June 2025

[Continued from Part 1 ] Royal Dutch Three weeks later, as the Murex cruised down the Malacca Strait toward Singapore, its crew might have seen a flare on the Sumatran coast. Twelve years earlier, a Dutch tobacco farmer wandering around the area looking for suitable farmland stumbled...

Baku In the 1880s the Rothschilds and Nobels were losing their battle with John D Rockefeller for the kerosene market in Europe. Their unlikely saviour was a Jewish merchant from the East End of London. Marcus Samuel transformed the petroleum industry, persuaded the Royal Navy to...