Technological Zones in the Middle East: Engineering Politics out of Flows of Energy and Infrastructure
Panel 140, 2016 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, November 19 at 10:00 am
Panel Description
The construction of different forms of energy system and infrastructure in the Middle East has historically demanded different technologies of control, distribution, marketing, and labor. These technological zones of measurement, regulation, and qualification have also relied on regimes of risk assessment with consequences for the shape of the state, the multinational corporation, political community and nation, and possibilities for democracy. Focusing on the building of a set of large-scale engineering projects, namely, an oil industry in Iran, infrastructural technologies including electric grids in Palestine, the Iraq-Mediterranean pipeline, and the reconstruction of urban infrastructure in Casablanca, Morocco, this panels investigates the ways in which the socio-technical properties of diverse forms of energy and infrastructure have shaped politics and power struggles in the twentieth century.
Technological systems have often generated hazards and controversies they were not capable of controlling. Though central in shaping the politics of the twentieth century, socio-technical histories that take seriously the materiality of large-scale technical systems or the machinery of multinational corporations, concession contracts, pipelines, and urban infrastructure is missing from much of the scholarship on the Middle East. This panel contributes to an emerging interest in writing socio-technical histories of infrastructure and energy in the Middle East by arguing that the machinery of large-scale engineering systems embody politics and controversies, shaping who can act and on what terms. Drawing on tools from science and technology studies and the history of technology, the papers investigate the directly political construction of infrastructures, that is the organizational work (administrative, legal, technical) of building an industry, pipeline, or a city, by mapping the planning, development, and impact of these projects and all the problems that emerged in the twentieth century. In what ways did the different technologies involved for calculating and managing the success and failure about the feasibility and impact associated with a particular project shape the various actors involved and their bargaining power? The panel exposes the ways in which the equipment involved in assembling modern forms of infrastructure and energy help manage political uncertainties and unruly actors. Material technologies of infrastructure shape relations of domination and provide a point of entry into the analysis of power struggles with consequences for our understanding of political agency, technical and scientific expertise, and the role of international disciplinary regimes in helping to transform countries of the Middle East into laboratories for gathering knowledge and know-how on nature and on society.
Disciplines
Participants
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Prof. Katayoun Shafiee
-- Organizer, Presenter
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Dr. Fredrik Meiton
-- Presenter
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Natasha Pesaran
-- Presenter
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Dr. Gokce Gunel
-- Discussant, Chair
Presentations
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Prof. Katayoun Shafiee
When William Knox D’Arcy signed the first oil concession agreement in the Middle East with the Iranian government in 1901, he encountered numerous problems. This was due in part to the costliness of the venture and his failure to strike commercially producible quantities of oil in the first seven years of the concession’s existence. The problem was that the 1901 oil concession did not say much about the oil or where to find it. One of the first socio-technical problems British investors had to solve was how to attach property rights to a subsoil material owned by a foreign government in a region where local forms of property ownership already existed. No existing history of Iran, or of any other country in the Middle East, deals closely with the development of oil by taking seriously its technical and concessionary history. Based on archival research in Iran and the UK, this paper places technologies of accessing, measuring, valuating, and selling oil at the center of the analysis in order to trace the political construction of British concessionary property and its role in shaping alternative political possibilities in the control and distribution of oil.
British investors, managers, and engineers arrived to southwest Iran with a peculiar understanding of the properties of oil – the terms and politics through which they would access and exploit oil as spelled out in the concession’s text. They also confronted what they viewed as a desolate backwater inhabited by a population lacking the adequate technical knowledge and skills for modern energy development, yet possessing claims to ownership of the regions targeted for oil extraction. Placed by the company in apparent opposition to the history of democracy and modernity of the West, these local actors created a kind of uncertainty most evident in the problems that emerged around the question of British concessionary control over the oil. The paper starts from the concession agreement itself, treating the articles on property not just as a text over which the main actors disagreed, but as an apparatus through which actors take on new powers and politics. I argue that there were many rules of concessionary property, which conflicted with the building of international monopoly arrangements among the largest oil companies. The concession was highly uncertain because its articles maintained a flexibility and ambiguity that could be exploited by multiple sides, helping to constitute the political agency of the multinational oil company.
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Natasha Pesaran
The Iraq-Mediterranean oil pipeline was one of the most extensive and costly pipeline construction enterprises of its time. Built by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) between 1932 and 1935, it consisted of two 12-inch trunk lines 1,150 miles long that ran from the oilfields of Kirkuk to Haditha where it bifurcated, with one branch taking a northern route through French Syria to Tripoli, Lebanon, and the other running south through British mandated territory to Haifa, Palestine. With a joint transit capacity of 4 million tons per annum, the completion of the line marked the beginning of Iraq’s role as an oil exporter in the region.
This paper examines the political, commercial, and technical controversies that were involved in the planning of this pipeline. In particular, it focuses on the dispute that arose over the pipeline’s alignment and the means by which it was resolved. After its completion, such controversies could be “black boxed” and made invisible, as the pipeline became an accepted fact of the physical, political and economic landscape of the region. However, the pipeline’s ultimate form – a bifurcated line to two points on the Mediterranean coast – was the result of lengthy diplomatic and commercial negotiations between the oil company, Iraq, the three transit states, and mandatory powers, Britain and France, in addition to technical surveys, reports, and calculations, the validity of which was repeatedly questioned and debated by IPC board members.
Drawing on material in the British, French and IPC archives, this paper examines how the alignment of the pipeline first emerged as problem in the course of concessionary negotiations between the IPC and the Iraq Government, before turning to consider how the dispute was resolved and the ways in which it shaped the various actors involved. The paper pays particular attention to the mobilization of technical knowledge and expertise in the dispute. It argues that a division between the technical/ commercial and political/national interests was being continually produced and invoked by various actors in order to further their goals. This process was an important factor in enabling the IPC to establish and maintain an identity as a commercial entity and to make claims to a non-political status, which in turn shaped its relationship to state actors and institutions. In this way, an examination of the pipeline sheds light on broader questions relating to the formation of institutional identities and the relationship between corporations and governments.
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Dr. Fredrik Meiton
In the course of the mandatory period, Palestine emerged as an entity at once more precisely defined than ever before and, by the same process, the site of growing economic and ethno-national differentiation. The nature of the relationship between the Jewish and Arab communities of mandatory Palestine has long been a point of scholarly disagreement. Advocates of a ‘dual societies’ model emphasize ethno-national separation and dynamics generated internally in each community. Advocates of the ‘relational’ model, on the other hand, stress the importance of cross-communal interaction in shaping the two communities and the land.
Drawing on the records of state and municipal archives in Palestine and Israel, as well as the Israel Electric Corp. Archives, this paper seeks to bridge and move past the two paradigms by arguing that both the dual and the relational nature of Palestinian society emerged as historical products of the same world-making endeavors. It does so by tracing the gradual emergence of mandatory Palestine as an infrastructural state and technological zone.
Designed to mobilize natural resources, forge a unified market, and firm up political control, infrastructural technologies, including railways, ports, airports, electric grids, and currency regimes, divided as they unified. They provided the material undergirding for a new unit of account by which success and failure were defined and measured, risk managed, and violence redirected. As such, they also embodied and sustained political and economic visions and enacted a certain spatial order and division of labor. As a result, the paper argues, the making of Palestine as a technological zone had the paradoxical effect of also generating political, social, and economic division by virtue of the unified standard it imposed.
