Chapter 33 Britain's Oil Control Secret

From the discovery of a large oil field in Mexico in 1910 to the mid-1920s, the British Mexican Eagle Petroleum Co., Ltd., under the leadership of the chairman of the board of directors, Wittman Pearson (Lord Cowdray), exploited oil in Mexico. The market made frequent appearances and struck hard, competing with the aggressive Rockefeller Petroleum Company of the United States. Like every other big British oil executive, Pearson worked for the British Secret Intelligence Service. In 1926 he sold his interest in the Mexican Eagle to Royal Dutch Shell.Pearson became Lord Cowdray, who organized Mexico's oil wealth into a protected trust that would become Pearson Corporation.It is one of the most influential business groups in London.The group owns publications such as London's "The Economist" and "Financial Times", and has a large stake in the influential London-New York-Paris commercial bank Lazar de Frille.

In the global scramble for control of the major oil reserves, the policies of the British Foreign Office, the Secret Intelligence Service and the BP interests coordinated in a very subtle but very effective way.At that time, except for the Soviet Union, it was difficult for other countries to do this. By the early 1920s, the British government also controlled a large private military industry.In fact, these military-industrial enterprises directly serve the interests of the government, that is, to dominate and eventually control all areas with huge oil reserves.Four of these companies play an important role, all of which are part of British secret intelligence operations.

Royal Dutch Shell, despite its name, has fallen into the secret control of agents of the British government.The Dutchman Deterding first recognized the potential of oil for civilian use while in Sumatra in the Dutch East Indies. Later, he was promoted to the president of a small Dutch lamp oil company called Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, which specialized in Indonesian oil. . In 1897, Deterding realized that it was crucial to control the sea shipping deadlines of his trade, so he entered into a strategic alliance with a shipping company.He merged his Royal Dutch Petroleum Company with a London-based Shell Shipping and Trading Company.Shell Shipping and Trading was established by the shrewd British shipping magnate Marcus Samuel (Lord Beard), who also built the world's first oil tanker.

The merger of Deterding's Royal Dutch Company and Samuel's Shell Shipping and Trading Company became the most powerful trust in the world. Of course, this was inseparable from the secret support of the British government.Even in the United States, through the California Oilfield Company and Oklahoma's Rossana Oil Company, the company soon became a competitor to Rockefeller's Standard Oil Group.Both of these companies are wholly owned by Shell overseas without worrying about being subject to US antitrust laws.Within the United States, antitrust laws placed many restrictions on Rockefeller Standard Oil.

At the same time, they also formed the Anglo-Persian Petroleum Company to exploit the exclusive oil resources of the British government in Persia and the Middle East. In its quest to gain control over future global oil exploration, the British government has also established another ties firm, a little-known company with strong ties to the British Foreign Office and secret intelligence agencies around the world.The company was called Darcy Exploration Company. In the early 1920s, oil scrambles had distinct political characteristics, and the British Darcy Exploration Company was at the center of this politics. "The agents of the Darcy Exploration Company in Central America or West Africa, China and Bolivia always seem to be above all agents of the British Government," commented a contemporary.

The fourth and final entity of the British government engaged in a secret oil war around the world during this period was a nominal Canadian company, headed by a Mr. Orvis, called British Control Petroleum Corporation, or BCO for short.Like Shell and others, BCO is secretly controlled by the UK government.The task of Orvis is to seize new important oil provinces in Central and South America for Britain, so as to counter the various schemes of the company owned by Rockefeller in the United States. In 1918, Orvis managed to get Britain to recognize the government of Tirogo in Costa Rica. In return, BCO received oil rights to more than 7 million acres of land near the Panamanian border and the important Canal area.The United States refused to recognize the Tiroco government. In 1921, a border conflict occurred between Panama and Costa Rica. The United States intervened on the side of the new government of Costa Rica. This was nicknamed the "Toy War" in Central America.The new government of Costa Rica immediately declared that all oil exploration rights previously signed by the Tiroco government, especially those granted to BCO, were invalid.

American oil companies immediately obtained a large number of exploration rights, and the new government of Costa Rica soon discovered that it was easy for them to obtain loans from New York banks, and the loan terms were very favorable. In response to this situation, BCO started to develop towards the south, towards the city of Maracaibo in Venezuela. In 1922, near the estuary, a large number of high-yield oil wells were discovered.Orvis won the largest oil-water well for his Anglo-controlled oil company.Royal Dutch Shell quickly followed up and established wholly-owned Venezuelan Petroleum Exploration Co., Ltd. and Coron Development Company.Of course, Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company soon joined the battle for oil and established the Venezuelan Standard Oil Company. In the early 1920s, Venezuela became one of the world's most important oil producers.

With the support of the British government and the cooperation of the British secret intelligence agencies around the world, the success of BP is obvious to all. On the eve of World War I in 1912, Britain, through its oil companies, controlled less than 12% of world oil production.By 1925, Britain controlled most of the world's future oil supply. Sir Edward Mackay Edgar, in an article published in the British financial journal Sparling Monthly in September 1919, reviewed the general situation thus: I would say that two-thirds of the improved The oil fields are all in the hands of the British... The Orvis Group and its affiliated companies actually circled two-thirds of the oil fields in the Caribbean Sea, which completely belong to the British. The institutional arrangement is to ensure that all the business of the group will always be in the hands of the British ...or, again, Shell, the greatest of all oil companies.Shell Petroleum exclusively owns or controls related businesses in every important oil field in the world, including the United States, Russia, Mexico, Dutch East Indies, Romania, Egypt, Venezuela, Dominica, Trinidad, India, tin Netherlands, the Malay Archipelago, northern and southern China, Siam, the Straits Settlements (the Malacca region of Malaysia) and the Philippines.It will take a few more years for the advantages of this situation to be fully realized and bear fruit, but there is no doubt that the final payoff will be huge... Before long, the United States will have to withdraw from the British company. Going to buy oil, and paying more and more dollars, because without oil, she cannot survive and is not self-sufficient.

However, in 1922, an unexpected event occurred that led to an "armistice" period in the postwar conflict between the United States and Britain many years later.The threatening new alliance from the East forced Washington and London to form a shared governance mechanism with global hegemony, and under such a mechanism formed the strategic center of global hegemony that has continued to this day.We must go to Genoa to see how this state of affairs contributed to a series of events of world significance. This time it was Germany, ignoring the British baton and forcing Britain to work more closely with its Washington counterpart.