Writing about sugar's defining role in the 18th century, the French Enlightenment thinker Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal referred to it as “the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe” (cited in Michael Diffy, Soldiers, Sugar and Sea Power: The British Expeditions to the West Indies and the War with Revolutionary France [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], p.6.) The same could be easily claimed for the role of cotton and coal in the 19th century, and for that of oil in the 20th century. Compared to the historiography of sugar, cotton, and coal that has been quite multifaceted, the historiography of oil is rather one-dimensional as its main focus lies on its linkages to rentier states and geopolitics. Concerning the Middle East, a number of publications, including Robert Vitalis’ America's Kingdom (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2006) and Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy (London: Verso, 2011), have in the last decade or so pushed the oil historiography beyond its traditional narrow scope. Katayoun Shafiee's Machineries of Oil, which builds on Mitchell's emphasis on oil's materiality, represents a major contribution to this development as it provides novel insights into the entangled history of oil, using the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), British Petroleum's forerunner, as a case study.
Its focus on oil's infrastructures reveals the sociotechnical processes that fashioned oil's encounter with the local society and the national state, leading to the creation of new kinds of workers, property rights, knowledge systems, and political forces. As Shafiee explains, this encounter was highly contentious, involving different actors such as AIOC, the British and the Iranian states, oil workers and local communities. These contentious politics reconfigured the Iranian state and the power of AIOC, which confronted and diffused the rising tide of nationalism and labor militancy through machineries such as concessionary contract, property rights, mathematical formula, international law, disciplinary regimes, sanctions and boycotts, coercion and repression, and coup d’état.
Shafiee discusses the sociotechnical machineries of oil in a manner that is both simple and ingeniously instructive at the same time. Starting each chapter with a few articles of the concessionary agreement of 1901 signed between William Knox D'Arcy and the Imperial Persian Government, or its revised version of 1933, she analyzes how they defined specific sociotechnical machineries that intervened in the conflicts between the various actors, and were in turn shaped by them. This dynamic is illustrated by the crisis that emerged in the early 1930s as the Iranian government pushed for higher production rates and royalties, and access to accounting and technical information to strengthen national sovereignty.
Following the cancellation of the 1901 agreement in December 1932, AIOC tried to come up with a formula that would ensure Iran's profit royalty decreased as tonnage of produced oil increased, in order to take away Iran's incentives to demand higher production. The final settlement was largely based on royalties per tonnage, and a sum equal to 20 percent of the dividends paid to the company's shareholders in excess of a certain amount—a result that stood far from Iranian demands. Reza Shah accepted the deal, Shafiee argues, because the Iranian state was weak and didn't have “access to calculative equipment” (pp. 109–110). This formulation, however, evades the question of the relative importance of the two factors, and the structural causes for the weakness of the Iranian state vis-à-vis the strength of AIOC.
To its credit, Machineries of Oil develops a serious focus on technical aspects in order to analyze “the kind of social world the oil industry sought to build” in the Middle East (p. 118). However, it runs the risk of overstating its case when it claims that “a social history of Iran's oil workers cannot account for the actual equipment—the technical work of formulas—and their political activity in defining what conception of worker competency were necessary to protect British control of oil operations and ultimately block nationalization” (p. 117). This claim seems to be based on a narrow definition of “social history,” reflected in the statement that the “social histories of Iran's oil workers for this period focus on the question of unionization, political ideology, and degree of organization without considering how oil's technical properties and the terms of the concession contract concerning Persianization shaped disputes” (p. 117).
Although this might have been true in the past, recent scholarship on the social history of labor in the Iranian oil industry has not only focused on social relations and political conflicts, but it has also looked at institutions, laws, urban spaces and technologies as sites of contestation between workers, the transnational oil company, and the state. Engagement with this new scholarship could have provided the opportunity to complement new approaches in social history with an approach that highlights the “technical work of formulas” in order to arrive at a possible synthesis (p.117). Such a synthesis could in fact help to address some of the book's limitations that in my view stem from the application of the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which heavily informs the book's approach but is only implicitly referred to when the author discusses the “interdisciplinary methods from STS [Science and Techonology Studies]” on which the book draws (pp. 9-10). Originally formulated by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon and John Law, ANT defines actors in a network as both human and non-human, traces the processes of mediation among them that is referred to as “translation” through the method of thick description, and as a result evades grand analytical concepts and instead focuses on the interactions in the network. These three elements that in my view define ANT have allowed Shafiee to formulate original perspectives, but they have also posed some analytical limitations.
Firstly, Machineries of Oil defines, congruently with ANT, the actors in the energy network as humans and nonhumans, attributing “political activity” to the concessionary agreement and formula. This tends to reify “political activity” rather than analyzing in more detail the intermediary acts of collective human agency, which involve organization, ideology and strategy, and mediate between formula and political power. Although the strikes of oil workers and the actions of Iranian politicians are discussed, for instance, they are analyzed at a much more general level than the actions of AIOC experts and their formula. This tendency to sidestep the process of mediation and to privilege the view from the top, at times leads to misrepresentations of the view from below.
Agitation among oil workers in the late 1920s, for instance, is contributed to the Iranian Communist Party, known as the Tudeh, although the former was established in the early 1920s and was repressed and banned a decade later, while the Tudeh party was only established in 1941. Another example is the lack of any reference to the instigation of ethnic conflicts by AIOC during the 1946 strike in Abadan, which played an important role in preventing the emergence of a strong labor movement. More extensive usage of Persian sources to push the thinking and actions of Iranian officials and workers more to the foreground would have complemented and sometimes countered the perspectives conveyed by the BP and Foreign Office archives on which Machineries of Oil heavily draws.
Chapter 4 of Machineries of Oil injects a good amount of political and social analysis to the book's technical emphasis in order to explain the kind of worker that the oil industry tried to create. To do so, however, Shafiee expands the definition of technologies to “social technologies,” which encompass social, economic, and political policies of the company and the state, including paternalism and the creation of racialized hierarchies. This is a positive move that strengthens the explanatory prowess of the book, but also demonstrates the limitations of the focus on the materiality of oil, and undermines the claim that agency can be attributed to human and nonhuman actors. In order to move beyond this limitation, a serious engagement with the social and political aspects of the oil industry is required.
Secondly, Shafiee employs thick description in Machineries of Oil to trace the processes of translation between the different actors in order to reassemble the network within which they operate. This results in fascinating insights that highlight the role of technology and formula, but it also prevents the analyses from moving further into the terrain of explanation. This brings me to the third limitation that reflects ANT's aversion to engage with grand concepts such as “social structures,” “state formation,” and “capitalism.” An engagement with such concepts, however, could have strengthened the book's explanatory rigor by pointing out, for instance, how the struggle over property rights was part of the larger process of primitive accumulation, reflecting the particular form of uneven and combined development of capitalism in Iran.
These critical reflections should be read as a constructive engagement with a book that without any doubt will have a lasting impact on how the history of oil in Iran is understood by historians and social scientists of the Middle East. Its novel insights are indispensible for anyone who wants to gain a deeper understanding of how oil has shaped the 20th century in a multifaceted way. More significantly, Shafiee's creative interdisciplinary approach is a strong stimulant for critical thinking about the entangled history of oil, technology, international relations, the state, and the subaltern.
