Comment by Hilift | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hilift | Hacker News Reader

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The UK was in a really interesting position. The British empire was the largest in history, and it occurred during a time of great advancement during the industrial revolution. Liquid fuel wasn't new. The owner of two of the three ships holding 90k lbs of tea in the Boston Tea Party, Joseph Rotch (1704–1784), held a monopoly on whale oil. His existence was probably illustrative and educational for those who followed in railroads and petroleum.

Churchill did not know it at the time, but he was the peak of the empire. Physically the empire was untenable, but in business there was a new world of influence. I sometimes compare early Churchill to the business adventures of Averill Harriman and Prescott Bush.

https://nha.org/research/nantucket-history/history-topics/ro...

Liquid fuel wasn't new (the etymology of "oil" is olive oil, in use for literally thousands of years <https://www.etymonline.com/word/oil>), but cheap, abundant, geologically-sourced liquid fuels were.

Whale oil may have been big business in the 18th century, but the entire history of whale-hunting produced the equivalent of a few days of present petroleum extraction in terms of fuel.

Oh, and Whale hunting did in fact continue through the 20th century, petroleum didn't save the whales, as has been discussed here: <https://edconway.substack.com/p/no-kerosene-did-not-save-the...> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43584303> (April 2025). Aristotle Onasis, whom I've already mentioned in this thread, not only owned oil tankers and supertankers, but built some of the largest whaling ships ever commissioned, specifically to hunt blue whales:

<https://www.greece.org/poseidon/work/modern-times/onassis.ht...>

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle_Onassis#Whaling>

I'm not entirely sure what Churhill knew or when, but the British Empire was already creaking (along with much of the rest of the 19th-century European political establishment) even before the onset of WWI (and was in fact a major contributing factor to that war), and was obviously weakened and foundering prior to WWII, which was the coup de grâce.

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