This book is a gripping account of the murky world of the international oil industry and its role in world politics. Scandals about oil are familiar to most of us. From George W. Bush's election victory to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, US politics and oil enjoy a controversially close relationship. The US economy relies upon the cheap and unlimited supply of this single fuel. William Engdahl takes the reader through a history of the oil industry's grip on the world economy. His revelations are startling.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"'This is the only accurate account I have seen of what really happened with the price of oil in 1973. I strongly recommend reading it.' --Sheikh Zaki Yamani, former Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia
'I recommend this book to all who wish to know how the world is really run, what are the systems behind the sub-systems we perceive in the daily media, and what are the antecedents of the present global political dilemmas.' --Dr Frederick Wills, former Foreign Minister, Guyana
'For those truly interested about how the world economy functions, this book will be greatly useful. The book treats especially well the political goals of Britain, a thread in modern history all too often overlooked.' --Stephen J. Lewis, economist, City of London
'... one of the most readable books I have ever seen. It will shock people, but it is needed. William Engdahl has found a common thread that ties hundreds of events which, at first glance, appear to be unassociated.' --Leon D. Richardson, Far East Financial columnist, industrialist, advisory board, Sloan School of Management, Massachussetts Institute of Technology
Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Original Language: German --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
256 of 264 people found the following review helpful
By Craig Stern
Format:Paperback
I first ran across this book referenced in a footnote about three years ago and tried to track it down. First I tried to purchase it, but found that it was out of print and used copies were going for $100.00+ on the internet. I found this curious since it was relatively recent (1993) and, given its topic, was certainly of tremendous interest to US readers, even before the events of 9/11 and the subsequent Gulf War II. I was fortunate to find it in my university library and have since read it several times.
I am tempted to go 'on and on' about this book, especially since it is not easily available for people to read. Nor does anyone seem to feel that they can (or are able to?) republish what should be a 'best seller' in the current geopolitical climate and circumstances. Engdahl, whose personal background includes engineering and law (Princeton), working in Texas oil industry, and international economics (University of Stockholm), does a penetrating and eloquent job of sorting out the complex web that connects the controlling interests of international politics with the goals and objectives of global oil and financial interests, these having merged in the last century into the powerful and dominant hegemony of an Anglo-American consortium.
There are so many revelations that are so well documented that one has to slow down and completely reorientate his or her conception of and attitude toward recent history. His tone is neither particularly vindictive nor is it conspiratorial. It looks at people and events and provides plausible motives and methods that are not part of the conventional awareness. For example, (fact) the British navy decided in the late 19th century to change their primary fuel source from coal to oil, thereby (objective) needing to secure access to oil reserves, basically in perpetuity. (result) British agreements for oil resources with the Sheikh of Kuwait date from 1899. (fact) Oil then comes to supplant coal as the primary energy source for all of the industrializing world, and a decade later Germany threatens to become the leading industrialized nation in Europe and (objective) needs a secure source of oil, so they begin construction on the Berlin to Baghdad railway intending to capitalize on agreements to import Iraqi oil. (question) How does Britain meet this emerging geopolitical threat. (objective) Block Germany's access to Middle East oil. (result) Curiously WWI begins with an out-of-the-way assassination in Croatia that just happens to occur near the route of that railway. War ensues and not only is the B-to-B railway cut off, but Germany loses all colonial power in the Middle East.
Shortly after WWI the leaders of the seven major western oil companies meet and agree to not compete with each other but to cooperate, and in 1928 drew up the Red Line agreement that gave virtually control of virtually all Middle East oil to the Anglo-American cartel. Even France's portion was minimalized to Turkish reserves. The Anglo-American consortium came to be known as the Seven Sisters and over the course of the ensuing decades become more and more infused with global banking and financial interestes, i.e., Rockefeller, J.P.Morgan, the Warburgs, the Rotheschilds, Brown Harriman, etc., coming to dominate the world economy by controlling the primary energy source. It is "all about oil" and has been since the turn of the century.
