ABSTRACT
Americans tend to think of the oil industry as essentially American. In 1859, the first commercial oil discovery was made at Titusville, Pennsylvania. By the end of the century, an ambitious entrepreneur from Cleveland, Ohio, John D. Rockefeller, had created not only the largest oil business in the world, but indeed the largest industrial enterprise in the world. For the next 50 years, the United States led the world in both oil production and oil consumption. Five of the seven largest oil firms in the world – the famous or infamous ‘seven sisters’ – were American. Even as numerous other countries vastly surpassed the United States in oil production after World War II and gradually wrested control of their oil sources from the major oil companies, the idea of the oil industry as organically American has remained a staple of the nation’s cultural identity, even up to the present.
