Description:

KATAYOUN SHAFIEE: Middle East Institute, National University of Singapore

TITLE "Machineries in oil: A socio-technical history of Anglo-Iranian oil and its world"

Description: How did the calculative work of formulas shape the history of oil in Iran in the first half of the twentieth century? Instead of offering a complete and chronological history of an oil firm operating in the Middle East, I tell the story of the emergence of a new political actor of the twentieth century, the multinational oil corporation, by working through a series of calculating technologies for managing information that made the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, renamed British Petroleum after 1954) a success in the first fifty years of its existence. Few historians have looked at the kinds of non-human actors, tools, and machinery involved in the building of such a large-scale political project as an oil industry. Focusing on a series of crises punctuating this history, the talk considers the 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. I zoom in on the role of an unexpected and unusual actor in this history, a formula, and the ways in which this calculating technology helped transform political issues, such as the replacement of foreign workers with Iranian ones, into a purely technical-economic calculation ensuring the oil company’s total control of not only its recruitment policy, but production rates, and profits. The history of these tools, technologies, and techniques of information management is crucial for understanding the twentieth century politics of the Middle East and the peculiar ways in which countries of the Global South have served as irreplaceable laboratories for producing knowledge and know-how on nature and on society.

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