In The First World Oil War, Timothy C. Winegard tells an important story about the emergence of oil as a commodity vital to national security. The combatants in “the Great War” quickly understood that victory in mechanized warfare would require growing quantities of crude oil and refined products, and their military strategies came to reflect this fact. Winegard's book discusses the impacts oil had on military choices during World War I and on the politics of the peace process that followed. His book is at once a history of oil in the war and a history of other aspects of the war itself.

Winegard makes good use of a variety of sources from the Imperial War Museum in London, the Middle East Center at Oxford, military archives in Canada and Australia, and private collections to complement the existing literature on World War I. He builds engaging portraits of military leaders while also presenting detailed accounts of their campaigns to capture and control the sources of oil needed for victory. His work is particularly useful in understanding the war in the Middle East and the Caucasus and the long-term impacts on this oil-rich region of the chaos created by modern warfare and of the new order imposed by the victors after the war. He argues strongly that the quest for oil by Britain, Germany, Russia, and other combatants in World War I shaped conditions that still influence events in the Middle East a century later.

At times he seems to claim too much. Surely World War I marked a turning point in the history of war and in the history of the global industry, but did it really redraw the map of the world as Winegard asserts? Only if the world does not contain North and South America. Did the war's impact continue to shape events in oil-producing regions and inside the major global oil companies for the next hundred years? Only if World War I is understood to contain the impacts of World War II and the Cold War, which together altered numerous national boundaries in Europe while also introducing an era of extraordinary growth in the demand for oil that set the stage for the rise of OPEC and of large national oil companies as producing nations took control over their own resources.

The heart of Winegard's book and its major contributions to the historical literature are contained in chapters 6, 7, and 8, which focus on often neglected episodes in the history of World War I. Here, readers interested in the war or oil or both will find details not readily available in other sources. The climax of the book is chapter 6, “From Basra to Baghdad to Baku,” which presents valuable insights into British efforts to capture and control known oil fields that ultimately became centers of production in the Middle East. Chapter 7 then carries this story through to war's end, with the British emerging as the winners of the quest for control of much of the region's oil. Chapter 8 completes this epic story with an excellent account of the political jockeying among the victorious Allies for control of these oil regions during the peace process that led to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. This chapter emphasizes Britain's success in carving out “mandates” for itself in important sections of the Middle East. Here, as throughout the chapters on World War I, the book provides little detail about the role of the United States, which by this time was—far and away—the world's largest oil-producing nation (p. 245, Table 9.1). More information on the activities of the major international oil companies during and immediately after the war would strengthen the book.

The central chapters in Winegard's book provide excellent background on events in Iran (then Persia), Iraq (a nation pieced together in the peace process), and Baku (Azerbaijan). The book as a whole is quite useful in understanding the subsequent evolution of a region that by the 1970s had become the center of global oil production. When the author claims that World War I “altered the course of history,” he is certainly convincing in the case of the histories of the region and of the oil industry (p. 7).

The remaining chapters attempt a most difficult task: tracing events in the oil industry from the Treaty of Versailles into the twenty-first century. The space dedicated to this sweeping overview is insufficient for its purpose, although those who come to the book with a good background in oil history should enjoy the author's race through events from the 1920s into the 2010s. The author can rest easy about readers’ responses to these concluding sections; he already has completed his mission by providing the most comprehensive account yet published of the history of oil's impact on events during and just after World War I. His book will fill in gaps in the knowledge of all of its readers.