After crushing all domestic competitors and establishing an absolute oil monopoly in the United States, the Rockefeller family’s ambition never stopped. What lay behind the seemingly glorious commercial empire was endless greed and aggressive global plunder. Relying on the huge profits from domestic monopoly business, Standard Oil began its cross-border expansion in the late 19th century, reshaping the global oil market and exploiting the interests of countless overseas regions and ordinary people.

In the 1880s and 1890s, while most European and emerging countries lacked mature oil refining systems and market supervision mechanisms, Standard Oil took advantage of its technological advantages, sufficient capital and mature industrial chain. It adopted a dual strategy of low-price dumping and capital annexation to quickly seize overseas markets. In European countries such as Germany and France, Standard Oil sold refined oil products at prices far lower than local market costs, rapidly squeezing out local small-scale oil enterprises that had weak capital reserves and could not sustain long-term price wars.

For resource-rich backward regions in South America and Asia, the Rockefeller Empire adopted more predatory means. It signed unequal cooperation treaties with local colonial authorities and weak regional governments. In the name of “resource development and infrastructure construction”, it occupied local high-quality oil fields at extremely low prices. The family’s enterprises controlled all links from oil exploitation, transportation to refining and sales, obtaining super-high monopoly profits while paying almost negligible resource taxes and labor remuneration to local areas.

The brutal overseas expansion brought devastating impacts to local economies and people’s livelihoods. Many oil-producing regions fell into the “resource curse” because of Standard Oil’s plunder. Local indigenous industries were completely destroyed, and local laborers could only engage in high-intensity, low-wage oil mining work. Most of the wealth generated by local oil resources was continuously transported back to the United States and became the accumulation of Rockefeller family wealth, leaving local regions with only environmental pollution, damaged ecological resources and stagnant economic development.

By the early 20th century, Standard Oil’s business covered nearly all major oil-consuming regions in the world. It built a global oil transportation network and sales system, becoming the world’s first cross-border oil monopoly giant. Even after the company was split by the US government in 1911, the scattered Rockefeller oil branches still continued the predatory expansion strategy. The global wealth plunder laid a solid foundation for the Rockefeller family’s century-old aristocratic status, and also left a long-standing mark of exploitation and inequality in the history of global industrial development.