The success of the Anglo-Maikop Corporation within the fiasco of the Maikop 'oil rush'

Abstract

The present article reviews the history of the Anglo-Maikop Corporation (AMC); a free-standing company which, in 1910, took part in the speculative oil rush originating in the City of London and whose target was the Maikop oilfields in Russia. Although the Maikop phenomenon was a fiasco, the AMC prospered. The company all but disappeared during the first years of the Bolshevik revolution, but between 1910 and 1914 it was able to make the transition from coal to oil in Southern Russia, and created a successful, vertically integrated oil holding. In this article, we argue that this success, which is in stark contrast to the failure of the company's peers, was mainly due to the fact that the AMC's founder, George Tweedy, was very knowledgeable of the Russian oil scene of the time, which was, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the most advanced oil industry in the world.