This comprehensive history of British Petroleum has been based firmly on the evidence from contemporary records.

This 1994 second volume of BP's history aims to be an honest and comprehensive examination of the company in the period 1928-1954.

The emergence of the international oil corporation as a political actor in the twentieth century, seen in BP's infrastructure and information arrangements in Iran. In the early twentieth century, international oil corporations emerged as a new kind of political actor. The development of the world oil industry, argues Katayoun Shafiee, was one of the era's largest political projects of techno-economic development. In this book, Shafiee maps the machinery of oil operations in the Anglo-Iranian oil industry between 1901 and 1954, tracking the organizational work involved in moving oil through a variety of technical, legal, scientific, and administrative networks. She shows that, in a series of disagreements, the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, which later became BP) relied on various forms of information management to transform political disputes into techno-economic calculation, guaranteeing the company complete control over profits, labor, and production regimes. She argues that the building of alliances and connections that constituted Anglo-Iranian oil's infrastructure reconfigured local politics of oil regions and examines how these arrangements in turn shaped the emergence of both nation-state and transnational oil corporation. Drawing on her extensive archival and field research in Iran, Shafiee investigates the surprising ways in which nature, technology, and politics came together in battles over mineral rights; standardizing petroleum expertise; formulas for calculating profits, production rates, and labor; the “Persianization” of employees; nationalism and oil nationalization; and the long-distance machinery of an international corporation. Her account shows that the politics of oil cannot be understood in isolation from its technical dimensions. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched.

This is the first volume of a comprehensive history of British Petroleum, which covers the history of the company from its origin up to 1975. Volume one covers the years 1901-32 and deals with the earlier years of the D'Arcy Concession from its granting in 1901 by the Shah of Persia, to the discovery of oil in 1908, the formation of the company in 1909 and its formative years until the cancellation of the concession in 1932. Dr Ferrier places the origin and growth of the company not only within the context of the oil industry but in the wider perspective of the evolving energy requirements in the twentieth century. This History has been based firmly on the evidence from contemporary records. The company archives have proved much indispensable and often hitherto unknown information.

In April 2010, the world watched in alarm as BP's Macondo well suffered a fatal explosion and a catastrophic leak. Over the next three months, amid tense scenes of corporate and political finger-pointing, millions of barrels of crude oil dispersed across the Gulf of Mexico in what became one of the worst oil spills in history. But there is more to BP's story than this. Tom Bergin, an oil broker turned Reuters reporter, watched the 'two-pipeline company' of the early 1980s grow into a dynamic oil giant and PR machine by the turn of the twenty-first century. His unique access to key figures before, during and after the spill - including former CEO Tony Hayward - has enabled him to piece together this compelling account of a corporation in crisis, and to examine how crucial decisions made during BP's remarkable turnaround paved the way for its darkest hour.

A detailed account of the activities of BP, 1950-75.