Imperial Standard: Imperial Oil, Exxon, and the Canadian Oil Industry from 1880 by Graham D. Taylor (review)

In Imperial Standard, Graham D. Taylor reconstructs the rich, transnational history of the Imperial Oil Company from 1880 to the present day. For most of its history, Imperial was the largest oil company in Canada and one of the most successful corporate entities in the country. Despite its incalculable significance for Canadian energy history, there is practically no scholarly work on the Imperial Oil Company; James Laxer and Ann Martin's 1976 monograph assessing Imperial's impact on the Canadian economy, and several books and articles published by the company are the rare exceptions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the large American oil companies and their histories have a significant body of literature. Taylor's study thus fills a longstanding gap in the literature on Canadian oil history and is particularly welcome at this critical moment in the country's energy trajectory.

Taylor is a business historian whose work focusses on the growth of multinational corporations during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Imperial Standard, Taylor makes his first book-length foray into the Canadian oil and gas industry, which he asserts was "arguably as important for the nation's economic development in the twentieth century as was the Canadian Pacific Railway in the nineteenth century and the Hudson's Bay Company in the years before Confederation." (3) The central thesis of the book is that over the past 140 years the Canadian oil and gas industry played a foundational role in the social, political, and economic life of Canadians and, more specifically, that Imperial was a corporate leader in the unfolding of the age of oil both in Canada and around the world.

Imperial Standard consists of thirteen chapters of varying length, which are divided into three chronological parts: Part I ("Foundations," 1860–1917) examines the early years of Imperial Oil and its takeover by Standard in 1898; Part ii ("Before Leduc," 1917–1947) follows the expansion of Imperial operations across Canada and the world; Part iii ("After Leduc," 1947–1980) focuses on the challenges faced by Imperial in the tumultuous post-war decades; the Epilogue contains three chapters that account for the company's activities from 1980 up to the present day. The book ends with several appendices containing maps, diagrams, and statistical data. A prominent feature of this book is the depth of research and the extensive use of archival materials. Taylor has been researching this project for more than forty years, and during that time he has consulted the Imperial Oil records held at the Glenbow Archives in Calgary, Alberta, and the Standard/Exxon records held at the Dolph Briscoe Centre for American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to corporate records, Taylor also makes extensive use of official histories and reports, company journals, trade literature, newspapers, and photographs. The author states that this is not an official history of Imperial, and that all of the records he consulted are freely available to the public.

Several aspects of this book stand out as noteworthy. Imperial Standard is an engaging business history that reconstructs Imperial's boardroom decisions, traces its acquisitions and mergers, and narrates the rise and fall of the company's economic and political fortunes across the oil-producing world, from Mexico and Peru to Iran and Russia. While primarily a study of Imperial, this book is also a history of its much larger American parent company, Standard Oil (later Esso and later still Exxon). As hinted in his title, Taylor historicizes both companies simultaneously by reconstructing their complicated, often fraught, yet nonetheless profitable relationship over the past 140 years. Employing this wide-angle approach enables Taylor to situate Imperial's history in local, regional, national, continental, and global contexts, expertly weaving his narrative through all of these scales. The reader is brought on a fascinating journey across time and space, from nineteenth-century oilfields in Ontario to twenty-first century offshore drilling platforms in...