ABSTRACT
The most important oil-producing countries, in the order of their importance, are the United States, the USSR, Venezuela, Roumania, Persia, the Dutch East Indies, Mexico, Colombia, the Argentine, Trinidad, Peru, and Poland. Great Britain and the United States have been the chief rivals for oil fields abroad. British and American companies almost exclusively engage in the international trade in oil. The growth of nationalist sentiment, the development of labour movements, fear of the Monroe doctrine, participation through the League of Nations in world affairs, and the discovery that they possessed great wealth in their national resources have given the South American republics a sense of power which they lacked entirely in their earlier days. The Japanese concession of Saghalin, the northern half of an island whose southern portion belongs to Japan and which borders the Siberian mainland, is the chief source of Japanese naval oil supplies. It is strategically as important to Japan as to Russia.
