The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea

In 1859, a retired railway conductor named Edwin Drake struck oil in a tiny Pennsylvania town called Titusville. Back then, crude was refined for use in kerosene lamps. Soon, the Drake Well was pumping hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil. The Petroleum Age was under way.

Yet few Americans know that a decade before this amazing discovery, the world's first commercial oil well had already been plumbed on a peninsula far from Pennsylvania, a peninsula whose name means "place of salty waters" - a hook of land that juts into the briny Caspian Sea.

Landlocked by Iran, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Azerbaijan - names that Americans these days might associate with an abundance of natural resources - the Caspian Sea is actually a lake, but one that happens to blanket some of the world's largest oil and gas fields.

To spend time in any of these countries, four of which once belonged to the Soviet Union, is to see the names such as Chevron and BP emblazoned on everything from stationery to shipping containers and to wonder, how did Western companies get here?

[...]]