Abstract

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. In this book talk I turn 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 British imperialism.

Engaging with energy history, postcolonial/subaltern studies, and science & technology studies, the book focuses on the politics of expertise. On the one hand, it examines the oil company’s technopolitical efforts to master the particular – both human and non-human – in line with standardised practices of the global oil industry. These corporate strategies inadvertently produced anti-colonial subjectivities and led to the rise of labour activism and a mass movement calling for the company’s expulsion from Iran. On the other hand, the book shows how nationalisation reproduced the epistemic coloniality of the oil company. It argues that nationalisation diverged from subaltern contestations of oil expertise in Abadan, which presented a more fundamental challenge to colonial modernity in foregrounding embodied, situated knowledge.