Journal of Energy History Revue D'histoire De L'énergie Machineries of Oil: an Infrastructural History of BP in Iran (Katay
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Journal of Energy History Revue d’histoire de l’énergie AUTEUR Clarence Hatton-Proulx Machineries of Oil: An Graduate student in Science Infrastructural History of BP in Iran and Technology Studies, York University, Canada. (Katayoun Shafiee, 2018) DATE DE PUBLICATION Référence bibliographique 08/04/2019 Katayoun Shafiee,Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History NUMÉRO DE LA REVUE of BP in Iran (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). JEHRHE #2 SECTION Résumé Recensions L’ouvrage de Katayoun Shafiee se penche sur l’histoire de MOTS-CLÉS British Petroleum (BP) en Iran, de 1901 à 1954. Le livre montre Pétrole, Politique, Entreprise, comment la multinationale a développé toute une série de Contestation, Savoirs pratiques visant à déplacer les revendications politiques DOI égalitaires des travailleurs du pétrole vers des calculs tech- en cours no-économiques. Ces calculs sont parties prenantes de la constitution d’un vaste réseau d’alliés (des autres majors POUR CITER CET ARTICLE pétrolières aux gouvernements occidentaux). Ils participent Clarence Hatton-Proulx, ainsi de la transformation de la politique au Moyen-Orient, et « Machineries of Oil: An de la formation du régime énergétique de notre monde. Infrastructural History of BP in Iran (Katayoun Shafiee, Remerciements 2018) », Journal of Energy The author would like to thank Marc Letremble for his kind History/Revue d’Histoire de comments. l’Énergie [En ligne], n° 2, mis en ligne le 08 April 2019, Plan de l’article URL : energyhistory.eu/en/ → Concessions and geological reports as “political node/119. weapons” → Dividing profits, dividing labor → Nationalization, backlash, and strategies of “masterly inactivity” → Social technologies and the shuttering of political alternatives ISSN 2649-3055 JEHRHE #2 | RECENSIONS P. 2 HATTON-PROULX | MACHINERIES OF OIL: AN INFRASTRUCTURAL HISTORY OF BP IN IRAN (KATAYOUN SHAFIEE, 2018) claims, such as demands for higher wages or increased Iranian participation in the com- pany, into technoeconomic calculations, argues Shafiee. Therefore, the book’s main ambition is to delve into these machineries of oil through six different case studies, each forming one chap- ter, in order to show how Pandora’s boxes get tranformed into black boxes. Mitchell’s influence over Shafiee’s work is not 2 fortuitous since the former supervised the lat- ter’s PhD thesis4 at New York University’s depart- ments of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies; since then, Shafiee has held posi- tions at the National University of Singapore, at University College London and at the University of Warwick, where she is now assistant profes- 1 From time to time, in the academic world, a sor. In fact, following one of the key points made researcher strikes oil and opens a new field for in Carbon Democracy, Shafiee opens her book exploration. Timothy Mitchell’s book Carbon by inviting us to see oil as more than just an Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil1 cer- economic resource, traditionally viewed in aca- tainly belongs to this category. By showing ener- demic discourse through the rentier state5 and gy’s centrality in shaping political and economic the resource curse lens, since this narrow con- forces, and how oil in particular helped create ception of oil ignores its materiality and how, “for a world order dependent on an undemocratic oil to be transformed into profits, it must rely on Middle East, he has paved the way for many a set of technical arrangements, human forces, scholars interested in revisionist accounts of political powers, distribution systems, forms of energy history. Among these, Katayoun Shafiee expertise, and coercive mechanisms.”6 However, follows this path with her first monograph enti- seriously considering oil’s materiality contrasts tled Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History with most histories of oil and of AIOC, whose of BP in Iran2 which examines the history of existence is usually explained solely by the Royal the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s3 activities in Navy’s switch from coal to oil in 1912; addition- Iran through a socio-technical lens, studying in ally, these accounts treat states and transna- detail the organizational practices that allowed tional corporations as separate entities, seeing the British company to keep a monopoly on AIOC and the Iranian state as distinct. But these the extraction of Iranian oil until its national- narratives are insufficient, according to Shafiee. ization in 1951. These organizational practices Indeed, other motives can explain AIOC’s foun- and artefacts, such as mathematical formulas, dation in 1908, one being a constraint on global concession terms, and international law, were oil supply to ensure high profits for transnational used by AIOC to transform social and political 4 Katayoun Shafiee, Cracking Petroleum with Politics: Anglo-Persian Oil and the Socio-Technical Transformation 1 Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power of Iran, 1901-1954 (New York, NY: New York University, 2010). in the Age of Oil (London: Verso, 2011). 