Even though we may not be paying attention, oil always flows through the subsoil of our lives, as a fundamental element of most activities we carry out. But from time to time, it abandons its discretion and becomes part of the news headlines, never for a good cause. Today we are once again living through one of those periods when information about the price of crude oil torments us and threatens our way of life. Black gold has been the great fuel of capitalist society since the second half of the 19th century, but while today the big players are faceless multinationals, for many decades those who made and unmade things in this sector were well-known figures, such as Jean Baptiste August Kessler.

"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.

This spring, a rumor that has been recurring for years has resurfaced in the business world: a possible merger between the two European oil giants, or, in other words, between British Petroleum (known commercially as BP) and Shell (the new name for Royal Dutch Shell). Whether the merger actually materializes or not, the reality is that the history of both oil companies is more than a century old and filled with corporate moves. If we want to trace the origins of British Petroleum, we must go back to 1901, when a wealthy investor from southern England obtained a concession for some land in Persia (now Iran) for oil exploration. His name was William Knox D'Arcy, and the project would have great historical significance.