Engdahl's references are extensive and substantiate his disturbing interpretation of history, like the intentional suppression of the German Mark after WWI and the intentional manipulation of the OPEC oil embargo of the 1970s as a premise to artificially inflate global energy costs (a Bilderberg target objective), thereby making BritPetr North Sea oil exploration efforts solvent and bankrupting the debt burdened Third World.
Engdahl's revelatory insights go up through Gulf War I and one can only speculate as to his thoughts on the current Bush administration's economic/tax policies, the Iraq intervention, and their relationship to consolidating control of the global economy into the hands of a few staggeringly wealthy individuals and corporations. This book should be IN PRINT and TODAY!
85 of 91 people found the following review helpful
By Luc REYNAERT
Format:Paperback
H. Kissinger has said: 'control energy and you control the nations.'
W. Engdahl explains the all importance of oil in world domination, and more specifically its geopolitical, military, economic and financial impact.
Oil became for the first time an important raw material during World War I, when air, mobile tank and swifter naval warfare held the upper hand.
After WW I the British sought to secure their petroleum supplies, by creating the League of Nations, which was only a facade of international legitimacy to a naked imperial seizure of territory.
British imperial power was based on 3 pillars: control of world sea-lines, of world banking and finance and of strategic raw materials. Through its free trade policy (liberalism) it tried to preserve and to serve the interests of an exclusive private power: a tiny number of bankers and institutions of the City of London.
Its hegemony was attacked and replaced by the US after WW II, confirmed by the Bretton-Woods Agreements with the creation of the IMF and the World bank.
The new hegemon was (and is ) built on 2 pillars: military power and the dollar, but those pillars are fundamentally intertwined with one commodity: petroleum, the basis of the world economy's growth engine.
10 % of the Marshall aid to Europe after WW II served to buy US oil. The big US oil companies asked top dollars for their exports and obtained also that the aid could not be used to build refineries.
The Vietnam war constituted a massive diversion of the US industry into the production of defense goods (pillar 1).
The first oil shock of 1973 made the US banks the giants of world banking and the oil companies the giants of world industry: 'The artificial oil price inflation was a manipulation of the world economy of such a hideous dimension that it created an unprecedented transfer of the wealth of the entire world into the hands of a tiny minority. It was no less than a global world taxation through petrodollars.' (pillar 2, confirmed by Sheikh Zaki Yamani).
The oil companies also took the 'blossom of the nuclear rose'.
A cardinal goal of US foreign and military policy is control of every major existing and potential oil source. Such control would permit it to decide who gets how much energy and at what price: 'a true weapon of mass destruction'.
William Engdahl's brilliant but frightening analysis puts in the same framework Iraq, the Balkan wars, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergency of the oligarchs, the financial crises across Asia, the civil wars in Africa, the IMF and World bank policies, the fall of the Shah (after the collapse of the negotiations with BP), as well as the murders or 'accidental' deaths of W. Rathenau, I. Krueger, E. Mattei, J. Ponto and A. Moro.
At the start of the new millenium, the US has a near monopoly on military technology and might, commands the world's reserve currency and is able to control the assets of much of the industrial world. It fights for a near monopoly on future energy resources; in other words, for 'full spectrum dominance'.
William Engdahl has written an eye opening, fascinating but extremely dark book.
A must read.
W. Engdahl explains the all importance of oil in world domination, and more specifically its geopolitical, military, economic and financial impact.
Oil became for the first time an important raw material during World War I, when air, mobile tank and swifter naval warfare held the upper hand.
After WW I the British sought to secure their petroleum supplies, by creating the League of Nations, which was only a facade of international legitimacy to a naked imperial seizure of territory.
British imperial power was based on 3 pillars: control of world sea-lines, of world banking and finance and of strategic raw materials. Through its free trade policy (liberalism) it tried to preserve and to serve the interests of an exclusive private power: a tiny number of bankers and institutions of the City of London.
Its hegemony was attacked and replaced by the US after WW II, confirmed by the Bretton-Woods Agreements with the creation of the IMF and the World bank.
