History
The company was founded in Glasgow, Scotland in 1886 by David Sime Cargill to develop oil fields in the Indian subcontinent. In the late 1890s, it passed into the ownership of Sir Campbell Kirkman Finlay, whose family already possessed vast colonial interests through their trading vehicle James Finlay and Co.
It became an early and major shareholder in Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) - later Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, then British Petroleum and eventually BP. It restricted its downstream interests to the subcontinent, where BP had no business. It played a major role in the oil industry in South Asia for about a century through its subsidiaries, and in discovery of oil in the Middle East through its significant interest in British Petroleum. It marketed itself under the BOC brand in Burma, Pakistan and Assam (in India) and through a joint venture Burmah-Shell with Shell in the rest of India.
Burmah Oil Company created mechanised drilling in Magwe Division's oil fields (Yenangyaung, Chauk, and Minbu). Until 1901, when Standard Oil Company began operating in Burma, Burmah Oil Company was the sole oil company to operate in the colony. In 1923, the company secretly gave £5,000 (£236,000 in 2011 money) to future Prime Minister Winston Churchill to lobby the British government to allow them to monopolise Persian oil resources. The company operated in Burma until 1963, when Ne Win nationalised all industries in the country. Based on nationalized assets of Burmah Oil, the Myanma Oil and Gas Enterprise was created.
The company was involved in a landmark legal case, Burmah Oil Co. v Lord Advocate, concerning the destruction of oil fields in Burma by British forces.
In 1966, Castrol was acquired by Burmah, which was renamed Burmah-Castrol.
The Bank of England came to the rescue of Burmah Oil after the company made large losses on its tanker fleets in 1974. The core of the rescue operation was the provision of a year's grace so that the company could become smaller and more viable.
In 2000, Burmah-Castrol was acquired by the then BP Amoco (now renamed BP).
Read more about this topic: Burmah Oil
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)