‘Fouled by Oil’? Oil Diplomacy and the Lausanne Conference, 1914–1928

The centenary of the 1923 Lausanne Treaty has seen historians challenge the familiar view of this re-settlement of the defeated Ottoman Empire as an enduring success, drawing attention to the ways in which the treaty validated a mandatory population exchange, now viewed as a form of ethnic cleansing. This reappraisal of Lausanne’s place in fashioning a new Middle East order has yet to address oil diplomacy. Competition among governments, oil companies and concession-hunters for rights to the oil of the former Ottoman Empire, in particular Mosul, inspired considerable speculation at the 1922–3 Lausanne Conference, and continues to fuel conspiracy theories surrounding Lausanne’s ‘secret clauses’. A tendency to tell the history of oil diplomacy in the first half of the twentieth century from the perspective of nation-states has made it difficult to explain the success with which emerging MNEs manipulated host governments, rather than being tools in the hands of statesmen pursuing energy security/energy independence. This essay argues that we need to assign oil companies greater agency if we want to understand the emergence of a global oil cartel.