Oil dominated press coverage of the Lausanne Conference, yet historians have paid it little attention. Those historians who have addressed oil diplomacy in these years have tended to adopt a top-down perspective, one that presents oil companies as the tools of foreign ministries. This chapter restores agency to the financiers and speculators who jostled at Lausanne, each claiming the right to determine how oil reserves lying within the borders of the former Ottoman Empire were exploited. Although the Turkish (later Iraq) Petroleum Company) emerged victorious, shaping the development of Middle East oil under the terms of the 1928 Red Line Agreement, this outcome was far from clear in 1922–1923. It is possible to imagine an alternative oil settlement merging from Lausanne, one that might have offered a more equitable division of the Middle East's oil wealth.