Seven Sisters (oil companies)

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The "Seven Sisters" was a term coined in the 1950s by businessman Enrico Mattei, then-head of the Italian state oil company Eni, to describe the seven oil companies which formed the "Consortium for Iran" cartel and dominated the global petroleum industry from the mid-1940s to the 1970s.^[1]^[2] The group comprised Anglo-Persian Oil Company (now BP); Gulf Oil, Standard Oil of California (SoCal) and Texaco (now Chevron); Royal Dutch Shell; and Standard Oil of New Jersey (Esso) and Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony) (now ExxonMobil).^[3]
Prior to the oil crisis of 1973, the members of the Seven Sisters controlled around 85% of the world's petroleum reserves, but in recent decades the dominance of the companies and their successors has declined as a result of the increasing influence of the OPEC cartel and state-owned oil companies in emerging-market economies.