This project examines the history of the Aramco-affiliated Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) in Lebanon from 1950 to 1975 using technopolitics as a theoretical lens to understand labor activism and post-colonial nationalism. It focuses on public debates about the oil pipeline’s implications for Lebanon’s future and discourse about Tapline as a sign of technological modernity, Tapline’s attempt to “uplift” Lebanese workers through the inculcation of technical skills and modern comportment, and labor activism by Lebanese Tapline employees attempting to overturn a hierarchy of labor in which local workers were subsidiary to foreign managers. I argue that Tapline supported the status quo of Lebanon as a commercially-oriented “merchant republic,” while simultaneously representing the possibility of radical change and creating vulnerabilities in Lebanon’s energy regime exploitable by petroleum workers seeking to change the terms of their labor. This research has three main goals. First, it set out to follow the research program proposed by Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy and evaluate the political implications of Lebanon’s dependence upon petroleum and its accompanying infrastructure, while devoting greater attention to discourse and the particular social orders oil companies, states, and workers sought to build. Second, it seeks to correct for the excessive thematic emphasis of sectarianism and accompanying chronological emphasis of the 1975-1990 civil war in the study of Lebanon’s post-independence history. Finally, it aims to increase scholarly attention to the history of energy in the Levant, which has been almost entirely ignored despite the historical and increasing contemporary importance of energy politics in that region. This project makes extensive use of Lebanese press sources obtained from the newspaper archive at the American University of Beirut. including especially articles from al-Nahar, al-Anba’, al-Nida’, and al-‘Amal, to ascertain how various Lebanese factions construed Tapline’s political implications. A large body of documents produced by or for Tapline, including files recently recovered from the company’s defunct offices in Beirut, will help reveal its strategies for managing its labor force and Lebanese public opinion. Documents from the office of the Tapline Laborers’ Syndicate and interviews with that union’s former president offer an intimate glimpse into that union’s inner workings and discursive strategies. Finally, US government documents including declassified CIA reports and leaked diplomatic cables offer information divulged by Tapline and Aramco employees to the US government not available elsewhere.