Böcker av Ian Skeet

The Sultanate of Muscat and Oman was a hermit state until 1970, preserving in every detail the poverty, personality and picturesque reality of a medieval kingdom. For forty years, Sultan Said bin Taimur personally controlled everything that happened, deliberately cutting the nation off from the headlong development of the rest of the world. Fortunately for Oman this would change, and fortunately for us, we have a first-hand witness to this complex society before that watershed. Ian Skeet traveled across the vast sand deserts and arid highlands of Muscat and Oman in 1966-68, preparing the wary inhabitants for the coming of oil, visiting its isolated walled cities, fortified oasis communities and independent-minded Bedouin tribes. The sultan's motives may have been pure - to preserve his people from the sin of usury and the slavery of foreign debt - but Ian Skeet's portrait is a devastating study of the dead hand of autocracy.

This book examines the history of OPEC, and the political and economic events that have shaped the organisation and the world economy since its creation in 1960. It covers the background to its establishment, its struggle to find a role, and the way it revolutionised attitudes within the oil industry.