In the two decades prior to the 1979 revolution, natural gas became the fuel of Iran’s future. During that time, gas ceased to be a waste product burned in the fields. Instead, gas and its infrastructure became monumental testaments to the independence and progress of Iranian society. For the government planners who made gas part of the broader state-directed modernization efforts then in full swing, the new fuel source promised to power Iran’s accelerating industrialization while also permitting most of the country’s oil to still be sold abroad. Yet natural gas promised still greater benefits: the potential to alleviate Iran’s worsening air quality crisis. By replacing the oil-based fuels then in widespread use, gas brought hope that a smoke-clouded future for Iran’s cities could be avoided. Going beyond histories of industrial and economic growth, this paper aims to shed light on the crucial role that environmental concerns and attempts to address them played in the history of Iranian modernization. In the 1960s, academics and government planners began setting out expectations for the environmental benefits natural gas could bring for Iranian society. Iranian cities had started to choke on the fumes produced by rapidly proliferating workshops and motor vehicles, drawing complaints from as high as the royal family. Claims that gas could improve Iran’s air quality were tested in the 1970s, when factories across the country were converted over and a trial study for gas-powered buses was conducted in the capital. Brick kilns and asphalt plants were quickly identified as major polluters, and between 1974 and 1977 plans were set in motion to convert them to gas. Complications arose as factory owners objected to the high cost of the imported equipment, and despite the eventual conversion of the workshops, the matter pit environmental protection and its costs against overarching goals of rapid industrial development and economic growth. For Tehran’s public transit experiment, the limiting factor was not politics but technology. Inspired by the example of Tokyo, between 1975 and 1979, routes featuring gas-powered buses were established. Despite significant public attention, the test failed as the expensive foreign buses struggled to operate in the city’s notoriously hilly terrain. With these two episodes, this paper, based primarily on archival sources, studies the ability of natural gas to bridge the gap between rapid development and environmental protection, ultimately exploring the extent to which clean air and city dwellers’ quality of life were prioritized.

During the British mandate, cement and concrete gradually replaced stone as Palestine’s primary building materials. A period of unprecedented population growth, urbanization and immigration, the marriage between changing architecture, materials and booming construction dramatically changed Palestine’s landscape. Cement, and the concrete it was used to produce, were at the forefront of these changes. However, cement - an extremely fuel-hungry material - altered more than how Palestine was built. Focusing on the Nesher Cement factory in Haifa, the land’s sole cement producer at the time, this paper examines how changing construction materials and the energy transitions which enabled them, also altered the place of energy in Palestine’s history. Beginning operations in 1925, Nesher’s cement production relied on imported expertise, machinery and immigrant labor, as well as on huge quantities of imported coal. It thus marked a decisive change from the quarries and limekilns based on Palestinian Arab expertise, manual labor and local fuels, which stood at the heart of local stone construction. By 1927, the company’s expenses on fuel, primarily British coal, were roughly five times more than those of any other single industry in the land. Nesher’s owner, Michael Pollak, was himself a former Baku oil magnate who preserved his wealth after the Bolshevik revolution, thanks to his shares in the Shell oil company. Nesher’s cement was thus steeped in coal and oil from the start. Calling attention to the imperial politics and social consequences which flowed from the factory’s reliance on fossil fuels, this paper seeks to reevaluate the politics of building materials in Palestine in light of these energy transitions. Using archival materials, it evaluates three aspects of this apparent shift away from laboring bodies and biofuels: first, how Nesher’s management used the consumption of British coal to align itself with British imperial concerns and cement its monopoly; second, how Nesher’s coal-fueled kilns, rather than making manual labor or stone quarrying obsolete, reconfigured their place in the production process, rendering them “unskilled labor” for the supply of raw materials; and finally, how after World War II a global shortage in coal exacerbated a local housing crisis, particularly dire among Palestinian Arabs, which became known in the Arabic press as “the cement crisis” (azmat al-asman?). It shows how through cement production, fossil fuels became intertwined with national conflict, racialized hierarchies of labor and expertise, and the most basic needs.

The British mandate period (1920-1948) was Palestine’s moment of oil. Crude oil first flowed to Palestine through the Kirkuk-Haifa-Tripoli pipelines in 1933, followed by the construction of the Haifa refinery in 1938-1942. During these years, oil transformed from a sparsely used energy source to Palestine’s primary and almost exclusive energy source. This paper will examine the introduction of two refined oil products: benzene and kerosene, and how their trajectories animated social and corporeal movements and delineated new divisions between private and public spheres. Unlike the vast literature emphasizing the history of oil production in oil-producing states, this paper seeks to shed light on the importance of oil consumption in the social history of Palestine, and the importance of Palestine to the history of oil. The social life of oil in Palestine will be examined by focusing on the advent of automobility fueled by benzene, and the transformation of household management practices following the increased use of kerosene. While kerosene was used in Palestine as of the second half of the nineteenth century for public illumination, in the twentieth century it was increasingly used for lighting, cooking, and heating within private homes. Benzene was the first product produced by the Haifa refinery in 1939 to meet the demands of the war, and its increased use in fueling motorized traffic facilitated new kinds of spatial and political relations. During the mandate era, Palestine was estimated to have on average one automobile per 100 inhabitants – six times more than Egypt, Transjordan and Iraq – making it the most motorized country in the Middle East. Motorized transport altered relations between urban and rural dwellers, between the mountain and the coastal plain, between Arabs and Jews, and between women and men. It also produced new kinds of political action and anti-colonial resistance. Concurrently, a differently refined petroleum product, kerosene, was increasingly fueling new domestic arrangements and altering family relations within private homes. By putting together accounts of automobile drivers, passengers, travel guides, housewives and memoirs of childhood homes, the paper will explore how technologies of refinement differentiated between new ways of movement through public space and between the privacy of the home, and animated new political repertoires.