RISE OF THE SECULAR MODERNISTS 315You might wonder what sort of king would sell his country's entire
stock of any mineral known and unknown for cash to some vagabond
wandering through and why the citizens of the country would not imme-
diately depose such a king. The answer is, first: tradition. The Qajar kings
had been doing this sort of thing for a hundred years. Second, the coun-
try had just struggled mightily to scuttle the tobacco monopoly, which
their king had sold to British interests, a struggle that had left the coun-
try's activists exhausted. Third, oil didn't seem very important; it wasn't
tobacco, for God's sake (or even whale oil). Fourth, activists were girding
for a struggle that did seem more important than oil and tobacco com-
bined: the struggle for a constitution and a parliament. The oil deal there-
fore went unnoticed.
At the very time that Iran was giving away its oil, however, the impor-
tance of oil was about to skyrocket, due to a new invention: the internal
combustion engine. External combustion engines such as steam engines
ran on anything that burned, which in practice meant wood or coal; but
internal combustion engines ran strictly on refined petroleum.
In the 1880s, a German inventor had used this type of engine to power
a big tricycle. That tricycle evolved into a car. By 1904, cars were becom-
ing just popular enough in Europe and the United States that some roads
were being rebuilt to accommodate them. Soon after that, trains started to
run on oil. Then in 1903 the airplane was invented. Next, ocean-going
ships began switching over.
World War I saw the first use of tanks, the first oil-powered navies, and
the first airplanes that dropped bombs. By the time the war ended, anyone
could tell that petroleum-powered war machinery would grow only more
sophisticated and that whoever oWIIed the world's oil would end up own-
ing the world.
For Iran, that realization came too late. William D'Arcy had already
sold his Iranian oil concession to a company owned by the British govern-
ment (it still exists: it's now British Petroleum, or BP). By 1923, according
to Winston Churchill, Great Britain had earned 40 million pounds from
Iranian oil, while Iran had earned about 2 million from it.^3
Meanwhile, that British company had joined forces with Royal Dutch
Shell and certain U.S. interests to form a supercompany ("the Turkish Pe-
troleum Company") that proposed to look for oil in the Ottoman provinces