Oil and Beyond Expanding British Imperial Aspirations, Emerging Oil Capitalism, and the Challenge of Social Questions in the First World War

With the onset of the First World War, the British state crafted a new strategy of shifting its industry, military and navel units from consuming coal to oil energy. This transition effectively turned Persian oil into a strategic military as well as economic resource of fundamental importance to the British interests worldwide. With the exponential rise in demand for petroleum products the expansion of the oil industry and consequently the allocation and the maintenance of the labour force that was producing petroleum in its various forms became a priority for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), especially as the British government had become its main shareholder since 1911. This global shift to oil during First World War paved the way for the new political economic regime of Fordism, which was characterized by mass industrial production and consumption, under scientific labour management. The extraction and refining of significant and affordable supplies of petroleum was the underlying prerequisite of this global shift, and the Iranian oil industry was the forerunning supplier of this new energy economy in the Persian Gulf. This global shift had tremendous implications for the rural population of southern Iran, as mostly nomadic pastoralist and tribal agrarian populations were transformed into wage labourers for the emerging oil industry. This paper examines how local collective property relations, labour practices, and geographic settlement patterns were transformed during a decisive period between 1907-1926 in order to pave the way for making oil capitalism a functioning reality. Furthermore, it assesses the conceptualization, articulation, and implementation of the Oil Company’s shifting labour policy against the background of these greater global geopolitical shifts