Cracking petroleum with politics: Anglo-Persian oil and the socio-technical transformation of Iran, 1901-1954

This dissertation rethinks the politics of the modern Middle East through a study of the British-controlled oil industry in Iran from 1901 to 1954. Based on research in governmental and business archives in Tehran and Abadan, Iran, the United Kingdom, and the United States, it examines a series of disputes and crises concerning petroleum exploration, property rights, the organization of labor, geological knowledge, accounting methods, and the calculation and control of profits. The goal is to understand how interactions between nature, technology, and politics reconfigured the local politics of the oil regions and how these in turn shaped the emergence of both the national state and the multinational oil corporation.;Rather than studying society and technology in terms of separate spheres, the dissertation argues that the battle over the control and distribution of oil in Iran occurred precisely on a battlefield of techno-political contestation. The resolution of disputes over concession terms and profits entailed the working out of the power of the state and the transnational oil corporation in the local oil regions and abroad. The dissertation traces the ways in which reconfiguring the history of oil as a socio-technical process alters our understanding of agency and event, the political economy of a natural resource, and the assembly of government and non-government (corporate) entities and political community often taken for granted in the social sciences and history.;The dissertation therefore considers the different kinds of puzzles and political possibilities that are opened up in the battle over defining what shape the oil industry and national state will take. It reveals the differences that tools from Science and Technology Studies make for historical and political analyses, which often attribute predetermined political outcomes (i.e. authoritarianism or lack of democracy) to the development of states relying on petroleum profits. In practice, modern techniques of power and domination produced concerned groups, such as oil workers, who battled to reconstruct the techno-econo-social collectives at the heart of each dispute in advantageous ways to block rivals and to represent the many silent actors of the worlds they mobilized.