Canada has long been the most valuable energy trading partner of the United States. In 2018, the Great White North supplied nearly one-half of all U.S. oil imports. Numerous books published in recent years have examined the rise of oil sands extraction in northern Alberta, the major source of growing Canadian oil exports to the United States in the twenty-first century. But Canada emerged as a major oil and gas producer decades before the commercial development of the oil sands, and the origins of the Canadian oil industry even preceded the famous 1859 Drake well in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Not since Earle Gray's 1970 classic, The Great Canadian Oil Patch, however, has a historian undertaken to write a comprehensive history of the Canadian oil industry.
Graham Taylor's Imperial Standard accomplishes this task nicely. As the first major study of Imperial Oil, the Exxon affiliate that dominated Canadian oil for most of the twentieth century, Imperial Standard is a fine business history of one of Canada's largest enterprises. Based on extensive research in Imperial's corporate records at the Glenbow Museum and Archives in Calgary, along with a range of other primary and secondary sources, Taylor provides valuable insight into Imperial's leading role in the evolution of oil not only as a major national industry but also as “an integral part of the system of continental and then global expansion and dominion that Exxon pursued from its emergence in 1880” (p. 3).
Canadian oil historians are always proud to note that credit for the “first oil well” actually goes to James Miller Williams, who successfully drilled and refined oil from Enniskillen Township in southern Ontario at least a year before “Colonel” Edwin Drake drilled his. By 1880, a group of refiners had combined to form Imperial Oil in an effort to dominate the kerosene trade, much like Rockefeller's Standard Oil did in the United States. Even under protective tariffs, however, Imperial could not withstand the price-cutting onslaught of Standard and competition from other firms. In 1898, the owners sold a controlling stake in the company to the American oil giant. With the dissolution of Standard Oil by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1911, the largest of the monopoly's offspring—Standard Oil of New Jersey (Jersey Standard or, later, Exxon)—inherited the Canadian subsidiary.
The most compelling aspect of this book is Taylor's analysis of the changing relationship between Imperial and its majority shareholder. Destined at first to serve merely as a vehicle for selling Standard Oil products throughout Canada, Imperial assumed more strategic importance under the leadership of Walter Teagle, who took charge in 1911 before rising to the position of president of Jersey Standard in 1917. Teagle used the Canadian company (through its subsidiary, International Petroleum) to engage British firms in Peru, create “cover” for investments in countries potentially hostile to the United States, such as Colombia, and distance Jersey Standard from the tax and antitrust reach of the American government. Teagle also expanded Imperial's refineries across Canada and pushed oil exploration into Alberta and the Northwest Territories. Still, Jersey Standard siphoned off most of Imperial's international profits and kept its affiliate dependent on imported technology. All the while, the interchange of managers, engineers, and geologists between the two companies groomed managerial and technical talent within both.
The pivotal moment in the relationship took place in February 1947, when Imperial, under the leadership of Henry Hewetson, discovered major oil and gas reserves at Leduc, Alberta, just south of the provincial capital of Edmonton. The financial and organization demands of developing these reserves transformed Imperial into a more distinctly Canadian and vertically integrated operation. In the decades to follow, Imperial expanded and diversified more aggressively throughout Canada, including, by the early 1980s, investments in the oil sands and in the Canadian Arctic. Nevertheless, Imperial's major ownership by Jersey Standard (renamed Exxon in 1972) made it the target of nationalist opposition to the foreign domination of the Canadian oil industry, especially during the oil shocks of the 1970s. What inflamed this opposition most was Imperial's central role in the “continentalist” approach of Canadian national oil policy, which repeatedly blocked a proposed pipeline from Alberta to Montreal, dividing the Canadian market between an oil-importing East and oil-exporting West, to the benefit of multinational and American oil interests.
The last fourth of Imperial Standard loses focus. Imperial's archived records are only available through 1978, and Taylor's effort to bring the story beyond that point is frustratingly disorganized. His “epilogue” section, labeled “Since 1980,” is confusing because the previous chapter narrates Imperial's oil sands and Arctic ventures well into the twenty-first century, and the three chapters that make up the epilogue address developments prior to 1980. The first introduces background on the history of the international oil economy going back to the 1920s. The next offers a more global perspective on the history of Jersey Standard–Exxon, again starting in the 1920s. The third addresses the environmental impacts and issues that attended Canadian oil development, largely from the Leduc discovery forward through the challenge of global climate change, which seriously threatens Imperial's commitment to oil sands development.
The information in the epilogue chapters would have furnished more clarity and context had it been integrated into the main body of the book. Overall, however, Imperial Standard still succeeds in analyzing the unbreakable ties that have bound Imperial and Exxon together over time.
