ABSTRACT
It is generally accepted that the oil industry was born in the United States (in Pennsylvania in 1859) and that, except for a few years in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the United States had, until recently, always been the world’s largest oil-producing, refining and consuming nation. It remains the world’s largest oil-consuming nation by far, but it was overtaken by the U.S.S.R. in terms of production and refining over a decade ago. Even so, American oilmen – and many of their fellow countrymen – look upon the oil industry as an American ‘invention’ and continue to express scepticism as to the ability of any other nation to deal successfully with oil, and over the possibilities of organizing and running the industry in any way other than that tested and tried in the U.S.A.! These attitudes emerge, of course, from the early rise to importance of the U.S. domestic oil industry and the growing overseas interests of the largest American firms, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, have dominated the international oil business since its earliest days. Until recently, only the Anglo-Dutch Shell group and the British Anglo-Iranian (now B.P.) companies provided effective competition at the international level, while Shell was the only foreign company prior to 1970 to make any significant contribution to the development of the oil industry in the United States itself.
