In 1901 the Qajar Shah of Persia granted the British billionaire William Knox D’Arcy a vast concession to tap natural gas, petroleum and other mineral products across much of the Persian Empire. Within a few years, d’Arcy’s prospecting efforts struck oil in the Zagros mountains, amid the territory of Persia’s largest nomadic tribal group, the Bakhtiari. This paper explores the resulting construction at the heart of the Bakhtiari’s winter pastures of Persia’s first oil-extraction frontier. Recent studies, such as Timothy Mitchell’s seminal Carbon Democracy, have highlighted how early twentieth-century oil companies enforced their power by channeling and limiting the flows of supply of Middle East oil. But little attention had been paid to the early environmental and social consequences of British oil imperialism in south-west Persia, an area which was a borderland of the Persian, Ottoman and Russian Empires. Unraveling the connections between imperialism, extractive capitalism and ecological changes in the distinctive environment of the Zagros mountains, this paper argues that British oil extraction was not just part of geopolitical strategy geared around oil products: it was also, in terms of its impact in the affected region, both a quasi-colonial and a socio-ecological project. Specifically, the larger aim of the British oil project in Persia was to transform what was seen as a desertic wasteland into a productive space, through oil infrastructure, but also to transform the Bakhtiari into colonial subjects. With oil exploration and extraction, the Bakhtiari were enrolled as a workforce for the Company and gradually abandoned their nomadic way of life for sedentarisation. Showing how the search for a mineral resource and the valorization of an untapped subterranean world changed the uses of the land in the Zagros mountains, this paper will demonstrate how the Bakhtiari founds means of resistance against the environmental and social consequences of British oil imperialism, notably by protests, insubordination and sabotages of oil infrastructure. At one level, this involves attention to the challenges of reconstructing subaltern experience when the only substantive extant documentation is a colonial archive which requires carefully parsing both with and against the grain (Stoler 2009). On the other hand, binary narratives of imperial power and resistance also need to be placed within larger perspectives, notably anthropological work relating to the Bakhtiari (Garthwaite 2009; Digard 2015) which highlights the role of power hierarchies, protest and conflict within tribal groups as well as without.