$9.99 on Kindle, Nook, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play (August 2026)(cover by Susan Erony)
The Seven Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Shaped by Anthony Sampson (131,000 words, 6 illustrations)
“This is an extraordinarily fine book for the specialist and citizen alike, telling of that powerful community of interest embracing Exxon, Royal Dutch/Shell, Texaco, Mobil, British Petroleum, Socal and Gulf... The book is well researched, objective, and mostly well written — in every sense a first-class work.” — Harold L. Johnson, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
“Anthony Sampson... has performed one of the higher functions of journalism. He has entered an area of baffling complexity and made sense of it... his story is one of institutionalized greed, of amorality, of the abrogation of governmental responsibility, oftentimes of stupidity. It is the story of the cartelization of the earth’s most precious commodity... Mr. Sampson... has given us a book that... will help us understand the most profound economic change of our time.” — Kevin Cooney, The New York Times
“[A] first-rate popular history of the international oil industry, in which personalities, drama, and local color are arranged around some central ideas.” — William Diebold, Jr., Foreign Affairs
“Sampson has provided a well-written journalistic account of the origins, development, and current state of the seven largest multinational petroleum companies: Exxon, Mobil, Standard of California, Texaco, Gulf, British Petroleum (BP), and Royal Dutch Shell. He provides thumbnail sketches of the personalities of their founders, subsequent leaders, and current executives. He tells the story of the discovery of oil in various parts of the world, of the companies’ efforts at co-ordination and collusion to keep markets stable, of the enlisting of governments to help the companies achieve their goals, and finally of the rise of OPEC as the dominant force in oil price setting today.” — Lawrence J. White, Political Science Quarterly
“A diamond in a coal pile. It is, without exaggeration, a brilliant achievement... At once a captivating story and an intellectual analysis of oil.” — Business Week
“Anthony Sampson has succeeded in doing what few others have even tried: he has brought his considerable intelligence and skill to bear on an extraordinarily complicated area of business — the oil trade — and explained it clearly, sensibly and with seeming ease.” — Chicago Tribune
“Sampson has lifted some of the layers of secrecy that have hidden much of the oil companies’ operations from public scrutiny... [He] gets behind the great stone faces of oil corporate headquarters.” — John Barkham Reviews
“Sampson, a first-rate British journalist with a keen eye for color, gives us delicious accounts of [John D. Rockefeller and] some of the other gamey characters who run the industry.” — Washington Post
“Whether you regard the giant international oil companies as plundering privateers or as heroic industrialists, I think you will find some surprises in Anthony Sampson’s The Seven Sisters.” — Los Angeles Times
“Sampson’s book... has the journalist’s mark of making a complex subject readily understandable.” — Alfred S. Eichner, Challenge
“The best effort to date... For anyone who would begin to understand the role oil plays in making and breaking governments and economies, here’s a starting point.” — Playboy