Shell plc
CorpDigest
Shell plc
Company History
Founded 1907 in London, United Kingdom
Last reviewed: 2026-06-03 · By Swet Parvadiya
Marcus Samuel Sr. Ran a seashell trading business in Victorian London — importing decorative shells from the Far East to sell to collectors and craftspeople. His son, Marcus Samuel Jr. inherited the business and identified an opportunity in 1892 that had nothing to do with seashells: the Suez Canal Company had prohibited petroleum tankers due to fire risk from vapor accumulation in conventional vessels. Samuel commissioned the SS Murex, a ship specifically designed to carry bulk liquid petroleum safely through the canal, and negotiated Rothschild oil supply from Baku. The first voyage of the SS Murex in 1892 — 4,000 tons of Russian kerosene to Japan — established the trading model that Shell still operates.
Shell Transport and Trading Company was formally founded in 1897. The merger with Royal Dutch Petroleum in 1907 combined Marcus Samuel's British trading and transport infrastructure with Henri Deterding's Dutch production operations in the East Indies — creating the Royal Dutch Shell Group that remained the formal corporate structure until the 2005 unification into a single Anglo-Dutch entity.
The Russian nationalization of 1917 stripped Shell of its Baku oil assets without compensation. Mexican nationalization in 1938 removed another major producing region. The pattern of operating in high-risk jurisdictions and losing assets to political change is not unique to Shell — it defines the history of every oil supermajor — but Shell's response was always to replace lost capacity elsewhere rather than reduce geographic risk. The BG Group acquisition for approximately $53 billion in 2016 was the most recent major rebuilding move, substantially expanding the LNG business that now represents Shell's most strategically differentiated capability.
Marcus Samuel Jr. Founded the Shell Transport and Trading Company and built its Far East kerosene distribution network that became the British half of Royal Dutch Shell. He was Lord Mayor of London in 1902 and was later created Viscount Bearsted.
Henri Deterding was the architect of the Royal Dutch Shell merger and the dominant personality in the combined company for three decades. Known as 'the Napoleon of Oil,' he guided Shell through two world wars before his controversial retirement in 1936.
Acquire BG's world-class LNG assets in Australia (QCLNG), deepwater oil in Brazil (pre-salt Santos Basin), and East African exploration acreage to significantly grow Shell's LNG portfolio and Brazilian deepwater position. BG Group had built the QCLNG project in Queensland, Australia — which converts coal seam gas to LNG for export — and held deepwater exploration rights in Brazil's Santos Basin pre-salt, adjacent to the giant Lula and Búzios fields that Petrobras was developing.
Shell traces its origin to 1833, when Marcus Samuel Sr. opened a London curio shop selling decorative seashells and oriental antiques imported from the Far East. That import-export business, run from Houndsditch in the East End, evolved over fifty years into a substantial trading house known as M. Samuel & Co., handling rice, silk, copperware and other Asian cargoes. The pivot to oil came under Marcus Samuel Jr. in the early 1890s, when he saw the opportunity to ship Russian kerosene from Batum on the Black Sea to Asian markets dominated by Standard Oil. Samuel commissioned the world's first purpose-built bulk oil tanker, the Murex, which in 1892 became the first tanker permitted to transit the Suez Canal, slashing freight costs to Singapore and Bangkok. The trading firm was reincorporated in 1897 as The Shell Transport and Trading Company, with the scallop shell logo a nod to the founder's earliest cargo. By 1907 the British Shell Transport and Trading merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum in a 40:60 ratio to form the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the structure that became one of the world's two largest integrated oil companies for the next century. The seashell shop is therefore both literal origin and corporate identity.
By the early 1900s both Royal Dutch Petroleum, formed in 1890 to exploit Sumatran oil concessions, and Shell Transport and Trading, founded in 1897 around Marcus Samuel's tanker fleet, were being squeezed by John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Shell had aggressive ships and a tanker network, while Royal Dutch under Henri Deterding had the production and refining base in the Dutch East Indies. After Standard Oil tried to acquire each separately, Deterding pushed for a defensive combination. The two firms signed a working partnership in 1903, then on April 23 1907 formalised the Royal Dutch/Shell Group with two parent companies in a fixed 60:40 split: Royal Dutch Petroleum of The Hague held 60% and Shell Transport and Trading of London held 40%. Deterding became Director-General of the combined group and dominated strategy for three decades. The dual-parent, dual-headquarters structure became a distinctive feature of Shell and lasted, with various refinements, until the 2005 unification into Royal Dutch Shell plc and again until the 2022 move to a single UK domicile.
The Murex was the launch vehicle that turned Marcus Samuel's trading house into a global oil business. Built at West Hartlepool to Samuel's specifications and launched in 1892, the 5,010-ton vessel was the first ocean-going ship designed exclusively to carry kerosene in bulk in its own steel hull, replacing the wooden case-oil trade. Crucially, Samuel had spent two years lobbying the Suez Canal Company and Lloyd's of London to certify bulk tankers safe enough to use the canal, a privilege Standard Oil had been denied. On 24 August 1892 the Murex sailed loaded with Russian kerosene from Batum through Suez to Singapore and Bangkok, cutting voyage times and freight costs versus the long Cape route by roughly half. With Suez access secured, Samuel ordered a series of similar tankers, all named after seashells, and undercut Standard Oil across the Asian markets. Within three years his fleet was carrying around 90% of the Russian kerosene moving through Suez. That logistics edge, combined with bulk storage installations Samuel had pre-built in Asian ports, is what made Shell Transport and Trading credible enough by 1907 to merge as an equal with Royal Dutch.
Shell unified its corporate domicile in two steps. In 2005, after the 2004 reserves overstatement scandal that forced Shell to restate roughly 4.5 billion barrels of proved reserves, the group abandoned its 1907 dual-parent structure and combined Royal Dutch Petroleum and Shell Transport and Trading into a single holding, Royal Dutch Shell plc, incorporated in England and Wales but tax-resident in the Netherlands, with headquarters in The Hague. The second step came in late 2021 and early 2022, when shareholders approved moving the group's tax residence and headquarters to the United Kingdom, dropping the 'Royal Dutch' prefix to become Shell plc. Three drivers stood out: a Dutch dividend withholding tax that complicated buybacks, a 2021 Hague district court climate ruling against the company, and pressure from activist investor Third Point arguing the dual share-class structure depressed valuation. Unification simplified the share class, allowed larger buybacks, and concentrated governance, board meetings and the CEO's office in London. The Dutch government was openly displeased, but the move passed with more than 99% approval at the November 2021 EGM.
After the 1907 merger Shell expanded along three axes: upstream production, downstream refining and marketing, and chemicals. In the 1910s and 1920s Henri Deterding pushed Shell into Romania, Russia, Mexico, Venezuela and the United States, opening Shell Oil Company in California in 1912 and acquiring Roxana Petroleum in 1915. By the 1930s Shell was the only major non-American competitor to Standard Oil's successors. Postwar growth came from Middle East concessions, North Sea exploration starting in the 1960s where Shell-Esso developed Brent and other giant fields, and a chemicals arm that became one of the world's largest by the 1970s. Diversification included coal, metals and nuclear before a 1990s refocus back to oil and gas. Shell pioneered scenario planning under Pierre Wack, helping it navigate the 1973 and 1979 oil shocks. The 2000s brought heavy bets on deepwater Gulf of Mexico, Athabasca oil sands, Pearl gas-to-liquids in Qatar, and the BG acquisition in 2016 that vaulted Shell to the top of global LNG. The 21st century pivot has added offshore wind, hydrogen, biofuels and EV charging alongside the legacy hydrocarbon business.