Frontiers of Resource Extraction in the Modern Middle East
Panel VII-07, 2024 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, November 14 at 11:30 am
Panel Description
Recent scholarly work has unveiled the significance of commodity frontiers, which represent the processes and locations where the integration of resources (including land, energy, and raw materials) has played a pivotal role in propelling the formation of new ecologies, the transformation of colonial relations, and the emergence of national economies. This panel explores how resource extraction and the development of associated infrastructure, crucial in late-imperial endeavors in the Middle East, served as arenas for intra-group formation and inter-group conflicts. The four papers within this panel examine the incorporation of resources as commodities within diverse production frameworks, spanning from arms to infrastructure and construction. They also explore the interaction between international corporations and institutes and local populations, revealing the intricate connections formed by imperial resource extraction between colonial development, nation-building, and capitalist expansion.
The first paper discusses the early-twentieth-century encounter between the Bakhtiari, Persia’s largest nomadic tribal group, and the Concession Syndicate, a forerunner of British Petroleum engaged in oil extraction and exploitation in the Qajar Empire. The paper delineates the multifaceted transformations undergone by the Bakhtiari as a British oil economy was emerging, encompassing shifts from intra-tribal conflicts to processes of adaptation to the new material and political structures of oil, which deeply changed the mountainous ecologies of southwest Persia. The second paper studies the rise of coastal sand (zifzif in Arabic and Hebrew) as an essential aggregate in modern construction in the eastern Mediterranean. Zifzif extraction drew vast peasant and Bedouin populations into urban economies from Alexandria to Beirut, transforming the coastal plains’ society and demography. Coupling financial growth with ongoing dispossession, the Levantine coastline post-WWII became simultaneously a platform for state power within bustling urban centers and a site of statelessness marked by refugee shelters. The third paper explores the influence of soil science on governance technologies involved in the construction of the Dez Dam– Iran's largest development project in the 1950s and 1960s. It studies how controversies that connected development economics, hydroelectric power, and soil improvement informed and transformed processes of state-building, democratic possibilities, and the role of international economic and scientific governance institutions in local Iranian politics. The fourth paper delves into the reciprocal relationship between late-imperial economic development and the burgeoning arms production in Mandate Palestine. It argues that industrial development, particularly concessions sanctioned by the British government for the extraction of potash and electricity production, facilitated the rise of a military industry in Palestine.
In recent years, a new wave of scholarship demonstrated that the British mandates in Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine, as well as Jewish colonization in Palestine were wrought and wired by large projects of infrastructure construction, resource extraction, and economic development. Left unexplored, however, is the way these industrial and technological developments facilitated and were facilitated by arms manufacture and trafficking. This paper explores how late-imperial economic development co-constituted the emergence of an arms industry in Mandate Palestine. It argues that while Palestinians crafted arms through artisanal labor and utilized trade and drug smuggling routes across Bilad al-Sham that had predated mandatory borders to traffic arms, Jewish manufacturers capitalized on industrial concessions granted by the British administration that provided the materials, guise, and scientific knowledge required to establish a growing arms industry.
The paper focuses on the two major monopoly concessions granted by the colonial government to Zionist interests in the 1920s – the concession to the Palestine Electricity Corporation (est. 1923) and the concession to the Palestine Potash Company in the Dead Sea (est. 1929) – and shows that they became strongholds of arms manufacturing. Potash played a pivotal but understudied role in the growth of the nascent arms industry: it was used to produce approximately 120,000 bombs by the late 1940s, affecting the results of the 1948 war. The integration of potash as a commodity in the manufacturing of arms significantly transformed the ecology and landscape of the Dead Sea. It also transformed Palestine’s academic environment: engineers, mechanics, technicians, and chemists trained at prestigious German institutions were prominent figures in Palestine’s burgeoning arms industry. Labs and workshops of the Technikum (later renamed Technion), Haifa’s technological institute, the Hebrew University, and the Ziv Institute (later renamed Weizmann Institute) produced gunpowder, tear gas, explosives, detonators, incendiary and smoke bombs, flares, and engraved coil for rifle and mortar barrels. Modern Israel’s military-industrial-environmental complex was born.
In 1901 Muzaffar al-Din, the Shah of Persia, granted William Knox D’Arcy a vast concession, which enabled the British billionaire to “search for, obtain, exploit, develop” natural gas, petroleum, asphalt and other mineral products across most the territory of the Persian Empire. After searching unsuccessfully for oil at the border with Iraq, the engineers of d’Arcy’s company moved men and machines to the territory of Persia’s largest nomadic tribal group, the Bakhtiari, in the Zagros mountains. From 1905 and until 1914, the Concession Syndicate, a forerunner of British Petroleum, would go on to obtain land from the Bakhtiari and build up infrastructure for oil exploration and extraction. In this way, over a compressed period of time, two different and ‘incommensurable’ forms of territorialization and of social ecology came to compete with one another in the Zagros mountains: on the one hand the territory of the Bakhtiari tribe, and on the other hand the Company’s territory. Meanwhile, over these decades and subsequently, the Bakhtiari were also drawn upon to provide a labour force for the Company’s needs: by employing Bakhtiari men as workers on oil extraction and production sites, this led to a process of transformation in the tribe. Two projects were therefore connected in British oil imperialism: the creation of a new commodity frontier was intertwined with a project to transform the Bakhtiari, based on racialized capitalist and colonial ideas about governance and production. The extensive historiography on British oil imperialism in the Middle East has paid relatively scant attention to indigenous actors; and only limited work has been done on the environmental and social dimensions of this key moment within a larger British imperial project geared around the mastery of natural resources. Using a historical anthropology approach, this paper sheds light on the multiple ways in which the Bakhtiari reacted to the environmental and social changes brought by oil. It contends that archival records which survive for this conjuncture do not simply track the “forms of resistance” of the Bakhtiari tribe to the capitalist endeavours of the British oil companies. Rather, what we witness in the sources — for the most part, Company and official records requiring reading against the grain — is more a process of reconfiguration of the Bakhtiari tribe. After a moment of inter-tribal tension and violence, the tribe adapted to the changes brought by oil and the material structures built by the British oil companies.
The introduction of European cement and silicate bricks to the Ottoman Mediterranean at the turn of the twentieth century made sand the most crucial component of modern Levantine construction. While almost ignored in current research, a host of sources in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, and European languages testify that this process had far-reaching consequences. Extraction of coastal sand along the Sinai and Levantine coasts and its transportation to the booming construction areas of Cairo and Alexandria, through Jaffa and Tel Aviv to Haifa and Beirut, quickly developed into an insatiable magnet for human labor and animal power. By the interwar period, vast peasant and Bedouin populations husbanding thousands of camels integrated into these urban economies, sharply shifting the cultural and demographic patterns of the coastal plains from Egypt to modern Lebanon. This paper analyzes the consequences of the commodification of sand in the southeastern Mediterranean and shows how it emerged as a site for Zionist competition with Arab workforce, as well as for class clashes between Arab landlords and migrant workers from Sinai, Transjordan, the Hauran, and Beqaa regions. The paper discusses Palestinian and Hebrew literature, poetry, and art, expressing the bodily experience of sand-soaked indigeneity (or the lack thereof), and the imaginative man-animal-nation bonds that animated sand markets. The paper argues that it was through these modern and urban-oriented encounters in sand-quarrying sites that Zionists sought to Orientalize the Levant as an ancient desert wilderness where natural encounters with animals, sunlight, and soil can be experienced and conceptualized.
