Breaking Rockefeller

March 14, 2016
Plucky upstarts challenge John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil monopoly in this lively history of the early petroleum industry from Doran, creator of the History of Oil podcasts. He examines the period from 1889 to 1911 when the secretive, penny-pinching Rockefeller controlled 80% of the world’s oil but faced threats from foreign competition and domestic antitrust initiatives. Doran focuses on two innovative rivals: Britain’s Shell Oil, founded by status-hungry merchant Marcus Samuel, whose advanced tankers shipped cheap kerosene from Russian refineries to Asia; and Royal Dutch Oil, which used pioneering geology to find rich oil fields in Indonesia. These companies and their colorful founders braved considerable risks to drill and sell oil—and to survive the price wars and buyout stratagems that Standard launched to crush them. Doran’s vigorous narrative conveys the drama of the oil industry in its heroic days, featuring grueling stretches of dry wells followed by marathon gushers; lurid, greedy oil boomtowns; and the wars, revolutions, and production gluts that made the business a roller-coaster. He’s also good at untangling the underlying dynamics of finance, marketing, technology, and transportation. The result is an entertaining portrait of the oil industry’s past and the business forces that still shape its present.

May 15, 2016

Oil is a messy business, and debut author Doran (vice president for research, Ctr. for European Policy Analysis) captures those tensions by setting the history of the industry within a global context. Here he illustrates the rise and fall of John D. Rockefeller's oil empire, the emergence of Royal Dutch Shell by upstarts Marcus Samuel Jr. and Henri Deterding, and how these events affected consumers, businesses, and militaries in the United States, Europe, and China. Using a bipartisan approach, the author relates how Rockefeller ruthlessly created a world monopoly by the late 1890s with a net worth equivalent to $357 billion today. Doran describes how distance, geography, risk, and greed interacted to produce such gains and the ways successful competitors (e.g., Royal Dutch Shell) revolutionized the industry. Ultimately, Rockefeller's enterprise was toppled by the combined efforts of Congress, notably senator John Sherman; the presidency (Theodore Roosevelt); Supreme Court justice Edward Douglass White; and the media, specifically journalist Ida Tarbell. VERDICT Doran is a gifted writer and storyteller; his first-rate history and introduction to the petroleum business from its origins to the present day delivers a page-turner sure to appeal to economists, historians, political scientists, and general readers interested in global economics.--William D. Pederson, Louisiana State Univ., Shreveport

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