This paper explores different representations of the corporate life of oil labour in the 1950s at a crucial juncture of the history of oil companies as industrial/neo-colonial enterprises. Focusing on Iraq, Bahrain and Kuwait it examines how indigenous employees featured in the public relation exercise orchestrated by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) and the Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) in order to counter mounting labour and nationalist opposition. Using documentary and visual materials (company publications in Arabic and in English, photographs and films) and drawing on a growing body of literature on the construction of space as a place of discipline and social control, the paper discusses how these oil companies used a variety of propaganda tools in order to promote new spatialities of labour bureaucratisation and indoctrination, most notably by framing workers’ lives in particular urban, suburban and industrial settings. It is argued that the history of this new type of propaganda offers an important reading of the local, national and global power struggles that characterised the Middle Eastern oil industry in the 1950s, complementing grassroots approaches to labour mobilisation. More specifically the paper is going to discuss: 1. The rhetorical and visual fields created by this propaganda, its different mediums, and the emblematic experts that coordinated it as part of the newly-created Public Relations Departments of IPC, KOC and BAPCO; 2. How this propaganda profiled the lives of up and coming company employees, entering their personal sphere of family life, leisure and pleasure, and manipulating their past and present social realities; 3. How by prescribing particular modes of corporate socialisation oil companies popularised the connection between the ‘model’ company employee and distinctive urban and sub-urban settings and lifestyles that reflected the developmental and ‘civilising’ rhetoric of the oil industry in the turbulent 1950s; 4. The new glamorous built environments promoted as the harbingers of a new work and family ethic and the symbols of modern oil life: the township, the nuclear family resident unit, the dormitory, the workshop and the company canteen.

In this paper I explore the production of expertise and its relationship to power, especially by focusing on everyday experiences in the Abadan refinery in the southwest Iranian province of Khuzistan. I argue that workers’ agency in the Abadan refinery, despite in practice being important to the running of operations, was simultaneously distinguished from and obfuscated by a process of knowledge production that constantly (re)produced a separate domain of technical expertise. I demonstrate that although workers were able to contest management’s definitions of ‘technical’ work (which was juxtaposed to ‘labour’), they were systematically denied a place in the daily production of the refinery as a space of expertise. Thus, we see a process that others such as Scott and Mitchell have identified in other technocratic projects: the subordination of localised agencies in favour of more abstract, universalising forms of knowledge. In addition, I highlight how this was especially visible in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s PR, which, in depicting the refinery through its technological edifices, represented it as a self-regulating system devoid of the subjectivities of human error. I then follow the effects of such representation as they played out in two spheres. Firstly, I show how the Abadan refinery became situated in the realm of established knowledge predominating within the global oil industry, figuring as a mobile assemblage capable of transportation to any locality. Secondly, I point to the perception of the Abadan refinery in public discussion within Iran itself in order to help explain knowledge production in the Iranian oil industry post-nationalisation. My paper will have a strong historical methodological focus, making use of subaltern and microhistorical approaches to address how historians can uncover quotidian agency from below from mainstream representations of the refinery and official company documents – my two main types of sources. However in my theoretical framework I also use both critical geography concerning the production of space, as well as the sociology and ontology of Bruno Latour in order to understand how human and non-human agencies are involved in the construction of expertise as a bounded, objective domain.

This presentation will examine the impact of oil on the state-building process in the Trucial States and United Arab Emirates, and the role of oil in popular responses to that process. Sources include the Arabic-language UAE press, correspondence from the British National Archives, oral histories, and fieldwork conducted over the past two years in the northern UAE. The mobility made possible by oil challenged and disturbed older political arrangements and forms of spatial control. In the early and mid-twentieth century, travel on foot or by camel was subject to a variety of social and political norms enforced by tribes, villages, and neighborhoods. Long-range seasonal migrations, for example, were made possible by social and economic connections to people who could provide escorts on the way to date palm oases. Oil and more specifically the automobile challenged these arrangements. First, the need to define the limits of oil concessions led the British to demarcate borders where few had existed before, and where there was no assumption of a unitary, bounded sovereignty as ‘natural.’ On the ground, however, disputes over these borders were sparked not by abstract loyalties to distant ruling sheikhs but by travel by land rover, which violated social norms. Likewise, the resolution of border disputes was facilitated by the construction of new roads and tracks to carry diplomats and soldiers into contested areas. It was eventually agreed, that representatives of the “dawla” – the state, which was the colloquial word referring to British diplomats and the Trucial Oman Scouts military force – were allowed to travel by automobile anywhere in the Trucial States without hindrance. The automobile thus became an early symbol of state-building and sovereignty. After independence and federation in 1971, oil again made possible new forms of social and political expression. Unlike explicit criticisms of the state and ruling sheikhs, critique of new infrastructure was always permitted. Talk of traffic jams and frequent car accidents became a lens through which the process of development and modernization was criticized more broadly. Petrol shortages in the northern UAE made visible the country’s uneven development and spatial inequality, and contributed to calls for a more equal distribution of wealth. Oil, the mobilities it makes possible, and the critiques arising from these shifts have thus been an essential social aspect of the UAE’s state-building process.

This paper examines the connections between oil, water and soil in the Iranian province of Khuzestan during the reign of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (r. 1941-1979). It seeks to expand understandings of “oil power” and the oil complex beyond representation in urban spaces, and to illustrate how oil-based technology was applied to alter rural environments and influence agriculture. In this way, the advancing methodology of understanding oil’s impact on societies can be brought outside the city and into the country, where the influence of an expanding oil and gas industry was felt in indirect and multi-faceted ways. Under the leadership of Abdolhossein Ebtehaj and the American liberal developmentalist David E. Lilienthal, the project to develop Khuzestan in the 1950s and early 1960s imagined oil as the means by which links could be formed between Iran’s rural population and the high modernism of the national development effort. Oil and natural gas were important not only in their capacity as sources of energy but in their ability to foster increased industrial and agricultural growth, by improving yields through fertilizers and oil-fed mechanization, and by allowing irrigation projects, including the massive Dez Dam, to open up more arable land. Iran’s farmers, who made up the vast majority of the local population, would have their lives changed indirectly by Iran’s increasing oil output. Oil, water and soil were therefore intimately linked in the plans to resuscitate Khuzestan, once Iran’s most populous and productive province. This effort connected to American notions of Iran as an “ancient” country that could be returned to its pre-Islamic prominence through the application of Western technical expertise. The end goal was a form of “petrochemical paradise,” where oil, water and soil would be linked together and provide the basis for modernity in Iran’s poorest areas. This paper draws on the personal papers and journals of David E. Lilienthal and the records of his company Development & Resources, housed in the library of Princeton University in Princeton NJ. It also utilizes the records of the Near East and Ford Foundations, two American organizations involved in rural development in Khuzestan, which are housed in the Rockefeller Archive Center in Tarrytown, NY, as well as the memoirs of Abdolhossein Ebtehaj and interviews with Ebtehaj and Iranians involved in the Khuzestan project compiled by the Foundation of Iranian Studies and Harvard University.