Since Iraq’s formation, academic, official, and vernacular conversations about Iraqi oil have often presumed the presence of a dichotomy in oil’s role in Iraqi politics. The dichotomy assumes that political disputes or foreign interventions in Iraq are either “about the oil” or are not. Therefore, some discourses on Iraqi oil--such as those advanced by anti-imperialists and by claimants in disputes over Kirkuk’s status--argue that it is an object of corporate greed or hegemonic desire by a particular government. From this perspective, the desire to invade Iraq or to control an oil-bearing region is a desire to control oil for economic or strategic reasons. On the other hand, Western officials insist that their interests in Iraq are not related to oil. Similarly, the same claimants in Iraqi land disputes assert that their own motives, unlike their opponents’, stem from culturally authentic stakes in the land in question rather than from resource-inspired avarice. I posit that the abovementioned ideas constitute a false dilemma that obscures more significant political dynamics. Using Arabic-language discourses on oil and British and American archives, I seek to analyze the many anxieties surrounding Iraqi oil since the era of the British mandate. In doing so, I argue that these anxieties originated in the unequal power relations inherent in the early Iraqi oil industry that coincided with the salience of anti-imperialism and the ideology of self-determination. The knowledge and technology differentials between the British government, the British-registered Iraq Petroleum Company, and the Iraqi government necessitated the latter’s reliance on foreign concessions to extract, refine and export oil. As a result, oil became a site of anti-imperialist criticism as well as a source of tension for the British and, eventually, American governments. The spectacle of oil’s impact via modernization projects expanded oil discourse both in Iraq and beyond, ensuring that it would always be a subtext in Iraqi politics and foreign relations. The idea that any invasion or land dispute in Iraq has “nothing to do with oil” is false: the cultural, political and economic complex of oil is always present in these circumstances. At the same time, control of Iraqi oil--itself an illusory idea--is never a sole motive. The frameworks of these conversations, whether they concern Western intervention in an oil-producing Middle Eastern country or resolving the status of a disputed oil-bearing territory, must transform to incorporate a more nuanced, and therefore more accurate, conception of oil.

Petroleum companies play a fundamental role in shaping imaginaries of the modern world in general, and the Middle East in particular. From bitumen used to develop the first photographs in 1827, to petrol that sends camera crews to locations around the world, and petrochemicals used to treat celluloid, the history of cinema is a history of oil. At the same time, histories of oil and cinema are embedded in histories of imperial power. In order to understand how the politics of petroleum shape knowledge production about postcolonial modernity in oil producing countries in the Middle East, this paper examines the history of documentary filmmaking by British petroleum companies in Iran, Iraq, and Kuwait. At the same time that Hollywood's cinematic imaginaries of the so-called Orient reproduced cultural stereotypes about lecherous Arab oil sheikhs, petroleum companies circulated "factual" films to impress mainstream audiences with images of oil modernity in the Middle East. Driven by the emergence of the public relations industry in Britain, these petroleum companies circulated some of the earliest moving images of modern cities in oil-producing countries to mass audiences across the region and throughout Europe. While Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s earliest films were produced to impress stockholders and staff, by the 1950s the Iraq Petroleum Company was employing Arab film crews to make Arabic language films screened in theaters ahead of features in Iraq. This shift signified a critical change in how images of oil modernity circulated as part of public consciousness and popular discourse. This paper is based on my analysis of oil company public relations office documents, film production records, film publicity archives, and documentary films sponsored by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Iraq Petroleum Company and the Kuwait Oil Company. The various gendered representation of built environments and bodies is central to my interpretation of the films’ engagement with contemporary discourses of nation building. I show how petroleum company films depicted oil infrastructure, urban architecture, and women’s bodies as key sites where visible evidence of modernization in oil-producing countries was determined. British petroleum companies put cinema’s dialectic power to both educate and entertain to work as a means to legitimate colonial practices of extraction as fundamental to postcolonial nation building in oil-producing countries of the Middle East.

