CHAPTER SEVEN:
OIL AND THE NEW WORLD
ORDER OF BRETTON WOODS
A New Empire rises from
the ashes of war
Following six years of a war
spanning the entire globe that had left more than 55 million dead in its wake,
the world in 1945 had changed in many significant ways. However, for vast
regions of the world, most especially in Eastern Europe and the less-developed
regions in the southern hemisphere, 1945 merely marked a transition to a new
form of chronic war--most often, economic.
In 1919, following the Versailles
Peace Conference, the British Empire was at its largest extent, its dominion
covering one quarter the entire surface of the world, the Empire ‘upon which
the sun never set.’ A mere thirty years later, by 1949, the British Empire was
disintegrating in every region, as demands for colonial independence were made
against the oppressive mother country. The British Empire was in the throes of
the largest upheaval of perhaps any Kingdom in history.
Following the mutiny of the Indian
Royal Navy in February 1946, the postwar British Government of Labour Prime
Minister Clement Atlee appointed Viscount Mountbatten of Burma to be the last
Viceroy of India, with the task of arranging the fastest possible withdrawal of
English forces and government administration. Mountbatten's partition of the
vast Indian subcontinent into a bizarre quilt of East and West Pakistan with
predominantly Muslim population, separated by India, was completed by August
15, 1947, five months after Mountbatten's arrival in India.