Americans usually celebrate the two great generations that have marked their history: the generation of their founding fathers, responsible for the creation of their political system, in the second half of the 18th century; and the generation of robber barons, responsible for the creation of their monopolistic capitalism in the second half of the 19th century. John D. Rockefeller stands out as the greatest figure within the generation of the “robber barons”, he was strongly associated with oil and the creation of the Standard Oil Company, the first of the “Seven Sisters” to control the world oil market up until the end of World War II, and still occupy a prominent place among the 15 largest capitalist companies in the world.
Standard Oil was created shortly after the Civil War in 1870, but by the end of the 19th century, Rockefeller's company was the largest oil company in the United States, and the largest supplier of the kerosene, which lit up the largest cities around the world. According to his biographers, Rockefeller was a godly man and used to travel accompanied by two Pastors who gave him religious assistance, but at the same time he ran his company with merciless methods, with an unrestrained pursuit of capitalist greed, whilst even destroying his competitors whenever it was necessary. Maybe this was why his brother William Rockefeller used to refer to competition in the oil market as an exercise of "war and peace." As capital centralization advanced, and oil became the most important and strategic commodity in the world, John Rockefeller's behavior became a kind of universal "ethical paradigm" in the world oil industry.
In the early 20th century, the oil industry joined the war industry and oil became the "energy" that moved the ships, tanks and airplanes of the military forces of the Great Powers, especially in World War II, and in all conflicts that followed until the 21st century. Oil played a decisive role in the Pacific War, triggered by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and was the central reason for the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941, which wanted to reach Azerbaijan, in order to extract oil from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea. After that, oil was decisive for the US and British-sponsored coup d'état in Iran in 1953, and also for the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis. It again played a central role in the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, the Gulf War, 1991, the Iraq War, 2003, the Libyan War, 2011, and the Syrian War that continues to this day.
