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Nationalising Oil and Knowledge in Iran

Labour, Decolonisation and Colonial Modernity, 1933–51
  • Mattin Biglari
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2025
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About this book

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.

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    Frontmatter

    i
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    Contents

    v
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    Figures

    vi
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    Acknowledgements

    viii
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    Acknowledgements

    1
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    1 Refining Knowledge: Building the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and the Abadan Refinery

    49
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    2 The City of Oil: Social Reproduction, Infrastructure and Anti-colonial Resistance in Abadan

    83
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    3 The ‘Character’ of Engineering: Training, Subjectivity and Knowledge Production in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company

    123
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    4 The City of Science: Labour, Epistemic Struggle and Everyday Politics in the Abadan Refinery, 1946–1951

    165
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    5 Expertise, Resource Nationalism and the Paradoxes of Oil Nationalisation in Iran

    211
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    6 Nationalisation from Below: The 1951 General Strike

    238
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    Epilogue: Nationalised Oil and the Paradoxes of Decolonisation

    266
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    Bibliography

    277
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    Index

    304

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
February 18, 2025
eBook ISBN:
9781474489638
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
336
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781474489638
eBook ISBN: 9781474489638
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