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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2011

Diana Davids Hinton
Diana Davids Hinton
Affiliation:
Professor of history at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin
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Abstract

This issue brings together five articles on the modern petroleum industry. Two cover the growth of the industry in the early twentieth century: Michael Adamson's study of the development of California's coastal oil region by independent oilman Ralph Lloyd; and the study by Lisa Bud-Frierman, Andrew Godley, and Judith Wale of the British entrepreneur Weetman Pearson's operations in Mexico. Two articles treat the post–World War II period: Nathan Citano looks at the budding interests of U.S. oilmen in the Middle East and Daniele Pozzi traces the transformation of the Italian company ENI into an international oil firm. Finally, Keetie Sluyterman examines the ways in which Royal Dutch Shell handled environmental issues from its inception in 1907 to the present. The issue also contains a survey of recent historiography on the oil industry in Latin America by Marcelo Bucheli and a review essay by James Bamberg on a recent four-volume history of Royal Dutch Shell.

Type
Introduction
Information
Business History Review , Volume 84 , Issue 2: A Special Issue on the Oil Industry , Summer 2010 , pp. 195 - 201
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2010

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References

1 See, for instance, Hidy, Ralph W. and Hidy, Muriel E., Pioneering in Big Business, 1882–1911 (New York, 1955)Google Scholar ; Johnson, Arthur M., The Challenge of Change: The Sun Oil Company, 1945–1977 (Columbus, Ohio, 1983)Google Scholar ; Williamson, Harold F. and Daum, Arnold R., The American Petroleum Industry: The Age of Illumination, 1959-1899 (Evanston, Ill., 1959),Google Scholar and The American Petroleum Industry, 1899–1959: The Age of Energy (Evanston, Ill., 1963)Google Scholar.

2 For a most useful overview of the variety of new directions, See Fridenson, Patrick, “Business and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Business History, ed. Jones, Geoffrey and Zeitlin, Jonathan (New York, 2007), 9–36Google Scholar.

3 For example, in 1899, the Texas legislature mandated plugging wells upon abandonment and prohibited wanton gas flaring, but the objective was protection of the correlative rights of nearby lease holders. See Hinton, Diana Davids and Olien, Roger M., Oil in Texas: The Gusher Age, 1895–1945 (Austin, 2002), 9Google Scholar.

4 Gorman, Hugh S., Redefining Efficiency: Pollution Concerns, Regulatory Mechanisms, and Technological Change in the U. S. Petroleum Industry (Akron, Ohio, 2001).Google Scholar In much the same way, early twentieth-century advocates of petroleum conservation pointed to waste as a reason for industry regulation. See Olien, Roger M. and Olien, Diana Davids, Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry (Chapel Hill, 2000), ch. 6Google Scholar.

5 Black, Brian, Petrolia: The Landscape of America's First Oil Boom (Baltimore, 2000), 1, 6–7.Google Scholar

6 Priest, Tyler, “Extraction Not Creation: The History of Offshore Petroleum in the Gulf of Mexico,” Enterprise & Society 8 (June 2007): 227–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Bamberg, James, British Petroleum and Global Oil, 1950–1975:Google ScholarThe Challenge of Nationalism (Cambridge, U.K., 2000).Google Scholar Other authors have come forward with pointed criticism of multinationals' relations with indigenous workers. See, for example, Vitalis, Robert, America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford, 2007),Google Scholar on Aramco's poor treatment of blue-collar workers; and Santiago, Myrna I., “Women of the Mexican Oil Fields: Class, Nationality, Economy, Culture, 1900–1938,” in Journal of Women's History 21 (Spring 2009): 87–112.CrossRefGoogle ScholarJones's, GeoffreyMultinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century (New York, 2005)Google Scholar is a useful introduction to the petroleum multinational enterprises in the context of their development in other sectors.

8 Jonker, Joost et al. , A History of Royal Dutch Shell (Oxford, 2007),Google Scholar reviewed in this issue; Pratt, Joseph A., Prelude to Merger: A History of the Amoco Corporation, 1973–1998 (Houston, 2000)Google Scholar ; Priest, Tyler, The Offshore Imperative: Shell's Search for Petroleum in Postwar America (College Station, Tex., 2007)Google Scholar.

