at times seemed even more consequential than the flow of oil itself. In tribal and autocratic societies, this wealth, combined with concentrated power, often strengthened militant religious currents and hardened political control. The result was extreme inequality, tighter state authority, and the consolidation of privilege at the expense of the poor. Infrastructure improved dramatically, and many lives rose materially enough to preserve political stability, but dissent was often contained by coercion rather than consent.

Islamist influence also grew through Saudi-backed fundamentalism, the writings of influential thinkers in Egypt such as Sayyid Qutb, and ideologues in South Asia such as Abul A’la Maududi, as well as through movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood. These currents promoted highly politicized readings of Islam that often subordinated freedom of thought, open inquiry, and pluralism to ideological discipline and religious authority.

What followed, in many places, was not simply renewed piety but a sharpened drive to suppress opposition, narrow permissible thought, and define political order in explicitly religious terms.

The modern world still runs on oil and the energy it provides. Skylines blazing with light, highways in motion, and global industry all testify to its power. Oil has done enormous good. It has also financed some of the most damaging forms of fanaticism and repression in the modern age. Unless that link is broken, the abuses will continue.

Unless

If oil wealth can finance repression, proxy warfare, and ideological radicalization, then control over oil revenue is not merely an economic question. It is a strategic and moral one. The central issue is whether that wealth will be used to strengthen ordinary lives through infrastructure, civil welfare, and development, or diverted into corruption, militarism, and terror.

Iran presents one of the clearest examples. Its immense resource wealth has not been used chiefly for the flourishing of its people, but has too often sustained repression at home and violence abroad through proxies, weapons programs, and revolutionary ambition. In such cases, oil revenue does not simply enrich a state; it extends the life and reach of a regime.

For that reason, the geopolitics of oil cannot be separated from the geopolitics of peace. If the revenues of oil-producing states were made more accountable to the populations from whom they are drawn, the political consequences could be profound. Wealth that now underwrites coercion could instead serve human development, stability, and a more durable civil order.

The United States has often understood itself, however imperfectly, as something other than a traditional empire – self-interested, yes, but also at times a restraining power in a dangerous world. If the principles of accountable government, ordered liberty, and individual rights were more deeply rooted in oil-producing societies, the long-term result could be not only greater prosperity, but greater peace.

Whatever President Trump’s precise motives, one possible strategic logic behind his posture toward oil-rich states is that oil wealth should not remain freely available to regimes that convert it into proxy warfare, repression, elite corruption, or ideological destabilization.

Oil has done enormous good. But where it has been captured by authoritarian and ideological power, the damage has run deep. And it will continue – unless.

Grace and Peace

[1] Here is the Churchill quote, “How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property – either as a child, a wife, or a concubine – must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the faith: all know how to die but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.” Oil and the Export of Islamism (How oil wealth amplified Islamism, Autocracy, and Conflict)