The great oil octopus

There has lately arisen at Queen Anne’s Gate, on the site of a fine Victorian mansion demolished to make room for it, a gigantic palace, steel-framed in the up-to-date style, cl...

How has this vast combination been built up? There are those who will tell you that it has been accomplished because John D. Rockefeller was thrifty; there are others who are pe...

The contract between the railroads and the South Improvement Company was signed, and armed with this deadly weapon, Mr. Rockefeller went round to all the rival refineries in Cle...

The arrangements which have now been described were the foundation on which the Standard Oil Trust was built. Some time in the summer of 1874, when he had become sure that the s...

The Standard Oil people have undoubtedly practised bribery throughout a long series of years and on the most comprehensive scale, and that not merely to avert a temporary danger...

It will be necessary to return to the subject of bribery when we come to the marketing business of the Trust. We will now pass to a few examples of the resort to open violence f...

The constant policy of the Standard throughout its whole career has been superabundantly proved to be to cut prices where there is competition, and where there is none to raise...

The Standard achieved other ends by its system of creating bogus competitors, besides avoiding public odium. It was enabled by their operation to carry on a competitive warfare...

Hitherto we have been dealing with the history of the Standard Oil Trust on its native heath, the United States of America. It is now time to pass in brief review some of its op...

Passing next to Russia, there is no doubt that in the past this was a far more dangerous competitor of the Standard than it now is. The Baku output was at first so tremendous th...

In Germany the Standard was artful enough to strengthen its position by acquiring existing oil companies and retaining certain prominent German oil merchants as shareholders, th...

I have reserved until the end of my survey the examination of the Standard Oil Trust’s operations in Great Britain, because, as they have not been investigated so closely here a...

It is now time to devote a little attention to one of the Standard’s great triumphs in this country--the staving off until this present day of the legislative raising of the fla...

Naturally the juggle by which the low flash-point was thus stereotyped in the Act of 1879 had its effects. The number of petroleum accidents began to increase, and so Sir. V. Ma...

It is time now to turn to the Standard’s other English branch, the Vacuum Oil Company, Limited, which posed at first as an American company entirely independent and unconnected...