Baku

Baku appears not as a place visited by the principal characters but as a distant, urgently disputed center of oil and political power. In conversations in Paris, its uncertain future becomes a test of who will control the region’s resources: British interests, the United States, France, or Russia. The competing claims turn Baku into a compact expression of the postwar conflict between national self-determination and the ambitions of states and oil companies.

A strategic center seen from Paris

The novel introduces Baku through political talk rather than a local scene. At an opera attended by Eveline Hutchins and Eleanor Stoddard, Edgar Robbins turns conversation toward Baku and the oil business, arguing that England is securing future oil supplies while the conference debates the region’s fate. His account makes the city matter beyond its immediate geography: the question is not simply who governs Baku, but who will gain access to oil that may shape future power.

The subject returns at the opera and afterward, when Mr. Rasmussen, an engineer with Standard Oil, discusses Baku alongside Mohommarah and Mosul. His anxious, emphatic account places the city within a wider contest in the Near East, where Anglo-Persian and Royal Dutch interests are, in his view, getting ahead of the United States. Baku is thus represented through the language of competition over resources, reinforcements, and international influence, rather than through a description of its streets or inhabitants.

Competing claims and uncertain control

Rasmussen maintains that Baku cannot be held without heavy reinforcements and that only the United States can provide them. His claim makes control of the city a question of military capacity as well as commercial interest. In the same discussion, he argues that England is likely to present the conference with a fait accompli, turning control on the ground into a pressure on the negotiators to accept a result already imposed.

The characters’ responses expose the political contradictions within that argument. J. Ward Moorehouse suggests that public opinion might be roused against the British position and warns that the United States risks losing its primacy in world oil production. When Eveline asks about Russia, Rasmussen invokes self-determination to deny the Russians a right to Baku, saying that its population is mostly Turkish and Armenian. Yet he says he would prefer the Bolsheviks to England’s control, while predicting that Lenin and Trotsky have split and that the Russian monarchy will return within three months. His forecast presents the city’s future as unsettled, but his confidence in a rapid restoration is only his assertion, not a confirmed outcome.

Oil, diplomacy, and economic power

Baku’s significance in these scenes lies in the way oil links conference diplomacy to corporate rivalry. Robbins frames British advances as a seizure of future supplies; Rasmussen stresses the commercial disadvantage facing the United States and the possibility that a military intervention could alter it. Moorehouse, meanwhile, treats public opinion as a means of influencing the contest. Their discussion makes the language of national principle inseparable from strategic and commercial calculation.

The wider narrative places this argument alongside its account of financial power. It describes the House of Morgan’s international reach and the enormous Allied borrowing channelled through it, creating a broader picture of how private finance and state power intersect. The book does not establish a direct link between those financial arrangements and Baku’s eventual control; rather, their juxtaposition situates the oil dispute within a world where the allocation of resources and the making of political settlements are bound up with concentrated economic influence.

Narrative significance

Because Baku remains offstage, its meaning is built from rival voices and predictions. Robbins speaks from alarm about England’s expanding reach; Rasmussen speaks as an oil engineer concerned with competition and reinforcement; Moorehouse considers the force of public opinion; and Eveline’s question about Russia tests the claims against the principle of self-determination. Their disagreement keeps the city’s future open while revealing how readily that principle is invoked, qualified, or subordinated to strategic interests.

Baku therefore functions as more than a location named in passing. It is the focal point through which the Paris conversations expose the limits of a peace settlement shaped by powerful states and commercial interests. The unresolved contest over who may control its oil mirrors the wider uncertainty of the postwar order: the language of popular rights persists, but so does the struggle to secure resources and influence before negotiations can settle their fate.