5 The author points out that the rentier state concept 2 Katayoun Shafiee, Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural was first formulated in relation to Iranian economic History of BP in Iran (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). history. See Hossen Mahdavy, “The Pattern and Problems of 3 First known as Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), Economic Development in Rentier States: The Case of Iran,” then Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), and today known in Michael A. Cook (ed.), Studies in the Economic History as British Petroleum (BP). Following Shafiee, we will unilat- of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), erally use the acronym AIOC to refer to this firm throughout 428-467. the text for simplification. 6 Shafiee, Machineries of Oil, 8. JEHRHE #2 | RECENSIONS P. 3 HATTON-PROULX | MACHINERIES OF OIL: AN INFRASTRUCTURAL HISTORY OF BP IN IRAN (KATAYOUN SHAFIEE, 2018) oil corporations, another being the undermining usually goes hand in hand with ethnographical of Iranian7 state sovereignty. Furthermore, the work, Shafiee applies it with great skill to an dividing line between private actors and states historical approach based on archival work con- is often quite fuzzy, since they are deeply linked ducted in Iran, in the United Kingdom and in the through complex energy networks and infra- United States. The resulting book is built around structure and are therefore co-constructed. six different sociotechnical artifacts involving AIOC and presented chronologically, from 1901 3 To differentiate her work from the traditional to 1954. historiography on Iran’s oil industry, the author uses a sociotechnical analytical framework, CONCESSIONS AND GEOLOGICAL REPORTS AS stemming among others from Michel Callon’s “POLITICAL WEAPONS” work and the actor-network theory (ANT)8 widely used in the emerging research field of science In 1901, the Iranian government grants a 60-year 4 and technology studies (STS). A sociotechnical concession to William Knox D’Arcy for wide approach is useful, in this particular instance, access to its petroleum resources. This is not since it encompasses not only human but also the first fossil-fuel related concession on Iranian non-human actors such as oil, organizational territory, however, since access to coal was techniques or royalty calculations, to understand granted to the British Baron von Reuter in 1872. how these actors form a network to reach cer- And, indeed, coal will remain the dominant fos- tain objectives and shut down political possi- sil-fuel consumed globally over oil in relative and bilities. Even if the sociotechnical framework absolute terms until 1965 (see fig. 1 and fig. 2).9 Figure 1: Global primary energy consumption in absolute terms since 1800. Free of copyright restrictions (Creative Commons) 7 Iran was known globally as Persia until 1935, but we will use the former for clarity. 9 Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser, “Energy Production 8 See, for example: Michel Callon, “Some Elements of a & Changing Energy Sources.” OurWorldInData.org (2018). Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/energy-produc- the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay,” in John Law (ed.), Power, tion-and-changing-energy-sources. Data from: Vaclav Smil, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Energy Transitions: Global and National Perspectives (Santa Routledge, 1986), 196-223. Callon himself sat on her PhD Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2017). Charts are free of copyright dissertation committee. restrictions (Creative Commons). JEHRHE #2 | RECENSIONS P. 4 HATTON-PROULX | MACHINERIES OF OIL: AN INFRASTRUCTURAL HISTORY OF BP IN IRAN (KATAYOUN SHAFIEE, 2018) Figure 2: Global primary energy consumption in relative terms since 1800. Free of copyright restrictions (Creative Commons). 5 So, one may ask, why were D’Arcy and the British least until Reza Pahlavi’s accession to power interested in Iranian oilfields when oil consump- through a British-sponsored coup in 1921, after tion was still very much in its infancy? Traditional which he eliminated these middle groups and accounts portray the adventures of transnational allowed AIOC to repatriate all the Bakhtiyari’s oil corporations in the Middle East as a race to shares and dividends. Shafiee thus illustrates discover and exploit new oilfields. But, following how the concession, a seemingly neutral legal a point made in Carbon Democracy,10 Shafiee text, was in effect a technology of power and instead shows how the concession’s