This Dissertation Improvement Grant in the History of Science and Technology rethinks the politics of the modern Middle East, through a study of the British-controlled oil industry in Iran from 1901 to 1953. NSF support will fund research in governmental and business archives in order to examine a series of disputes and crises concerning petroleum exploration, property rights, the organization of labor, geological knowledge, accounting methods, oil distribution, 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. The British oil industry in Iran was one of the world's first and largest overseas oil operations. Company managers, petroleum engineers, and oil workers faced unprecedented technical challenges, forged new financial and social arrangements, and, through a series of crises, helped shape the politics of the modern state of Iran. No existing history of Iran, or of any other country in the Middle East, deals closely with the development of oil. In the literature of Science and Technology Studies research, with the exception of Geoffrey Bowker's (1998) investigation of a French oil services company, there is no scholarship that examines the development of the modern oil industry. This project aims to provide not just a technical history of oil production in the Middle East, but a study of how oil and politics interact. It builds on the tradition in Science and Technology studies research that challenges the division of labor between studies of technology on one side and studies of society and the economy on the other. The intention is not to better understand relations between technology and society, leaving the two as separate spheres, but to approach history and politics as socio-technical processes. The politics of the Middle East or any oil producing region of the world cannot be understood adequately without taking seriously its technical dimensions. Likewise, the technical world of oil can be understood properly only in terms of the historical and political forces through which that world has been shaped. The politics of oil in the Middle East is a topic of great contemporary concern. It is generally accepted that a country that enjoys large oil revenues faces unusual challenges in economic development and in creating democratic forms of politics. Yet the reasons for this oil curse are poorly understood. This is because oil is typically studied only in terms of its financial revenues and their impact. Taking a socio-technical approach will produce new kinds of understanding, by bringing into view the forms of power relations, labor struggles, technical controls, financial arrangements, and property regimes that develop in relation to oil. Thus the proposed research will offer a new way to think about both the political economy of oil and the modern politics of the Middle East.
