WARD, Thomas Edward.

£12,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Negotiations for Oil Concessions in Bahrain, El Hasa (Saudi Arabia), the Neutral Zone, Qatar and Kuwait. Rare first edition, issued for private circulation only, signed by the author on the title page and retaining his compliments slip. Ward (1889-1969), a principal negotiator in the region's petroleum expansion, traces the development of oil in the Arabian Gulf from Major Frank Holmes's early initiatives through US involvement to the Gulf Oil Company contracts and the Saudi concession, drawing on "letters, diaries and documents in my possession". No other market copy has been traced.This copy is from the library of Peter T. Cox - like Holmes a New Zealander - and is signed "PTC 1975" on page 227. Cox worked for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company at Masjid-i-Suleiman (1928-36; 1946-52), later serving in London as the exploration manager of D'Arcy Exploration Company, the managing director of the British Exploration Company, and a director of the Kuwait Oil Company. He retired in 1962. Mentioned in the text as a geological surveyor in Kuwait, he has added brief marginal corrections (pp. 227-8, 255) disputing Ward's account of a March 1933 meeting with Sir John Cadman - annotating the stated location, the presence of Colonel Dickson, and the meeting itself with the word "no".The book is institutionally well represented but largely in US libraries, with only Cambridge in the UK and NYU Abu Dhabi and the American University of Beirut in the Middle East.

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