The First Kuwait Oil Agreement

First Published in 1975. The first Kuwait oil concession agreement, granted on 23rd December 1934 by the late Shaikh Ahmad al Jaber al Subah to the Kuwait Oil Company Ltd., has been of fundamental importance in the history of the State of Kuwait; whose great increase in prosperity and international influence during the last twenty-eight years has directly resulted from its oil production since 1946 under the Agreement and its 1951 successor. Hitherto no full or authoritative account of the very long and complex commercial and political negotiations preceding the Agreement has been compiled; and consequently all descriptions of them so far published (except those merely quoting the Agreement's terms and naming the parties concerned) have contained substantial omissions or errors of fact involving a wrong impression of what actually occurred. This text is a record of the negotiations between 1911 and 1934.