This paper will discuss the urban social history of Abadan, Iran’s largest oil company town. The urban design and development of this city of a quarter of a million population of very diverse backgrounds framed a highly contested daily life that was an intense reflection of the socio-economic and political currents shaping modern Iran: In a very real sense Abadan was the laboratory of modernization in Iran! It was the place where the central state and its coercive and administrative agents and institutions, local elites and notables, corporate capital, technical experts, imperial powers, trade unionists and political activists, and local subalterns, ranging from proletarians, pastoralists, housewives, servants, landlords, prostitutes, smugglers, migrants, etc. all came together to make the oil complex a reality. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and gain insights into the urban processes that shaped this oil city in the first half of the 20th Century. The emergence and consolidation of the oil industry in Khuzestan in the early part of the previous century was predicated on the challenging and often haphazard process of both building an urban environment to accommodate the industrial production and commercial circulation of oil, but also the reproduction of the numerous social actors that supported this process or became attached to this industrial economy. In this paper I will argue that oil cannot be conceived as simply a physical substance, an industry, or a strategic commodity plugged into the process of capital accumulation. Rather, oil should be conceptualized as a social complex involving all these factors and much more. To better understand the layered ways in which the oil complex has shaped political dynamics and social imaginaries in a place like Iran it is necessary to provide a thick description of the numerous channels through which social and political life have been organized around it. Using archival material, extensive ethnographic research, and comparative urban geographic analysis, this paper will investigate how daily life and social and political relations were framed by the urban space of Abadan -- its patterns of housing, work, and leisure, its spaces of legality and subversion, and its coercive and symbolic architectures, etc. -- spaces that were a constant site of struggle and accommodation between all the social actors that made that made the oil complex a reality.