ABSTRACT
The French haven’t produced many illuminating or well-informed books about the function of oil in modern life. Heavy industry discovered that coke as a fuel was obsolete and changed to liquid fuels of many different kinds derived from oil. A peculiar feature of the oil industry is that the big producers are very few in number. The Latin American Indians who called the black oil which oozed out of the subsoil in some countries ‘the devil’s excrement’ had strange foresight. The history of oil is a catalogue of the problems it has caused for the small countries which produce it. It is widely known that the business of the oil companies is the most profitable of all investments in the capitalist world. The oil cartel was playing a double game. In Caracas it hinted at crooked dealings in OPEC by Middle Eastern or North African governments.
