Following the Suez crisis of 1956, the United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld proposed a regional economic development plan to address inequality among the Arab states. This paper draws on research in U.S. and British archives, UN records, Arabic sources, and Hammarskjöld’s unpublished papers held at the National Library of Sweden to produce the fullest available picture of his plan and its context. The idea was for a regional development fund into which oil companies would pay a percentage of the royalties they owed to Arab oil-producing states. Those states would also advance credits to the fund, which would invest in development projects in the resource-poor and more densely populated Arab countries of the Levant. The paper traces the genesis and development of Hammarskjöld’s plan to the aftermath of the Sinai War, in which the UN and World Bank advised Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser on the salvaging of the Suez Canal and the establishment of Egypt’s Suez Canal Authority. Like that postwar cooperation, Hammarskjöld conceived of the proposed fund as a way of facilitating Arab economic development within the framework of a rehabilitated Anglo-American petroleum order. Without saying so publicly, the secretary-general also hoped that the fund could assist in resettling significant numbers of the Palestinian refugees who had been driven from their homes in 1948 as part of a negotiated Arab-Israeli peace. Despite intensive efforts to sell his plan to Nasser, Israeli prime minister David Ben Gurion, British foreign secretary Selwyn Lloyd, and U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles, Hammarskjöld failed to realize his scheme. He faced opposition from the U.S. and British governments, major oil companies, and the leaders of Arab oil states such as Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Sa‘id, all of whom feared that Nasser would benefit most from the proposed fund. By assigning supervisory roles over the fund to the UN Secretariat and World Bank, Hammarskjöld also conceived of regional development as a strategy for containing Arab nationalism and reconciling it to the demands of the “free world” oil economy. Nevertheless, Hammarskjöld’s plan represented a missed opportunity, before the establishment of OPEC and the petrodollar bonanza, to address the ways in which oil development fostered staggering inequalities within and between Arab countries. Such structural inequalities persist in today’s Arab Middle East and contribute to poverty, conflicts, and migration.

In 1934, Dr. Louis Dame, an American medical missionary working on behalf of the Reformed Church of America’s “Arabian Mission,” paid a visit to the Sheikh of Qatar. Although Dame’s trip was primarily to provide medical services on behalf of his mission, American representatives from Standard Oil of California (SOCAL) had also secretly tasked him with assessing whether the Qatari Sheikh would be interested in signing a new concession with Americans after their current concession agreement with the British expired. American oil developers had already benefited from the missionaries’ wide network of contacts and positive relationships with local Arab rulers, including the King of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud, with whom SOCAL had just signed a concession. RCA missionaries had been offering their medical services to Ibn Saud and his family for the last two decades. Medicine, the missionaries maintained, had served as an “opening wedge” providing them access into these rulers’ homes. American oil executives were well aware of this fact. Two years after Dame’s visit to Qatar, they invited him to come work for the company that would later be known as ARAMCO. Cooperation would not end there. In the following years, American missionaries continued to work closely with ARAMCO as the company developed its medical facilities and schools in Saudi Arabia. When ARAMCO created the Arabian Research Division, a department whose “chief function” was to gather information about Arabian history and Islam in order to “know and understand the Arab,” missionaries would play a key role in training the division’s employees. Although ARAMCO executives and American missionaries had differing objectives in the area, both believed that modernization and development were essential to their ultimate goals. This paper will analyze how these two groups cooperated on the ground and how such cooperation shaped early modernization narratives about Saudi Arabia in the period between 1933 and 1955.

The first Secretary General of OPEC, the Iranian lawyer Fuad Rouhani, was invited to give a lecture series on “the various points of contact of oil with law” to a UN seminar on international law in January 1962. His topic was oil concession law, in particular the ongoing offensive by the Middle Eastern oil producing nations to change their longstanding concessions. Most people he knew, he said, disliked the very term “concession” for two reasons – its content and its connotation. “As to substance,” the concessions were transactions in which a “pre-Constitution sovereign, unmindful of the interests of his people, gave too much for too little.” Casting an even darker pall was the way the term captured the gist of the relationship between the oil nations and the companies. The problem was simple: a concession was “a giving of the weak to the strong.” This paper discusses the work of Rouhani and his colleagues in OPEC – in particular the Venezuelan Francisco Parra and the Iraqi Hasan Zakariya – as part of a broader movement to find an “economic equivalent to decolonization” in the 1960s. The paper analyzes the ways in which these and other elites from the oil producing nations sought to place their work within that other international institutions, including the Non-Aligned Movement, the United Nations Permanent Sovereignty Committee, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Using concepts that had wide currency in the decolonizing world, including economic arguments about terms of trade and legal arguments about changing circumstances, the elites of the oil-producing nations conducted an increasingly effective offensive against the oil concessions. As Rouhani put it at the United Nations seminar, the shared conditions and consciousness of the oil producers, “a corollary of national sovereignty,” had already begun to make such a project possible. In fact, it was the very “growing realization” of their common national interests that brought OPEC into being. This paper examines that perspective using research from the OPEC Library in Vienna, the United Nations archives in New York and Geneva, and a number of other repositories,

This paper examines how the United States encouraged development in Iran after World War II, working with technocrats in the Pahlavi regime and the shah to foster socio-economic reform inside Iran. Simultaneously, the oil of Iran was integrated into an international energy system by Western oil companies, thus providing the Pahlavi regime with the revenues it would need to fund its development programs, the First and Second Seven Year Plans. For the United States, the goal of oil-based development was to "cure" what they perceived to be the country's chronic instability and forestall its slide towards communism. This represented the bridging of global and local, through a process of "dual integration." Before 1951, the U.S. supported the Iranian development effort and the global integration of oil from a distance, relying on private third-party actors, including the British oil company AIOC, to accomplish its strategic goals. Following the nationalist challenge by prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh, who refused to abide by the companies' conditions for global integration and embarked upon an "oil-less" development strategy, the U.S. engineered a coup d'etat in 1953 in Iran that was meant to return Iran's oil to world markets, thereby permitting the flow of oil revenues to resume and new oil-driven development projects to continue. After 1954, the U.S. provided grant aid, facilitated loans for the Pahlavi regime's Second Seven Year Plan, and cooperated with non-governmental NGOs to aid Iran's progress. Oil-based development assisted by American experts failed to achieve the desired results, however, and by 1962 the instability in Iran seemed as bad as it had been in the Musaddiq era. In the 1960s, U.S. direct support for Iran's oil-driven development underwent a transition: the shah was allowed to take full control over development through his White Revolution land reform campaign, and American NGOs were effectively forced out. At the same time, the shah's cooperation with the oil companies and Iran's successful sabotage of OPEC's first challenge to the companies guaranteed a stable source of oil revenues, upon which the shah could rely for the remainder of his reign. This paper illustrates how oil, development, and U.S. support for Iran's government changed over the course of the 1945-1964 period, resulting in the oil-based technocratic authoritarianism of the Pahlavi shah, and setting the stage for the imbalances and rentierism that would precipitate the fall of the shah amidst the Islamic Revolution of 1978-1979.