The present study intends to revisit the early history of the Abadan Refinery in the Iranian southern province of Khuzestan through examining the labour contribution to the foundation, sustentation and eventual consolidation of this massive industrial complex. The labour partial resistance and accommodation to a growing array of imposed recruitment measures, training schemes, and labour disciplines will be studied within the boundaries of labour agency. However, in this paper I will argue that the labour subjectivity cannot be marginalised as an isolated, passive recipient of management, knowledge and technology. The labour agency needs to be conceived beyond the national frontiers and in a transnational multi spaces context. The discovery of oil in 1908 was followed by the inauguration of a new expanding oil industry that required new working force and employment relations in Iran. The building of the Abadan Refinery, which initiated in 1909, lasted four years and on the eve of the First World War it was already ranked as one of the major oil refineries in the world, employing a workforce of 3000. Following the initial construction work that engaged massive Indian and Persian semi-skilled and unskilled workforce, the artisans of the Rangoon refineries formed the nucleus of the skilled workforce in the Abadan Refinery. Along the refinery plant other workshops such as a foundry, soldering and filling sheds, and brick making were established. While the machinery and the technology were imported from Britain, soon it became clear that the conventional exiting method of refinery were not appropriate and practical for the treatment and refining of the sulphur-heavy Persian oil. The search for finding alternative solutions to these technical challenges in a nascent industry where technical knowledge and expertise was only in the process of emerging and taking shape globally became one of the major tasks confronting the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) during this early phase of consolidating the refining operations requiring intense practical, scientific, and engineering research and cooperation between Abadan and Sunbury, APOC’s main UK research facility. This process amounted to the emergence of new technical knowledge and expertise, which was not imported from Europe, but came out of the linkages, established between these two spaces- Abadan and Sunbury. The research for this study is based on the utilisation of the APOC, the Iranian and the British National Archives.