Conville & Walsh
literary agency
The New Great Game
Blood and Oil in Central Asia
- Author: Lutz Kleveman
- Category: Non-fiction
- Publisher: Atlantic Books(UK)/Grove Atlantic(US)
- Pub date: 9 October 2003
- Length: 336 pages
About The New Great Game
‘THE NEW GREAT GAME is an urgent, vigorous insight into a vital corner of the new century… undertaken with clear spirit and boundless energy’
— Colin Thubron
‘In Baghdad, where I have been working as a surgeon among the casualties of an ongoing war, Iraqis say that their country was invaded to secure control of its oil. Lutz Kleveman’s odyssey into the heart of the United States energy policy in Central Asia reveals that this conflict is just one front in a global oil war’
— Jonathan Kaplan
THE NEW GREAT GAME is a revelatory and timely account of the perilous game to dominate crucial resources – one that mixes religion and oil to explosive effect.
Kleveman reveals that there is a new ‘Great Game’ being played out in the Caspian region. Lying south of Russia, west of China and north of Afghanistan, this area contains the world’s largest untapped oil and gas resources. As much as 100 billion barrels of crude oil and 40 per cent of the world’s global gas reserves can be found there.
Since the fall of communism, politicians and multinational companies have struggled to possess and develop these resources. The new Great Game is a modern variant of the nineteenth-century clash of imperial ambitions between Britain and Russia, but with higher stakes. Desperate to wean itself from dependence on the OPEC cartel, the US is now pitted in a struggle with Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran, most of which are nuclear powers, for dominance of the Caspian’s fabulous energy reserve and its pipeline routes.
About the Author
Lutz Kleveman was born in Germany, grew up in the US and studied at the London School of Economics. He has reported from war zones for the Daily Telegraph, Newsweek and the Sunday Telegraph, as well as CNN.