Henri Deterding

Henri Wilhelm August Deterding (1866 to 1939), born in Amsterdam, was one of the first executives of the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, its general manager for 36 years from 1900 to 1936 and chairman of the combined Royal Dutch Shell oil company. Educated only to the age of sixteen, he worked at the Twentsche Bank and the Netherlands Trading Society in the Dutch East Indies before entering the infant oil industry, joined Royal Dutch in 1896 and succeeded its founder Jean Baptiste August Kessler as general manager when Kessler died in 1900. Nicknamed the Napoleon of Oil, he developed the tanker fleet that let Royal Dutch compete with Marcus Samuel's Shell company, led the 1907 merger with Shell Transport and Trading and the 1911 purchase of Azerbaijan oil fields from the Rothschild family, and made Royal Dutch Shell a competitor to John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil and one of the world's largest petroleum companies. He was made an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1920 for supplying the Allies with petroleum in the First World War, and his later admiration of the German Nazi Party made him controversial.