Adventures in Oil

British Petroleum’s ongoing oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico this summer has shocked and disturbed victims and onlookers at every turn - from the spectacular explosion on April 20th that took the lives of eleven workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig, to the oil company’s repeated botched attempts to stop the subsequent oil leak. The consequences have been catastrophic. For the past eight weeks oil has been gushing into the Gulf at rate so alarming that it dwarfs the impact of the historically tragic Exxon Valdez spill in 1989. The unabated leak from the BP rig disaster has produced an oil slick that has already devastated ecosystems and economies throughout the Gulf region. And yet BP’s public response has been explicit and cowardly denial of the oil company’s responsibilities at every mark.

In the first place, BP denied its workers safe conditions on the Deepwater Horizon rig as it cut corners and created this predictably disastrous scenario. In statements to the press in mid-May, BP CEO Tony Hayward very publicly denied the scale and severity of the catastrophe caused by his company. He told Sky News that, “The environmental impact of this disaster is likely to be very, very modest,” and made the audacious statement to the Guardian newspaper that, “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

Until today, BP has failed to successfully execute action to cap the source of gushing oil, and the uncapped leak is predicted to continue flowing until Christmas. Following the explosion, BP denied public access to internal knowledge about the precise quantity of the oil leaking into the Gulf following the rig explosion. For weeks news reports echoed the official low-ball estimate of 5,000 barrels per day; however, honest calculations have pinned a more reliable figure to at least 30,000 barrels - or nearly one million gallons - per day.

Until now, BP has failed to implement a sufficient clean up effort, as oil corrodes marshes and beaches, devastating the wildlife in oceanic and coastal habitats. BP continues to deny full culpability for the scale of the devastation that has been wrought as a consequence of the oil spill in the region and the scale of the devastation, and the oil company has recently hired a firm dedicated to reducing payouts for compensation claims. 

Undoubtedly, this unfolding news event has shocked many of us. However, it is also important to understand how this sense of shock reveals a collective failure of imagination on the part of American consumers. It is safe to assume that any knowledge the average consumer and US citizen has of oil company operations is limited to information is generated by the oil companies themselves. Catchy advertising campaigns, branding, sponsorship and consumer products bombard and influence us with positive images of oil companies whether we notice or not. Today, the attention of most Americans is wholly captivated by images of the physical manifestation of oil wealth, from Dubai’s towers to Nascar and Hummer stretch-limos. The critical question of exactly how this wealth is generated - and more specifically, at what cost - is never posed by mainstream society’s perception of oil companies.

Today, the spectacle of oil wealth has rendered invisible the true human and environmental costs and risks of oil extraction, production and consumption. However, looking back at the history of how oil companies constructed their own public image reveals that this was not always the case. On the contrary, during the pioneering decades of oil extraction in the Middle East - 1920s to the 1950s - oil companies produced big-budget PR films that featured company operations as a spectacle in and of themselves. 

From laying pipeline across the desert, to daily operations of pumping on a rig, working the refinery and manning a tanker, major oil companies like the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) as well as BP - then named the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company - used the camera to spotlight company laborers who were hard at work bringing oil from deep underground to consumers’ automobile tanks. This is not to say that oil wealth was not a spectacle in these films as well. In fact, the spectacle of what oil wealth could produce in terms of national development - specifically for the modernizing countries of the Middle East - served as an important means for legitimizing the multiple costs and risks of the enterprise of oil extraction. 

Exemplary of this kind of oil company PR work is the IPC film The Third River from 1952. In brief, the film is about the physical operations required for the company to plan, transport and build a pipeline crossing the deserts of the Middle East to reach ports in the Mediterranean Sea that allow Iraq’s oil to be shipped to the modern European consumer. A large part of the film focuses visually on the work of toiling Arab laborers overseen by British company men, as seen in the film still pictured above. 

The narratives constructed to represent oil company operations were undoubtedly idealized, the actual costs and risks misrepresented, the portrayal of labor problematic on many levels, and the justifications given for the oil company’s actions plentiful; making this film ripe for further critical analysis.

Nonetheless, I’d like to end here by focusing on the general point that five decades ago an entire film could be dedicated to making visible the technical and human operations of oil extraction. Today these operations are entirely invisible from mainstream perception of oil companies. It is time that all of us start demanding knowledge of how oil is being extracted from the earth and delivered to us…and most importantly, at what cost? 

Image Source: The Third River (Pamphlet). 1952. Iraq Petroleum Company Film Unit. London: Newman Neame Limited. p 10.

Although this image makes no explicit reference to Iraq, it nonetheless documents the ways in which the western project of “documenting” the non-western world at large was conceived of and represented during the middle of the twentieth century. The image of three generic “natives” happily carrying filmmaking equipment atop their heads appeared a popular film trade magazine as part of an advertisement for a production company in 1955. 