9 For some of this earlier literature, See Pugach, Noel H., “Standard Oil and Petroleum Development in Early Republican China,” Business History Review (Winter 1971): 452–73;Google ScholarPearton, Maurice, Oil and the Romanian State (Oxford, 1971)Google Scholar ; Wilkins, Mira, “Multinational Oil Companies in Latin America in the 1920s: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru,” Business History Review (Autumn 1974): 414–46;Google ScholarJones, Geoffrey, The State and the Emergence of the British Oil Industry (London, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; McBeth, B. S., Juan Vicente Gomez and the Oil Companies in Venezeula, 1908–1935 (Cambridge, 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Venn, Fiona, Oil Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Philip, George, The P olitical Economy of International Oil (Edinburgh, 1994)Google Scholar.

10 Bucheli, Marcelo, “Negotiating under the Monroe Doctrine: Weetman Pearson and the Origins of U. S. Control of Colombian Oil,” Business History Review 82 (Autumn 2008): 529–53;CrossRefGoogle ScholarHaber, Stephen, Maurer, Noel, and Razo, Armando, “When the Law Does Not Matter: The Rise and Decline of the Mexican Oil Industry,” Journal of Economic History 63 (Mar. 2003): 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Frank, Alison, “The Petroleum War of 1910: Standard Oil, Austria, and the Limits of the Multinational Corporation,” American Historical Review 114 (Feb. 2009): 16–41;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMarcel, Valerie, with Mitchell, John V., Oil Titans: Oil Companies in the Middle East (Washington, D.C., 2006)Google Scholar ; Goldstein, Andrea, “New Multinationals from Emerging Asia: The Case of National Oil Companies,” Asian Development Review 26 (Spring 2009): 26–57Google Scholar.

12 Olien, Roger M. and Olien, Diana, Oil and Ideology: The Cultural Creation of the American Petroleum Industry (Chapel Hill, 2000).Google Scholar

13 Childs, William R., The Texas Railroad Commission: Understanding Regulation in America to the Mid-Twentieth Century (College Station, Tex., 2005).Google Scholar Regarding regulation in Texas, Jonathan, W. Singer studies the political impetus for action against Standard Oil affiliate Waters-Pierce Oil Company, in Broken Trusts: The Texas Attorney General versus the Oil Industry, 1889–1909 (College Station, Tex., 2002)Google Scholar ; and Smith, Ernest E. and Weaver, Jacqueline Lang have seen their Texas Law of Oil and Gas (Newark, 2006)Google Scholar go into a second edition. Hinton, Diana Davids and Olien, Roger M. supply an overview of the petroleum industry in Texas and the evolution of regulation, in Oil in Texas: The Gusher Age, 1895–1945 (Austin, 2002)Google Scholar.

14 Sabin, Paul, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (Berkeley, 2005).Google Scholar For a study of a specific instance in policy targeting petroleum markets, See Beauboeuf, Bruce A., The Strategic Petroleum Reserve: U. S. Energy Security and Oil Politics, 1975–2005 (College Station, Tex., 2007).Google Scholar An account of the generation of information for policymakers was written by Pratt, Joseph A., Becker, William H., and McClenahan, William M. Jr., in Voice of the Marketplace: A History of the National Petroleum Council (College Station, Tex., 2002)Google Scholar.

15 See, for example, Castaneda, Christopher James, Regulated Enterprise: Natural Gas Pipelines and Northeastern Markets, 1938–1954 (Columbus, Oh., 1993)Google Scholar ; Castaneda, Christopher J. and Pratt, Joseph A., From Texas to the East: A Strategic History of Texas Eastern Corporation (College Station, Tex., 1993)Google Scholar ; Castaneda, Christopher J., Invisible Fuel: Manufactured and Natural Gas in America, 1800–2000 (New York, 1999).Google Scholar The dramatic collapse of Enron spawned a veritable cottage industry in the history of the ill-starred firm. Two examples were written by McLean, Bethany and Elkind, Peter, The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Fall of Enron (New York, 2003),Google Scholar and Fox, Loren, Enron: The Rise and Fall (Hoboken, 2003)Google Scholar.

16 A venerable theme in discussions of the American petroleum industry, the fear of running out of oil, began to be revived in 1956, when Shell geologist M. King Hubbert predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in 1970 and thereafter decline. Since Hubbert, many persons have taken positions on the probability of future scarcity. Two authors, both with industry experience, whose works sparked considerable discussion in the industry are Deffeyes, Kenneth A., author of both Hubbert's Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton, 2001),Google Scholar and Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak (New York, 2005)Google Scholar ; and Simmons, Matthew, Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (Hoboken, 2005)Google Scholar.