The new hegemon was (and is ) built on 2 pillars: military power and the dollar, but those pillars are fundamentally intertwined with one commodity: petroleum, the basis of the world economy's growth engine.
10 % of the Marshall aid to Europe after WW II served to buy US oil. The big US oil companies asked top dollars for their exports and obtained also that the aid could not be used to build refineries.
The Vietnam war constituted a massive diversion of the US industry into the production of defense goods (pillar 1).
The first oil shock of 1973 made the US banks the giants of world banking and the oil companies the giants of world industry: 'The artificial oil price inflation was a manipulation of the world economy of such a hideous dimension that it created an unprecedented transfer of the wealth of the entire world into the hands of a tiny minority. It was no less than a global world taxation through petrodollars.' (pillar 2, confirmed by Sheikh Zaki Yamani).
The oil companies also took the 'blossom of the nuclear rose'.
A cardinal goal of US foreign and military policy is control of every major existing and potential oil source. Such control would permit it to decide who gets how much energy and at what price: 'a true weapon of mass destruction'.
William Engdahl's brilliant but frightening analysis puts in the same framework Iraq, the Balkan wars, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergency of the oligarchs, the financial crises across Asia, the civil wars in Africa, the IMF and World bank policies, the fall of the Shah (after the collapse of the negotiations with BP), as well as the murders or 'accidental' deaths of W. Rathenau, I. Krueger, E. Mattei, J. Ponto and A. Moro.
At the start of the new millenium, the US has a near monopoly on military technology and might, commands the world's reserve currency and is able to control the assets of much of the industrial world. It fights for a near monopoly on future energy resources; in other words, for 'full spectrum dominance'.
William Engdahl has written an eye opening, fascinating but extremely dark book.
A must read.
65 of 72 people found the following review helpful
By Joanneva12a
Format:Paperback
This book tells the hidden history of oil and money, and how they have been the underlying cause of almost every conflict since WWI. At the turn of the century oil became the new fuel to power naval fleets and provide energy. Ever since, the Anglo-American powers and their cohorts have never ceased to interfere in the affairs of other nations. In the cold calculating hands of a few, they have become the strategic weapons of choice to extend their sphere of global hegemony and domination.
The first few chapters lay the groundwork showing how early British `balance of power' politics produced a long and bloody history of colonial subjugation of developing nations and her subsequent steps taken to insure a war against an economically rising Germany who had embarked on a Berlin to Baghdad rail project. Maneuvered out of her isolationism, the United States joined WWI just as Britain, seeing a colossal opportunity at colonialism and control over oil, issued her mysteriously timed Balfour Declaration to Zionist Lord Rothschild during the darkest days of the war, and secured her foothold in Palestine by means of secret agreement.
The decades after, saw an increasingly close association of U.S. and British interests (among others), with many current US organizations being born out of their British counterparts who brought their Malthusian and social intelligentsia views along with them. So close in fact would this relationship become, that Henry Kissinger once admitted in his own words: "I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department"
Mr. Engdahl then takes us on a journey to show how the politically rich and powerful along with their accomplices in the private sector have created chaos out of order and used the depravity of each situation for their own ends as they played out their Faustian fantasies on the world. With their organized looting of nations, each new cataclysm preceded the charade of loaning `new money" to pay "old debts" and is ongoing to this day.
The number of victims in this book is startling, hence the play on words to Churchill's speech. As Bush and his wrecking crew are busily working on a script written long ago, their Iraqi exit strategy is most likely the balkanization of Iraq or imposition of "dollar democracy". Take your pick as either will suffice. And throughout the decades, the mother of all harlots is the system of fiat currency, which is the mechanism by which endless wars are financed while sucking the life of the tax paying middle class dry.
America has been hijacked by minds that have their roots in certain sociopathic ideologies that have gone out of their way to promote policies that lead to exploitation, inequality and despair. We were the first nation to free ourselves from British rule, and sadly in many ways. `A Century of War' shows just how much the former colonies have bought back into the very system our forefathers revolutioned against.
