248 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1940 



fact is responsible for the recent intensification by American interests 

 of the search for oil supplies elsewhere in the world, knowing that 

 5 or 10 years are required to explore and develop a foreign concession 

 to the point of commencing export. Exploration is particularly 

 active in South America and Asia. 



Asia is at present producing 9.4 percent of the total world supply, 

 but without question this proportion will increase substantially in 

 future years. British and British-Dutch companies have been active 

 in oil exploration in Asia for many years and have many notable 

 discoveries to their credit. Recently, however, the search has been 

 considerably intensified and American interests have entered the field 

 on a much larger scale than hitherto. 



The geographic importance of oil-field discovery and development 

 in Asiatic countries does not require emphasis. The necessary pre- 

 liminaries of aerial, geologic, and geophysical surveys enormously 

 enhance our scientific knowledge of hitherto little-known parts of the 

 world, and the subsequent opening up of inaccessible regions by oil- 

 field development can bring about far-reaching sociological changes 

 by the introduction of money, employment, and quick means of com- 

 munication by road and by air. The search for oil is playing an 

 ever-increasing part in the westernization of many parts of the East. 



Asia, with 55 percent of the world's population, has less than 5 

 percent of its oil consumption, but this is a changing circumstance. 

 Hitherto most of the oil fields in Asia have been developed for export 

 and only areas adjacent to coast line, or oil fields of a size to justify 

 the large expense of pipe lines to seaboard, have been developed. As 

 mechanization progresses and as more and more motor roads are built 

 and used, the internal market becomes increasingly important and 

 will lead to oil-field development for its own sake alone. We are 

 now ceasing to gape at the superficial changes effected by the impact 

 of West upon East — the tribal shaikh driving across the desert in 

 his expensive American car, Arabs in Jidda listening to broadcasts 

 from European wireless stations, Iranian cities cut across by boule- 

 vards modeled on European pattern, and countless such familiar 

 incongruities that demonstrate the intrusion of Western behavior 

 into Asia. The West has not only produced the pattern of modem 

 life but, in countries where oil royalties form a substantial part of 

 the yearly budget, the wherewithal to copy it. The movement is 

 gradual, but now inexorable. How far habits of life will change 

 habits of mind is a matter for conjecture . . . but with this thought 

 I seem to be diverging too far from my geologic analysis of the 

 search for oil. 



