‘The most complete & extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands.’
That was the reaction of Lord Curzon to the news of 1872 that a British citizen, Baron Julius de Reuter, had won a concession to run the industry, and to exploit the resources of & print the money of Persia.
A generation later, in 1901, a Devon-born millionaire, William Knox D’Arcy, negotiated the first oil concession in the country we now know as Iran.
Within 12 years all Iranian oil was British property &, at the end of WWI, Britain took control of Iran’s treasury, military & transport system under the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919.
These were just business deals to support British entrepreneurs; Iran was never formally a colony of the British Empire, it retained its own crowned head of state in the Shah & a prime minister. But the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was Britain’s largest overseas asset, its profits & dividends adding to the Gross National Income of the UK.
Out of all this came, eventually, the company we know today as BP – now only 44% British owned.
And next week a court in New Orleans begins hearings in a case which is expected to cost BP & its co-defendants billions of dollars in compensation to 110,000 plaintiffs following the 2010 offshore oil disaster at Deepwater Horizon.
It would be fascinating to see if an economic or financial historian could chart the international flows of all this investment & income since William D’Arcy’s first venture into the field.
These thoughts have been largely inspired by a fine column by Ben Macintyre in The Times of 21 February in which he explains how history colours the current Iranian attitude to Britain: ‘What Britons saw as investment, Iranians regarded as pillage’ & today are still ready to believe that Britain is ‘secretly working behind the scenes to destroy the Iranian Government’ & repossess its oil.
Today’s Anglo-Saxon model of the global economy welcomes foreign inward investment, believing in fact that capital (unlike people) has no nationality, is not even, (in the manner in which it whizzes round the world in unbelievably large amounts in astonishingly small slices of time) ‘real’ at all, just a web of electronic promises, promises & (collateralised) obligations.
And even when this foreign money does turn real, in the form of manufacturing, transport, utilities, newspapers & most of the houses in central London, we get the benefit of all those goods & services in which we no longer have the money to invest. According to Yolande Barnes of the upmarket property company Savills, writing also in The Times, we are now almost entirely reliant on the success of the expensive private developments, which attract foreign buyers, to fund new affordable housing.
At least these foreign investors have no one national identity of their own, there is no one country for us to fear might demand a direct role in our governance.
In 1980, at the height of the Iranian hostage crisis, Jimmy Carter described as ‘ancient history’ the US involvement in the restoration of the Shah in 1953.
Not quite such ancient history to us as we celebrate the 60th anniversary of the accession of our Queen, who was crowned on a rainy day in 1953.
When our great-grandchildren look back from 2152, when 2012 is as far away as 1872 is to us, will they then share Lord Curzon’s astonishment?
