Focusing on Kirkuk and on the industrial conurbation developed around the city by the Iraq Petroleum Company after the end of the British mandate, this paper explores the ways in which oil urbanisation played out in the contested terrain of Iraq’s labour mobilisation at a crucial juncture of the country’s modern history. In the Hashemite era, Kirkuk represented the microcosm of multi-ethnic and multi-cultural Iraq. Its fast development as an oil city illustrates the complex configurations of class and ethnic solidarities in the country, as well as the interplay between national and imperial politics as it was driven by the oil industry. More specifically the paper concentrates on: 1. The development of Kirkuk as the oil enclave of monarchical Iraq, with a focus on the new landscapes of inequality generated by fast urbanisation that pitted squalid suburban Kirkuk against the glamorous oil stations that mushroomed around the city. For comparative purposes I will place Kirkuk’s urbanisation in the broader context of Iraq and explain its distinctive and common features; 2. The relationship between some elements of structural violence embedded in the spatial, disciplinary and institutional organisation of the oil industry and the strategies of resistance and mobilisation adopted by Kirkuk’s oil workers. To this end I will analyse two episodes of labour unrest in 1946 and 1948 and explain how they were part of the broader political and social dislocation engendered by the Second World War. Again a comparison will be drawn with similar episodes of industrial conflict in other Iraqi cities, Baghdad and Basra in particular; 3. Some of the rhetorical underpinnings of industrial unrest in Kirkuk in order to explain the intersection of national and Communist politics with community-based urban political mobilisation. One of the distinctive features of Kirkuk’s working class was that it included a majority of recently urbanised Kurds who became followers of the Iraqi Communist party.