Aspiration and Folly: Charles Calmer Hart, Afghanistan, and the Inland Oil Concession

This paper chronicles the improbable saga of the Inland Exploration Company and its abortive oil concession within Afghanistan. Led by former US diplomat Charles Calmer Hart and geologist Frederick Gardner Clapp and backed by a variety of domestic financiers, Inland managed to obtain a national concession within the Afghan kingdom in 1936. This episode represented the peak of Kabul's interwar effort to engage the United States as a strategic counterweight to British and Soviet influence. Operating without State Department support, the ambitious Hart and Clapp contended with geopolitical rivalries and the efforts of rival firms, often relying on showmanship and guile. Their endeavor collapsed suddenly in spring 1938, undone by wider trends in the global oil market, local-level Afghan resistance, and the looming threat of another world war. The Inland saga illuminates interwar Afghan diplomacy, the historical role of smaller petroleum firms, and the wider importance of oil in modern Afghan history.