Shell was born in the early days of the oil boom and started out in the shadow of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard oil monopoly, which was able to drive many emerging rival oil companies out of business by undercutting their prices and taking over their shares of the market.
Royal Dutch/Shell was the result of a merger in 1907 between the British-based Shell Transport and Trading Company, which pioneered the used of seagoing oil tankers and the Royal Dutch Petroleum company, which made its fortune developing new oil fields in Borneo and Sumatra.
During the Civil War, when some of the slaves from the Trepagnier Plantation were joining Union forces to fight the Confederacy in Louisiana, a British Jew from the East End of London was setting up as a merchant on the Docks in that great city.
Marcus Samuel was an enterprising fellow who decided to greet ships returning to England from India, Japan, Africa, and the Middle East and offer to buy any trinkets and curious that sailors had collected abroad. Before long, word spreading among sailors that they could augment their wages by selling to Samuel.
Marcus had two sons, Marcus Samuel the younger and Samuel Samuel the elder died, his sons took his fortune and expanded their father’s import/export business, opening offices in Japan and London.
In the 1890s, the French Rothchild family decided to go into business exploiting the oil fields opening up in Baku in Russia. Needing a partner to help them transport and sell the oil, they turned to Marcus Samuel the younger.
After a brief trip to the Caucasus, Marcus Samuel deiced that the only way to take on the near monopoly grip that Standard Oil held was to radically reduce oil transportation costs.
At the tome kerosene was transported in crates of tin containers. Loading the fuel into these relatively small containers, crating them, and loading them onto ship as time consuming, expensive and inefficient, Samuel argued. It would be much preferable to just pipe the oil into a tanker ship.
In 1907, Sir Marcus Samuel and Henri Deterding merged the Shell Transport and Trading Company with the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company to create Royal Dutch/Shell.
The company is 40 percent owned by the Shell Transport and Trading Company and 60 percent owned by Royal Dutch Petroleum.
Brief History of Shell
