Petroleum: Commodity, Products and Infrastructures as Transottoman Entanglement around 1900

Stefan Rohdewald

Oil was discovered as a commodity of the future only at the end of the 19th century. The Russian Petroleum Production Company Nobel Brothers (Branobel) and Rothschild Frères in Baku, which quickly became the European bellwether in this new field of industrial activities parallel to the U.S. Oil fields, operationalized its extraction: The world’s first oil tanker named “Zoroastr” was used on the Caspian Sea. In addition to the railway to the Black Sea, in 1906 what was then globally the longest kerosene pipeline opened. Yet by 1913, the U.S. surpassed Russia as the biggest producer of petroleum. In the run for the oil fields that were expected to be found in the still-Ottoman Middle East an international struggle evolved, including Great Britain, Germany and France. The project designed for the priority programme Transottomanica aims at contributing several articles to a history of oil including the growing portfolio of oil products, their transport, the infrastructures involved as well as social conflicts and transimperial competition in the quest for modernity changed by techniques and industry between Russia, Persia and the Ottoman Near East.