This paper will discuss the urban social history of Abadan, Iran’s largest oil company town. The urban design and development of this city of a quarter of a million population of very diverse backgrounds framed a highly contested daily life that was an intense reflection of the socio-economic and political currents shaping modern Iran: In a very real sense Abadan was the laboratory of modernization in Iran! It was the place where the central state and its coercive and administrative agents and institutions, local elites and notables, corporate capital, technical experts, imperial powers, trade unionists and political activists, and local subalterns, ranging from proletarians, pastoralists, housewives, servants, landlords, prostitutes, smugglers, migrants, etc. all came together to make the oil complex a reality. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and gain insights into the urban processes that shaped this oil city in the first half of the 20th Century. The emergence and consolidation of the oil industry in Khuzestan in the early part of the previous century was predicated on the challenging and often haphazard process of both building an urban environment to accommodate the industrial production and commercial circulation of oil, but also the reproduction of the numerous social actors that supported this process or became attached to this industrial economy. In this paper I will argue that oil cannot be conceived as simply a physical substance, an industry, or a strategic commodity plugged into the process of capital accumulation. Rather, oil should be conceptualized as a social complex involving all these factors and much more. To better understand the layered ways in which the oil complex has shaped political dynamics and social imaginaries in a place like Iran it is necessary to provide a thick description of the numerous channels through which social and political life have been organized around it. Using archival material, extensive ethnographic research, and comparative urban geographic analysis, this paper will investigate how daily life and social and political relations were framed by the urban space of Abadan -- its patterns of housing, work, and leisure, its spaces of legality and subversion, and its coercive and symbolic architectures, etc. -- spaces that were a constant site of struggle and accommodation between all the social actors that made that made the oil complex a reality.

The present study intends to revisit the early history of the Abadan Refinery in the Iranian southern province of Khuzestan through examining the labour contribution to the foundation, sustentation and eventual consolidation of this massive industrial complex. The labour partial resistance and accommodation to a growing array of imposed recruitment measures, training schemes, and labour disciplines will be studied within the boundaries of labour agency. However, in this paper I will argue that the labour subjectivity cannot be marginalised as an isolated, passive recipient of management, knowledge and technology. The labour agency needs to be conceived beyond the national frontiers and in a transnational multi spaces context. The discovery of oil in 1908 was followed by the inauguration of a new expanding oil industry that required new working force and employment relations in Iran. The building of the Abadan Refinery, which initiated in 1909, lasted four years and on the eve of the First World War it was already ranked as one of the major oil refineries in the world, employing a workforce of 3000. Following the initial construction work that engaged massive Indian and Persian semi-skilled and unskilled workforce, the artisans of the Rangoon refineries formed the nucleus of the skilled workforce in the Abadan Refinery. Along the refinery plant other workshops such as a foundry, soldering and filling sheds, and brick making were established. While the machinery and the technology were imported from Britain, soon it became clear that the conventional exiting method of refinery were not appropriate and practical for the treatment and refining of the sulphur-heavy Persian oil. The search for finding alternative solutions to these technical challenges in a nascent industry where technical knowledge and expertise was only in the process of emerging and taking shape globally became one of the major tasks confronting the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) during this early phase of consolidating the refining operations requiring intense practical, scientific, and engineering research and cooperation between Abadan and Sunbury, APOC’s main UK research facility. This process amounted to the emergence of new technical knowledge and expertise, which was not imported from Europe, but came out of the linkages, established between these two spaces- Abadan and Sunbury. The research for this study is based on the utilisation of the APOC, the Iranian and the British National Archives.

This paper studies the impact of “White Revolution” looking from the local level of oil producing South and oil workers. It is argued that the Shah imposed reform package and the “revolutionary” discourse that he made use of did not only have an existence as a blue print provided by elites in power but also in the form(s) of its perception by the local people, in their selective ways of appropriating and experiencing it. This paper will deal with the following questions: How did the uplifting of women’s legal status affect the dynamics of power in the workers’ household? How did the workers experience the activities of the literacy and health corps in their cities? How did profit sharing schemes and the new “revolutionary” discourse affected workers' attitudes and demands and their political culture? In 1963, an extensive reform project, planning the social and economic transformation of the Iranian society was introduced. This Shah imposed “White Revolution” involved land reform, profit sharing plans for industrial workers, legal reform improving women’s social and political status, and formation of literacy and health corps. Marking an important process of transformation in the Iranian society, in the context of rising oil revenues and increasing political suppression, the “White Revolution” has attained its significant place in the historiography of 20th cc. Iran. Taken as a top-down project, its historical impact has been evaluated with respect to the motivations of its architect(s) and the events following it in the linear historical trajectory that culminates with the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. The narratives that indicate the weak points of its implementation or the uneven impact of its implementation with regards to the center and the periphery do not diverge from this state centered, top-down historiographical approach in as much as they employ a retrospective approach and focus on the failure or the success of the elites in power. The State Archives of Iran, UK and USA, and fieldwork will be the sources of this research. In depth interviews with retired oil workers and their family members will be utilized to reconstruct a picture of the “White Revolution” through the lenses of the oil workers of Khuzestan. It is aimed to contribute to the literature challenging the top-down narration of the dynamics of social, political and economic change in Iran and provide input for a counter discourse focusing on the making of this change at the local level.

When the great joy of the discovery of oil in Persia (1908) was celebrated by the almost-bankrupted investor William D’Arcy and his entourage, the hurray’s soon gave way to concerns over the establishment of an industry, and doing so in an unfamiliar socio-political setting. Part of this venture required the attraction, training and development of a reliable workforce. This paper retraces the challenges, the struggles and the victories of the men who made up this workforce. As oil was struck in the isolated Zagros Mountains of South-Western Persia, the territory of the nomadic Bakhtiari tribe, with no large cities in the vicinity, it was natural that the British investors looked at the local tribesmen as the prime source for providing workers. Besides, the leaders of the Bakhtiari tribe had gradually yet effectively become the main negotiating party to the oil concession agreement, since they were semi-autonomous from the weak central government of Persia, as demonstrated by their prominent championing of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. If their tribe would also become the main supplier of the workforce, it would secure the stability of operations. However, this line of reasoning deals only with the British perspective. The Bakhtiari tribesmen, who, in all freedom, actively chose to leave their ancestral ways and become employed in an industry, must have had their own reasons. This paper investigates these reasons and the transformative transition from pastoral nomadism, where ‘work’ was a way of life, to industrial work, with its radically different nature of labor, organization and activity. Through field research and literary/archival analysis, this paper will discuss the various dimensions of this profound social transformation, most notably the adoption of a new mode of productive activity around which wholly new social structures and relations displaced the existing organizations of collective and individual lives. It will go on to argue that during the first stages of company activity, when the benefits of urbanism were still far away, it were mainly the disadvantages and the alienating aspects of industrialization that were experienced by these erstwhile nomads. Therefore, the paper will address the question as to why, despite the profound socio-cultural disruptions, the majority of these men remained employed in the oil industry, becoming the first generation of oil workers in the Middle East, fathering the Iranian working class that was to be shaped in the coming decades and playing an important role in its making.