The Petroleum War of 1910: Standard Oil, Austria, and the Limits of the Multinational Corporation

"THE PROPRIETOR OF STOCK," ADAM SMITH CONTENDED in 1776, "is properly a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country." The mobility of the stockholder, like that of the merchant-who Smith likewise noted was "not necessarily the citizen of any particular country"-challenged the modern state trying to develop its own economy. The stockholder could invest abroad to avoid paying an obnoxious tax; worse yet, "a very trifling disgust will make [the merchant] remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another."1 In the twenty-first century, this observation has inspired studies of international economic activity that, despite myriad disagreements, tend to agree that "globalization challenges the importance of the nation-state and alters the balance of power between states and markets in favor of the latter," and that the major beneficiaries of this phenomenon are multinational corporations.2 Even in the Golden Age of global commerce that preceded the First World War, however, merchants and stockholders could not, in every instance, simply turn tail and flee over a "trifling disgust." Instead, they had to negotiate terms and reach settlements with a profusion of imperial, national, provincial, and local governments.3 This was particularly true of the oil industry, which had reached global proportions by that time. From 1910 to 1912, two of the world's most powerful corporate entities-"the best known of all international companies," the Standard Oil Trust, and the second-larg