Luke Mitchell writes:

Coll has constructed a narrative around the oilmen’s extraordinary efforts to stay a step ahead of anyone who might get between them and some new patch of crude. Where kidnappers, rebels, conspirators and (for the most part) pirates failed, ExxonMobil succeeded. But Private Empire is no boy’s own adventure for middle managers. The pivotal event in the history of ExxonMobil, as Coll sees it, wasn’t the wreck of theExxon Valdez, important though that was, but the fall of the Berlin Wall. ‘The Cold War’s end,’ he writes, ‘signalled a coming era when non-governmental actors – corporations, philanthropies, terrorist cells and media networks – all gained relative power.’

(LRB 8 November 2012)

Allen Lane | Hardback 704 pp. |ISBN: 9781846146596