Marcus Samuel, 1st Viscount Bearsted, was a British businessman who founded the Shell Transport and Trading Company, building it from a family trading firm dealing in seashells into one of the first companies to ship bulk oil through the Suez Canal in specially designed tankers, beginning in 1892. Shells tanker fleet let it compete directly with Standard Oil for the growing Asian kerosene market by cutting the cost of transporting oil in bulk rather than in barrels. In 1907 Samuel merged Shell with the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company to form Royal Dutch Shell, one of the companies that would come to dominate the twentieth century international oil industry. He served as Lord Mayor of London and was raised to the peerage, but his lasting significance is as one of the founders of the modern integrated international oil company.
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