The first few chapters lay the groundwork showing how early British `balance of power' politics produced a long and bloody history of colonial subjugation of developing nations and her subsequent steps taken to insure a war against an economically rising Germany who had embarked on a Berlin to Baghdad rail project. Maneuvered out of her isolationism, the United States joined WWI just as Britain, seeing a colossal opportunity at colonialism and control over oil, issued her mysteriously timed Balfour Declaration to Zionist Lord Rothschild during the darkest days of the war, and secured her foothold in Palestine by means of secret agreement.
The decades after, saw an increasingly close association of U.S. and British interests (among others), with many current US organizations being born out of their British counterparts who brought their Malthusian and social intelligentsia views along with them. So close in fact would this relationship become, that Henry Kissinger once admitted in his own words: "I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department"
Mr. Engdahl then takes us on a journey to show how the politically rich and powerful along with their accomplices in the private sector have created chaos out of order and used the depravity of each situation for their own ends as they played out their Faustian fantasies on the world. With their organized looting of nations, each new cataclysm preceded the charade of loaning `new money" to pay "old debts" and is ongoing to this day.
The number of victims in this book is startling, hence the play on words to Churchill's speech. As Bush and his wrecking crew are busily working on a script written long ago, their Iraqi exit strategy is most likely the balkanization of Iraq or imposition of "dollar democracy". Take your pick as either will suffice. And throughout the decades, the mother of all harlots is the system of fiat currency, which is the mechanism by which endless wars are financed while sucking the life of the tax paying middle class dry.
America has been hijacked by minds that have their roots in certain sociopathic ideologies that have gone out of their way to promote policies that lead to exploitation, inequality and despair. We were the first nation to free ourselves from British rule, and sadly in many ways. `A Century of War' shows just how much the former colonies have bought back into the very system our forefathers revolutioned against.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Awesome, all Depression was foretold way ahead of it's time
Excellent material, great compilation and analysis of the events))
Several of my friends after reading it asked the same question.... Read more
Several of my friends after reading it asked the same question.... Read more
Published 17 months ago by Val Ganusevich
1.0 out of 5 stars
Conspiracy hack.
I had to read this piece of conspiracy trash for a San Francisco State University class, as a companion a Cold War history class. My reaction, "What? Read more
Published on May 14, 2011 by Raisuli the Magnificent
5.0 out of 5 stars
The corporate matrix of debt and consumption
William Engdalh does not hesitate to renounced the current establishment.
Article after article, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, more credable sources emerege... Read more
Article after article, paragraph after paragraph, page after page, more credable sources emerege... Read more
Published on May 8, 2011 by Rakoon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Engdahl is correct about Madeline Albright
This is a great book that explains a lot of the underlying reasons behind conflicts brought by the Anglo-American establishment. Read more
Published on March 31, 2011 by Nathan
5.0 out of 5 stars
Do you want to know the real reasons by the U.S.Imperialism
I can say with confidence that most Americans have no clue why their country has troops stationed or fighting all over the world. Read more
Published on March 25, 2011 by J. Montz
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Hidden History Behind the Rise of Power
A Century of War defines the centres of power behind the events that have shaped modern civilization. Read more
Published on December 7, 2010 by Ila France Porcher
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book will change the way you view the world
Look at history as taught at school, and later repeated by documentaries, and even reinforced by the news :
1. Read more
1. Read more
Published on March 7, 2010 by Guy Denutte
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Century of War
One of the most interesting books I have ever read. The hisroical revelations which tell how we have arrived where we are today. Read more
Published on February 11, 2010 by Staffan Wennberg
5.0 out of 5 stars
The truth, pure and simple
William Engdahl's account is so starkly honest that it's almost disarming, if it weren't for the frightening truths he reveals. Read more
Published on January 21, 2010 by Dong Tran
5.0 out of 5 stars
Enddahl is a must read
I have read all of Engdahl's books and I have learned more about who really controls the U.S. government from him than from any other source. Read more
Published on January 5, 2010 by Bryan P. Schoell
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