ABSTRACT
The first big multinational companies of the modern era emerged from Europe’s growing need for raw materials in the late nineteenth century (Jones 2005: 20, 45). One of those raw materials was oil. The modern oil industry started simultaneously around the mid-nineteenth century in Eastern Europe, the US, and Russia. Demand for lighting oil drove the industry’s initial growth. As electricity substituted oil for lighting, the internal combustion engine sustained the industry’s growth into the twentieth century. By 1914, the oil industry had given birth to multinational companies that roamed the globe searching for oil and markets. Military demands for fuels, lubricants, additives, and explosives during World War I, however, truly propelled the oil industry onto the global stage (Winegard 2016: 4; Yergin 1993: 167–8). Oil’s strategic importance fostered technological innovations in exploration and production, transportation and refining in the 1920s and 1930s despite protectionism, economic nationalism, and depressed oil prices (Jonker and Zanden 2007: 334; Homburg 2006b, 2006a; Williamson 1963: 508–10). After World War II, oil displaced coal in most developed economies and became the vital resource it remains today.
