TABLE OF CONTENTS In the same year as Drake drilled his well, a man by the name of J.D. Rockefeller went into partnership with a newly arrived British immigrant, Maurice Clark, to establish a trading company in Cleveland, Ohio. It was an opportune moment with the Civil War of 1861-65 creating a demand for goods of all sorts, and it was an opportune place connected by two railways and the Great Lakes navigation system. The new firm soon turned to trade in kerosene which before long led it into the refinery business. In this way started the great Standard Oil Company which grew to become the world s largest corporation, being run on ruthless business lines. It was the precursor of the modern company with its bureaucracy, driven solely by the motive of return on investment. It was a marketing company: a market it sought to control by fair means and foul. It succeeded in doing so by placing a stranglehold on oil transport both by securing the pipelines and negotiating special rebates from the railways. The wild fluctuations in oil price were anathema to its orderly plans. Even in these early years of the industry, a need for regulation had already arisen: Standard Oil was in fact exercising a function no different from that subsequently applied by the Achnacarry Agreement [12], the Texas Railroad Commission [13] or OPEC.
