In this presentation, I attempt to narrate the history of the Iranian oil industry in the roughly twenty-year period between the 1954 Consortium Agreement and the 1973 oil-price shocks in terms of the juridical contradictions of capital. In doing so, I expand the traditional dialectic of capital and labor to theorize how extractive capitalism both operated and obscured itself along the legal frontiers of nature-exporting societies. After a three-year embargo of Iranian oil, the 1954 Consortium Agreement negotiated between the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and the “Seven Sisters” reintroduced Iranian oil to the international market, this time under a 50-50 profit-sharing principle already operating in Iraq, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia. The formal equality of profits enshrined in the Agreement extinguished accusations that the national owners and foreign managers of Iranian oil existed in unequal relation. Yet in reality, the Agreement isolated the Iranian state from operational matters and obscured the fact that profitability was contingent upon production limits, which foreign companies continued to determine. Discontent to collect rent that foreign companies set the ceiling on, the Iranian government worked throughout the 1960s to argue for increases in production capacities using the same juridical logic of the 1954 Agreement. While Iran conceived of oil, its finitude and potentials, in terms of national interest, the oil companies acted in terms of an international market crowded by new oil discoveries. Frustrated by his inability to harmonize dissonant interests, Mohammad Reza Shah, bolstered by the strength of oil-exporting countries under OPEC, nationalized the oil industry in 1973. Nationalization, however, exposed an even deeper contradiction in the oil industry: petrostates like Iran had helped lead the international struggle for sovereignty over natural resources, a key anti-colonial development strategy, but oil, exceeding the possibilities of its domestic consumption, could only be realized as value through foreign exchange, tethering nature-exporting countries to nature-consuming ones. Centering these contradictions in the history of Iran’s oil industry helps us account for the role of resource-rich but peripheral countries in the formation and reproduction of global capitalism. But more than that, it allows us to reconceptualize petrostates, distinguished by the emphasis on “productive” capital as passive rent seekers, as ciphers for understanding capital and the legal forms characteristic of it.