THE SEVEN SISTERS: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Made

by Anthony Sampson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 27, 1975

The ""Seven Sisters,"" a phrase made famous by the late Italian oil maverick Enrico Mattei, are BP, Shell, Texaco, Gulf, Socal, Mobil, and--the giant of giants--Exxon. Anthony Sampson, whose most recent book is The Sovereign State of ITT (1973), lucidly negotiates their tortuous histories, summarizing each sister's origins and tracing the industry's erratic relationships with Western and Mideast governments from the 1911 Standard Oil Trust case to the aftermath of the 1973-74 embargo. He deplores the longstanding British and American willingness to let the ""majors"" assume serious foreign policy responsibilities (keeping the Arabs sweet despite official support of Israel). For decades the great consortia (into which the sisters formed themselves to assume the important Mideast concessions) claimed to function as ""buffers"" between the oil-producing and consuming nations--an argument used to justify a multitude of anti-trust violations. Sampson thinks it was the independent companies, with their eagerness to acquire oil on any terms, who instigated the producing nations' new attitude during the 1960's. The majors, who might have withstood the producers' demands, eventually found it more satisfactory to capitulate and look for compensatory profits ""downstream."" In the end the oil-rich nations had only to stretch out their hands to the marketing and allocation machinery that their ancient masters had perfected. Sampson pays little attention to the majors' warfare against the independents; he mentions but doesn't go into the administrative complexities that permit the consortia and the corporations to generate fictional profits and losses (see Christopher T. Rand's Making Democracy Safe for Oil, p. 647); he fails to thrash out whether the sisters in fact managed to turn the price hikes of the late sixties to their own advantage. As for the future, he thinks the majors might be smart to surrender their concessions, but has few concrete suggestions beyond a warning that Western governments must think through the supervisory responsibilities they have so long shirked. Peter Odell's Oil and World Power (p. 165) is a solider general introduction to the subject, but the clarity of Sampson's writing offsets a certain blandness.

Pub Date: Oct. 27, 1975

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975

Categories: NONFICTION