In the second half of the twentieth century, natural gas became a crucial energy source for Iranian society. Under both the monarchy and the Islamic Republic, the exploitation of gas, long pursued by Iranian officials in the face of opposition from the international oil firms that operated their country’s petroleum fields, transformed Iranian society through the provision of vast quantities of cheap fuel and the rapid industrialization and modernization policies it furthered. In the 1960s and 1970s, new infrastructures to support natural gas distribution began to stretch their way across the Iranian landscape. But these pipelines, refineries, and gas terminals—and the intensified energy consumption they enabled—were not the only manifestations of Iranians’ utilization of their country’s extensive gas reserves. Just as important, natural gas became an essential ingredient to Iranian efforts to push the biological limits of their society, engendering new relations between Iranians and the interwoven ecologies that surrounded, interpenetrated, and underlay their communities. Focusing on early efforts to use natural gas resources to preempt deforestation as well as produce agricultural fertilizers and pesticides, I argue that gas was embraced as a way for Iranians to manage biological life within their country. As early as the 1940s, natural gas was seen as a feedstock for a new petrochemical industry that promised to jumpstart modern agriculture in Iran and make green large swaths of arid land in the country’s south. By the 1960s, gas was being used to produce nitrogen fertilizers on an industrial scale, making chemical agriculture much more accessible to Iran’s farmers and enabling the extensive cash cropping of sugar in the country’s southwestern regions. Through the manufacture of pesticides from natural gas, the same petrochemical industry held out the possibility of boosting agricultural productivity further still as well as improving human health through the suppression of unwanted life. Even in its role as a source of energy, gas was welcomed as a preserver of life, bringing the hope that Iran’s forests might be saved from the axes of those seeking to produce charcoal for domestic fuel consumption. Going beyond accounts of Iranian petroleum that emphasize its role as a source of energy for the world and the geopolitical machinations that ensued, this paper explores how the carbon remains of the ancient dead were employed to enact new visions for Iranian life, ultimately working to refigure it around forested holidays, desertification, changed diets, and metabolic syndrome.

This paper examines the ways in which flows of Iraqi oil to the Mediterranean shaped and structured nature-society relations in the interwar Levant. In particular, it focuses on the construction of the Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines and investigates the ways in which the pipelines shaped the social, political, and material landscapes and environment through which oil moved. Built between 1932 and 1935 by an international oil consortium, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the Iraq-Mediterranean oil pipelines consisted of two parallel lines that ran from Kirkuk to the Iraq-Syria border, where they split with one line running through Syria to Tripoli, Lebanon and the other taking a southern route to Haifa, Palestine. Drawing on the work of scholars in anthropology, geography, and history who have examined dispossession and conflict at sites of oil extraction (Appel, 2019; Watts, 2012; Bet-Shlimon, 2019; Fuccaro, 2015), I ask what kind of social processes, environmental relations, and forms of agency and resistance did oil transportation give rise to? In so doing, I also build on recent work (Barry, 2013; Ghosn, 2011) which has analyzed the politics of oil pipelines not in terms of geopolitics, but as agents of spatial and material transformation. In its public relations material, the company presented the lands through which the pipeline passed as empty desert, thereby erasing the impact of the pipeline’s construction on both people and nature. However, the pipelines traversed villages and areas of irrigable and cultivated land, especially as it reached Tripoli and Haifa, diverted water resources from the Euphrates and Tigris, and disrupted tribes across the Jazirah and the Syrian desert. Through an examination of materials from oil company and British and French national archives, I consider the oil company’s mobilization of resources and extension of control over land, water, and labour in the construction of the pipeline. I highlight how the company expropriated land, laid water pipes, and hired unskilled labour through an appeal to ‘public benefit’ and deployment of a corporate discourse that positioned the company as an agent of mandatory development, with far-reaching social and environmental consequences. Finally, I show how landowners and elites in Iraq and the transit countries criticized the gulf between the company’s discourse and practice through petitions and in the press and demanded greater material and economic benefits, while cultivators and laborers engaged in activities to disrupt the company’s pipe-laying activities.

The history of mid-twentieth century Iran can rightfully be cast as a struggle over the control, management and deployment of its natural resources. In the shadow of the struggle over the nationalization of oil, and after the 1953 coup d’état in Iran, this paper explores how new resource frontiers were created in Khuzestan focusing on land and water. Despite being a petro-state, the vast majority of Iran’s population were engaged in some form of agriculture and resided in rural areas prior to the 1979 Revolution. Khuzestan also contains one-third of its ground water resources and vast tracts of agricultural land which are fed by five main rivers and their tributaries. From the 1950s through the 1970s, the Iranian government employed foreign corporations and other public transnational institutions to execute a program of regional rural development in southwestern Iran. This program included building hydroelectric dams, modern irrigation networks, and the modernization of agriculture. The development of water and land resources as a step toward launching Iran into twentieth-century modernity. Khuzestan’s ecology and geology were thus seen as resource frontiers which due to lacking “proper stewardship” had become eroded and devastated. This paper explores the social and political importance of soil and water as natural/national resource in the mid-20th century, as their development instigated a technonatural remaking of Iran. I explore the contradictions of the experts and officials’ approach to nature as both global and unique to particular geographies. These contradictions shaped the experts’ approach to development and the technopolitics of infrastructure and resource extraction in rural Iran, as they came up against human and non-human material limits and frictions in these development plans. Through an analysis of historical archives, this paper investigates how political power was constituted and exercised at the nexus of struggle over natural resources, infrastructures and a material political economy.

In 1901 the Qajar Shah of Persia granted the British billionaire William Knox D’Arcy a vast concession to tap natural gas, petroleum and other mineral products across much of the Persian Empire. Within a few years, d’Arcy’s prospecting efforts struck oil in the Zagros mountains, amid the territory of Persia’s largest nomadic tribal group, the Bakhtiari. This paper explores the resulting construction at the heart of the Bakhtiari’s winter pastures of Persia’s first oil-extraction frontier. Recent studies, such as Timothy Mitchell’s seminal Carbon Democracy, have highlighted how early twentieth-century oil companies enforced their power by channeling and limiting the flows of supply of Middle East oil. But little attention had been paid to the early environmental and social consequences of British oil imperialism in south-west Persia, an area which was a borderland of the Persian, Ottoman and Russian Empires. Unraveling the connections between imperialism, extractive capitalism and ecological changes in the distinctive environment of the Zagros mountains, this paper argues that British oil extraction was not just part of geopolitical strategy geared around oil products: it was also, in terms of its impact in the affected region, both a quasi-colonial and a socio-ecological project. Specifically, the larger aim of the British oil project in Persia was to transform what was seen as a desertic wasteland into a productive space, through oil infrastructure, but also to transform the Bakhtiari into colonial subjects. With oil exploration and extraction, the Bakhtiari were enrolled as a workforce for the Company and gradually abandoned their nomadic way of life for sedentarisation. Showing how the search for a mineral resource and the valorization of an untapped subterranean world changed the uses of the land in the Zagros mountains, this paper will demonstrate how the Bakhtiari founds means of resistance against the environmental and social consequences of British oil imperialism, notably by protests, insubordination and sabotages of oil infrastructure. At one level, this involves attention to the challenges of reconstructing subaltern experience when the only substantive extant documentation is a colonial archive which requires carefully parsing both with and against the grain (Stoler 2009). On the other hand, binary narratives of imperial power and resistance also need to be placed within larger perspectives, notably anthropological work relating to the Bakhtiari (Garthwaite 2009; Digard 2015) which highlights the role of power hierarchies, protest and conflict within tribal groups as well as without.