Platform's top 10 journeys on the Oil Road

1. The Odyssey

The King of Ithaca's adventures remain vivid after 2,700 years. But for those Greek navigators who first read it, The Odyssey was already an ancient tale. Its world had come to a sudden end. Deforestation and agricultural methods had led to rapid soil erosion. A shifting climate produced harsh droughts in the Aegean. With the collapse of the Mycenaean Bronze Age went its trade arteries.

As the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe notes in Europe between the Oceans, these city-states relied on maintaining "a constant flow of the commodities used in diplomacy and trade". Climatic shift and environmental devastation destroyed the world that Homer described. The history of The Odyssey is a woeful lesson on the impact of climate change and the ecological limits of societies.

2. Blood and Oil in the Orient by Essad Bey

Written by Lev Nussimbaum under his Muslim pseudonym, Blood & Oil is an adventurous journey of an oil magnate and his son criss-crossing the Caspian region to escape the socialist revolutions. The book is unreliable historically , but is nonetheless a great read. It describes a privileged world, but an interesting counterpoint can be found in The December Strike, written by Stalin whilst an activist living among the oil workers in Baku's Black City.

3. The Region of the Eternal Fire: An Account of a Journey to the Petroleum Region of the Caspian in 1883 by Charles Marvin

The Caucasus in the late 19th century held a particular attraction for adventuring Englishmen like Marvin, as a supposedly wild and untamed province in the southern fringes of the Russian empire that also hosted the world's primary oil supply and was the source of much new technology.

4. Berji Kristin: Tales from the Garbage Hills by Latife Tekin

Tekin's fantastical stories of the daily life in a squatted slum on the edge of Istanbul give the reader an extraordinary sense of the precarious existence of Kurdish and Turkish villagers who journeyed to the cities in search of some new life.

5. Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris

In her best book – according to author herself – Morris explores the port town's role in centuries of trade and movement across the Mediterranean and the Balkans. Having first visited at the tail-end of the second world war as a British cavalry officer, Morris developed a close relationship with the Adriatic, with a further three books on Venice – both as a city and as a naval empire.

6. Al-Rihla (The Journey) by Ibn Battuta

The western imagination of medieval travel across the Mediterranean and Caspian regions is dominated by Marco Polo's tales of the Venetian Empire and beyond – an imperium of militarised trade routes. Yet Ibn Battuta – a near contemporary of Polo's – travelled three times the distance, visiting China, Tanzania and Timbuktu.

7. The Oil and the Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea by Steve Levine

Levine's book is packed with stories of the intrigue behind the west's attempts to gain control of Caspian resources, out of reach since the Bolshevik revolution. While his book portrays these events from the top down, thankfully it is better written and less hyperbolic than Beyond Business: An Inspirational Memoir from a Remarkable Leader, the autobiography of John Browne, former CEO of BP and central to BP's acquisition of its position in the region.

8. Pipe Dreams by Rena Effendi

Effendi was initially employed by BP to document its Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline for a corporate calendar. After travelling along the route, she became increasingly disenchanted with the poverty of the population despite the oil wealth flowing beneath the fields. She flipped sides and produced this powerful photographic journey recording the hidden stories behind the spin.

9. The Seventh Man by John Berger and Jean Mohr

An examination of the challenging experience of migration from Turkey to western Europe and the centrality of migrant workers to modern capitalism. Thirty-seven years later, Europe's borders have changed drastically but this book remains seminal – not least given the parallel strengthening of Fortress Europe by officials in Brussels and rising xenophobia across the continent, from Greece's Golden Dawn to British Conservatives.

10. Energy 2020: European Commission report

Last and easily the driest reading on this list, Energy 2020 is also by far the most important guide to future trade across the region – setting underlying priorities that will define pipelines, tanker routes and energy sources. While not the most gripping narrative, this document was written in order to shape the geographic, economic and social realities from the Caspian to the Mediterranean – and beyond.


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