The US has long conceived Middle East (ME) oil as a remedy for the perceived problem of peak oil, the idea that that global supply would decline everywhere but the ME. I call belief in a scarcity imperative for aggressive ME policy “oil scarcity ideology.” The peak oil models that engendered scarcity ideology came mainly from geologists, but their forecasts were not really works of physical science. They were implicit economic forecasts whose dubious assumptions were that (1) production was a simple function of geology and (2) no economic or technological change could postpone downward production trends. Though three 20th century waves of scarcity ideology were followed by oil market gluts, aggressive policies were never abandoned. The perceived US imperative that force must be asserted to secure scarce ME oil is thus a kind of folklore, impervious to information from the market. Scarcity ideology expressed itself as a science-based Jeremiad incorporating older discourse of Manifest Destiny with newer Progressivist Realism. Based documents from the Mark Requa Papers at the University of Wyoming, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, and neglected works like The Strategy of Minerals (1919), I find racial and geographic determinism are central elements in US security policy. Contrary to anti-imperialist and anti-Western critiques of US ME policy, the engine of US aggression was never corporate greed; government always led the way. Official and scholarly subscription to scarcity ideology made aggressive policy seem the only rational course to secure national survival. The influence of this folkloric construct reached its apogee late in the Cold War when the National Security Agency of President Jimmy Carter believed that an oil–starved Soviet Union planned to invade and conquer Iran to secure a supply. Many in the agency, including the National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, were prepared to use nuclear weapons against the oncoming Red Army. This construct found public expression in a 1979 Time cover image in which the Soviet Bear, its head and claws poised above a map of the Persian Gulf, prepared to devour the region. To deter Soviet invasion, Carter declared Persian Gulf oil a vital interest the US would defend by force. The Soviet threat was imaginary. Though several less influential agencies disagreed with Brzezinski’s frightening and baseless Jeremiad, scarcity ideology prevailed. Neither official policy nor the disciplines of political science, history or Middle East Studies have confronted the serial failure of peak oil forecasts to materialize.

In this paper, I examine Saudi Arabia’s cultural and urban redevelopment projects through a genealogical reading of the material politics that have been central to Saudi petro-modernity. Specifically, I focus on the production of archives, museums, and commemorative space, sites that are rarely folded into discussions of the state despite their centrality. While we typically think of infrastructure as invisible, my discussion of material politics centers on cultural artifacts and built environments as evidentiary networks through which official historical knowledge moves and becomes visible. Through this approach, I am able to show how the commemoration of disciplinary history in everyday life and the attendant spatial politics are deployed to at once reproduce the power of the regime while creating new opportunities for petro-capital accumulation. I argue that projects of historical memorialization and urban planning are material realizations of the regime’s late-twentieth century strategies for political legitimation and economic diversification. From the mundane lifeworlds of archival documents and the spaces that house them to the spectacular commercial and archeological megaprojects, these simultaneously constitute monuments to oil modernity and are pillars of political governance. Yet, beyond presenting oil as a sign of God’s blessing on Al Saud’s divine rule, the historical record that animates these projects ignores the history of oil and its impact on everyday life. Indeed, the elision of oil, the key animating force for Saudi infrastructural development, is striking. Why is oil, so pervasive in our imaginations of Arabia, so absent in the discourses of the new cultural and urban projects? How can we think through the ways in which producers of knowledge have actively relegated oil to matters of exploration, production, and wealth, as a platform for us to understand how the political economy of oil has co-constituted political, economic, cultural, and social life in Arabia and beyond? I pursue such questions by attending to the ways in which the imperatives of the oil economy came to structure the production of Saudi Arabian material history, social relations, built environment, and concepts of modernity. Based on three years of ethnographic, archival, and oral history research in Saudi Arabia, I highlight everyday practices of state making and reveal how oil money is conceptualized not only as the “life-blood” of the Saudi economic sector, but of cultural national identity as well. In so doing, I also suggest new sites and modes for reading the Saudi state as an unfinished, unstable, work-in-progress.