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Embargo

How the 1973 Oil Crisis Changed the World

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Embargo

By: Philip Delves Broughton
Narrated by: Philip Delves Broughton
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We have been here before.

The king of Saudi Arabia had warned the Americans repeatedly: if you do not treat us with respect, we will cut off your oil. For years, nobody believed him. On 5 October 1973, he made good on his threat.

The consequences were immediate. In America, fuel rationing and a 55mph emergency speed limit couldn't stop the lights of Times Square flickering out by Christmas. Across Europe, governments scrambled for secret supplies of oil; Britain's chancellor flew to St Moritz to interrupt the Shah of Iran’s skiing holiday and beg for the fuel needed to keep the country running. As panic spread through Western capitals, the world's most powerful economies discovered that their prosperity rested on decisions being made in Riyadh.

Embargo is the gripping inside story of the 1973 oil crisis and the small group of leaders who shaped it. It is the story of Faisal, the Saudi King who was born a nomad and became the richest man in the world. Of Ahmed Zaki Yamani, his unflappable Harvard-educated oil minister who drove American oil executives to tears with his steely calm. And of Henry Kissinger, the US statesman who failed to grasp how much leverage the Middle East had acquired over the West until it was too late.

Filled with frantic diplomacy and secret negotiations, Embargo follows the race to avert economic catastrophe and restore the flow of oil. In the process, it uncovers a turning point in modern history: the moment the industrialised world discovered how vulnerable its prosperity was to turmoil in the Middle East. More than fifty years later, we are still wrangling with the consequences.

© Philip Delves Broughton 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026

 20th Century International Modern Political Science Politics & Government Middle East Royalty Iran Imperialism Africa Socialism Saudi Arabia
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Critic reviews

Jaw-dropping, deftly erudite, witty, shocking, outrageous. An extraordinary retelling of how energy changed – and continues to change – the deepest structures of world, war and nations.
Embargo is both an illuminating account of the 1973 oil crisis and an extraordinary echo of the current one. Philip Delves Broughton offers a sobering reminder of the misunderstandings that plague geopolitics to this day. Remarkably resonant.
A masterpiece: Delves Broughton is the most evocative non-fiction writer of our time. Here is the hawk-eyed King Faisal, seated at dinner with a hooded falcon, mimicking the bird's piercing screech as he throws it meat from his table. There is Ibn Saud, crossing the Great Bitter Lake in a tent pitched on the deck of an American destroyer, sheep penned at the stern. And in Washington, Henry Kissinger, soothing and schmoozing Liza Minnelli an hour before Faisal turns off the oil. Sand, gold and treachery — this book made me feel a century turn.
The 1973 Arab oil embargo was a profound turning point in the modern age – the beginning of a wholesale reordering of the world's geopolitical chessboard – and it has at last found its worthy chronicler. Through prodigious research and a novelist's eye for the intriguing detail, Broughton takes his reader into the conference rooms and desert tents where strategies were devised and deals cut to produce the greatest transfer of wealth in human history. Readers will gain a fascinating education into how the global oil industry really works - and have a rollicking good time in the process.
Gripping and insightful, Embargo is a must-read to understand not just the 1973 oil crisis, but every energy shock that has followed since – including the 2026 US-Iran war for the control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Embargo is the best book on oil politics I’ve read. It’s totally absorbing.
Philip Delves Broughton has turned the birth of the modern petro-state into a thriller - specific, cinematic, and completely impossible to put down. Embargo is the book that explains how the world we live in was actually made.
It takes a very clever author to deliver both a ripping yarn and a big ideas book. In this page turning history of the 1970s OPEC embargo, Philip Delves Broughton does both. Connecting the dots between the discovery of oil, the origins of Israel, Western corporate greed and the ongoing tension between tradition and modernity in the Arab world, he shows us why the Middle East remains the mother of all geostrategic chokepoints.
Marvellous. I gobbled this book up and learned something new on nearly every page. Even if we weren't once again wrestling with oil crises, I would have enthusiastically recommended Embargo. Since we are, this is essential reading.
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