Nationalising Oil and Knowledge in Iran
Labour, Decolonisation and Colonial Modernity, 1933–51
How did British oil production in Iran shape both subaltern anticolonialism and colonial afterlives in the country?
- Examines the history of Iranian oil nationalisation ‘from below’, following struggles between the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) and subaltern actors in the city of Abadan, southwest Iran
- Based on archival sources from Iran, UK and US, as well as Persian-language newspapers, oral histories, and memoirs
- Engages with energy history, postcolonial/subaltern studies, and science & technology studies to interrogate epistemic struggles over oil expertise, highlighting themes of technopolitics, environment, development, and embodied knowledge
- Adopts a multiscalar approach to situate Abadan in networks of colonialism and racial capitalism, especially through corporate social engineering schemes to produce racialised and gendered subjectivities
- Illuminates the paradox of resource nationalism in global decolonisation, promising economic emancipation and yet further entrenching colonial modernity
Iran’s nationalisation of oil in 1951 was a key catalyst for the rise of resource nationalism as an animating force of global decolonisation, expelling the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, now known as BP) after nearly fifty years of domination in southwest Iran. Nationalising Oil & Knowledge in Iran turns attention to the origins of nationalisation in the everyday struggles between the oil company and subaltern actors in the city of Abadan, then home to the world’s largest oil refinery and deeply imbricated in networks of colonialism and racial capitalism.
Engaging with energy history, postcolonial/subaltern studies, and science & technology studies, the book focuses on the politics of expertise: how nationalisation reproduced the epistemic coloniality of the oil company, which rested on local dispossession, social engineering, as well as racial and gendered segregation. It argues that nationalisation diverged from subaltern contestations of oil expertise in Abadan, which presented a more fundamental challenge to colonial modernity.
List of Figures
Introduction: The Coloniality of Oil and Knowledge in Iran
1. Refining Knowledge: Building the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the Abadan Refinery
2. The City of Oil: Social Reproduction, Infrastructure and Anticolonial Resistance in Abadan
3. The ‘Character’ of Engineering: Training, Subjectivity and Knowledge Production in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company
4. The City of Science: Labour, Epistemic Struggle and Everyday Politics in the Abadan Refinery, 1946-1951
5. Expertise, Resource Nationalism and the Paradoxes of Oil Nationalisation in Iran
6. Nationalisation from Below: The 1951 General Strike
Epilogue: Nationalised Oil and the Paradoxes of Decolonisation
Bibliography
Index
A brilliantly argued and painstakingly researched investigation into the intersection of oil’s material politics and subaltern histories of decolonisation that challenges the methodological nationalism that has characterised much of the modern historiography of Iran. Biglari’s multi-layered and globally connected account of Iran’s struggles over oil knowledge reaches out far and wide, providing food for thought to scholars and students of the post-colony and the international oil industry.
