A PIPELINE RUNS THROUGH IT THE STORY OF OIL FROM ANCIENT TIMES TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR

KEITH FISHER

Allen Lane, 768pp, £35

Once it became apparent that oil was a better fuel for battleships than coal and that motor vehicles were here to stay, no prisoners were taken by those determined to exploit this gilt-edged resource. For instance Royal Dutch Shell literally exterminated the unfortunate Sumatrans below whose land there was a huge oil field. A similar fate had already befallen the native American tribes of New York and Pennsylvania, the fiefdom of Standard Oil’s John D Rockefeller. And when, in 1885, oil was discovered in Upper Burma, oil-less Britain promptly invaded.

In the Times, Max Hastings said that ‘one of the many fascinating conclusions’ reached by Keith Fisher was that when we lost the American War of Independence, we had no inkling that we were forfeiting ‘not merely a continent, but also energy sources that a century and a half later would enable the US to eclipse the British Empire’. Hailing this ‘wonderfully detailed and colourful book’ in the Telegraph, Stephen Poole contrasted the optimism that greeted the Oil Age and its supposed benefits, e.g. ‘Cities without steaming mountains of equine dung’, with ‘the creeping disaster of global warming overshadowing us now’. But according to the Literary

Review’s Barnaby Crowcroft, Fisher’s sombre account endorsed the ‘anti-humanism of modern-day apocalyptic environmentalism … Modern industry ... has delivered global improvements in life expectancy, nutrition and literacy and reductions in poverty, infant mortality and the need for backbreaking manual labour unknown in all previous human history, making possible unprecedented gains in personal freedom. A river runs through that too.’