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The History of Oil: Tracing the Black Gold
Paperback
Series: History
Business BiographiesBusiness General
Currently unavailable to order
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Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Feb 11 2025
Pages: 206
Weight: 0.81
Height: 0.44 Width: 7.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English
What if oil isn't just fuel, but the blood that built empires, started wars, and buried inconvenient truths for centuries? This book traces 5,000 years of humanity's obsession with petroleum, from Babylonian bitumen and Byzantine napalm to Rockefeller's ruthless monopoly and the colonial scrambles that carved up continents for oil seepages.
Across its chapters, this large print edition follows oil through every era of human history. Ancient Chinese engineers drilled 900-foot wells using bamboo roughly 1,800 years before anyone struck oil in Texas. Egyptians wrapped mummies in oil-soaked linen. Byzantium deployed Greek Fire, a napalm-like weapon that melted Crusader fleets. Aztec temples were sealed with bitumen that Spanish invaders called devil's tar. And when the modern oil industry erupted in Pennsylvania, it brought wildcatters who bribed, threatened, and hired snipers to shoot farmers who refused to sell their land. Standard Oil spied on politicians and blackmailed judges. Early refineries exploded weekly, and the workers were treated as disposable. The large print format keeps the dense detail and timelines comfortable to read.
What's inside:
- Ancient origins: Babylonian asphalt, Egyptian mummification oils, Chinese bamboo drilling, and Aztec bitumen rituals spanning thousands of years before the modern era
- Oil as a weapon: Byzantine Greek Fire, Mongol warriors waterproofing bows for rain warfare, and the Persian refining techniques medieval monks hid from the Inquisition
- The birth of the oil industry: Drake's first well, the Pennsylvania wildcatters, poisoned farmland, and the weekly refinery explosions that killed workers no one counted
- Rockefeller and Standard Oil: pipeline sabotage, hired thugs, political espionage, and the monopoly that rewrote the rules of American business
- Colonial oil wars: how Europe carved up Africa for seepages, the shift from whale oil to petroleum, and the early environmentalists jailed for calling oil toxic
Reader review:
I thought I knew oil history until the chapter on Chinese bamboo drilling completely surprised me. And the land-snipers hired by early oil barons? That was new. The large print made it easy to get through the denser historical sections without fatigue. Fair warning though: you'll look at every gas station differently after reading this. Dr. Rachel K.
Oil built cities and toppled kings. It owns your car, your plastic, and a good deal of your politics. This book traces the full, dirty history of how we got here, from Babylonian walls to modern pipelines. Large print edition for comfortable reading.
Order your copy today.
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