"Refining Knowledge: Labour, Technopolitics and Epistemic Struggle in Iran’s Oil Nationalisation"

Dr Mattin Biglari, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of History, Religions and Philosophies, SOAS University of London

Iran’s nationalisation of oil in 1951 is popularly championed as an important episode of anti-colonialism in the Middle East. Expelling the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) half a century after the infamous D’Arcy concession, conventional narratives have argued it heralded an era when governments across the region (and Global South, more generally) increasingly wrested control of natural resources from foreign corporations and states. But how does our understanding of this event change when it is examined beyond elites such as Mosaddeq, instead foregrounding subaltern experiences in the country’s oil producing areas?

Drawing on archival sources from Iran, the UK and US, in addition to Persian-language newspapers, oral histories and memoirs, this paper reassesses Iranian oil nationalisation by showing how it reproduced the epistemologies of the very oil company it expelled. By focusing on everyday life in the oil city of Abadan in the years leading up to oil nationalisation, it argues that workers, students and local residents not only made this important event possible, but also diverged from elite actors in their critique of colonial modernity. These struggles played out in quotidian spaces such as the refinery, schools and the street, and highlighted the politics inherent in the seemingly ‘technical’ domains of infrastructure and scientific expertise. Nevertheless, the paper shows how practices on the ground became translated into the sphere of the dominant political discourse, such that nationalisation helped give rise to colonial afterlives – epistemic, racial and environmental – in the years ahead.

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