The shellfish entrepreneur who competed with the Rothschilds

"In the labyrinth of alleyways and dark corridors of the City of London, where almost all the nerves of the world pass through 130,000 offices large and small, you can find a fat little man strolling about, an old-fashioned top hat covering his head with Semitic features [...]. He is a man who, with Deterding, controls oil fields fourteen times richer than all the American fields." This is how a Catalan publication from the late 1930s described Marcus Samuel, one of the key figures in the European oil industry since the end of the 19th century.

We've already discussed Henri Deterding, founder of Royal Dutch Shell, but that would have been an incomplete story without recounting the adventures of his partner, Marcus Samuel, founder of Shell. Born in London into a Jewish family with Iraqi ancestry, he grew up surrounded by the allure of international business. His father had established an import-export company, and later, he and his brother, Samuel Samuel, set up a firm to trade with the Far East. Their initial product was seashells, but they soon discovered other, far more profitable commodities (in fact, besides seashells, which would prove important to the future oil company, they also traded in spices, rice, sugar, tea, and other products). His travels through Asia allowed him to build a significant network of contacts in Japan, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

An event that would change Samuel's life was the arrival of shipping broker Fred Lane, a trusted associate of the Rothschild family. The banking dynasty had created the Caspian and Black Sea Petroleum Company to exploit Russian oil, but competition from Rockefeller, through Standard Oil, proved too complex an obstacle to gaining entry into the American market. Faced with this situation, Rothschild opted to look eastward to sell their product, and the person with the best distribution network there was none other than Samuel. The alliance between the two was swift, and from 1891 Samuel placed his ships at the service of the Rothschilds' oil. A few years earlier, the Suez Canal had opened, significantly shortening the distance to Europe from the East.

After six years of collaboration with the Rothschilds, Samuel created a brand new company dedicated solely to the transport of black gold, which he named after his original business: he called it Shell, which means shell (The full name was Shell Transport and Trading Company). Simultaneously, it began operating a refinery in Borneo, in the Dutch East Indies. With the turn of the century, a new company joined the race between Shell and Standard Oil to dominate the market: Royal Dutch, now headed by Henri Deterding, a figure who would become one of the giants of the oil world. In 1907, the two companies merged to form Royal Dutch Shell, with the intention of competing with Rockefeller's Standard Oil (it is often also explained that Samuel relied on Deterding's firm to be able to dedicate time to the intense social and political life he developed in London, which distracted him from his other duties).

Key in the First World War

The Dutch oil company contributed a large amount of production, while the English one complemented it with a large distribution network. The resulting company invested considerable effort in demonstrating the benefits of its oil for powering engines, a fuel used by Prince Borghese in his victory in the legendary 1907 Peking-Paris rally, and also by Ernest Shackleton and Captain Robert Falcon Scott in their polar expeditions. The relationship between Samuel and Deterding was not particularly easy, but Fred Lane reappeared, often acting as a mediator between them. Shell was key in the First World War, as an oil supplier for the Allies.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Samuel held several important positions in the City of London, including that of Lord Mayor, which is why he was first called sir and after lord from 1898 until his death.