Here, what immediately strikes the viewer today is how the charicature-like representation of the native/other is derogatory in its  drawing of the three “natives” with clear visual reference to blackface in its representation of race, stereotypes of “tribal” dress in its representation of the body, and ambiguous references to gender roles. Clearly, this mode of visual stereotyping draws explicitly from a colonial imagination of “natives” that was perpetuated in literature, photography, and films generated in America and Europe throughout the 19th and 20th centuries - e.g. see King Kong (1933) and Avatar (2009). 

While the crude simplicity of the representation of colonized people is immediately apparent, what may be less obvious in reading this image is what it suggests about the complex relationship between indigenous populations and foreign “experts” in the process of film production (and other imperialist industrial practices from oil extraction to urban planning). 

The image plays off of a reference to the stereotypical image of non-western and “traditional” practices of carrying a water jug on top of one’s head. Instead of a jug, each of the three natives pictured here are suggested to serve as caddies to the white filmmaker, toting his camera, tripod and film stock. The juxtaposition of the modern movie making equipment and the traditional behavior of the natives conforms to the dichotomous framework of modernity versus tradition that has shaped western perspectives of the rest of the world until today. Here, the natives are suggested to serve merely as manual labor, happily facilitating the work of the foreign filmmakers: the naturalized, subordinate role assigned to them by colonizers.  

However, beyond this particular instance of representation, what happened on the ground in terms of the interaction between indigenous peoples and foreign (film and other) companies is far more complicated. In the case of Iraq “natives” were hired and trained in the service of the petroleum company film unit to participate in all aspects of the process from photographing and composing music, to writing scripts and recording narration. However, it was not until after the Revolution in 1958 that these Iraqis took the technology into their own hands, so to speak, able to wield some creative control over the film projects they worked on. 

In general, films were an important part of the way in which young “modern” nation-states of the Middle East, Africa and Asia have been documented, and critically how knowledge about the non-western world has been produced and consumed by mass western audiences. The technology of film introduced a new dynamic mode of representation to define colonies and “post” colonial territories.  

Nader (1994) emphasizes the need for comparative consciousness, provoking the question of what it might have been like if in fact these “natives” turned the camera equipment around to document the western filmmakers and other imperialist figures in society. What of narratives and representations might they have constructed in a project to cinematically document, understand and engage with the imperialist presence?

Image Source: Film User, August 1955: 382.

Fifty-five years ago at a New Year’s Eve party for Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) employees in Kirkuk, Miss Khalida Asad - the daughter of an Oil Police commandant - came dressed as “IPC” and won a prize for the “most original” dress (pictured above). Reporting on the event for Iraq Petroleum Magazine, Anne Kitchen lauds Miss Asad for the “great ingenuity and imagination” that went into her creative ensemble.

Creative, bold, and kitschy as Miss Asad’s outfit may be, this image serves more importantly to illustrate an important point about the hegemony of IPC in the Middle East during this period. The “imagination” represented in this attention-getting design is akin to the powerful visual language that IPC used to establish an “imagined community” through the circulation of its popular company periodicals in the 1950s.

Benedict Anderson (1991) argues that the advent of print-capitalism, i.e. mass circulation of periodicals to disparate and heterogenous national populations, has been fundamental to the construction of national identity. Similarly, IPC circulated magazines and diaries intended to reach employees and readers in all parts of the Middle East, in order to construct a sense of belonging to the “imagined community” of the Iraq Petroleum Company.

Here, a young Iraqi woman is literally attempting to embody the petroleum company by pasting visual references to the IPC onto her body. The strong visual language developed by IPC is easily recognizable in Asad’s dress. Regional maps with dotted lines marking the route of pipelines and oil tankers compose the pattern of fabric, while the iconic rig and bar graph indicating increasing company profits & production of oil barrels adorn her head and shoulders.

This visual language of mapping the Middle East, imagines the region as the territory of the petroleum company; thus locating, identifying, including and excluding certain local populations within that reinscribed geography as part of an IPC community. Violent practices of mapping and the writing of history is most often examined in terms of the nation-state (see Craib 2004). However, in the case of Iraq and other petroleum-producing countries it is also important to continue considering how the Petroleum Company, worked in parallel, in cooperation, or perhaps in competition with individual nation-states of the Middle East, to determine the boundaries of belonging: who to include and who to leave out, and similarly in the writing of official national and/or company history, what remember and what to forget.

Image Source: Kitchen, Anne. 1954. News from Our Middle East Locations: Kirkuk. Iraq Petroleum 3 (7): 38.

And so the imperialism and those co-operating with it have been able to control the people of the country and the wealth of the country and begin to smuggle out of the country’s wealth to distant countries in addition to the introduction of poverty hunger and feudal policy.

The illustration and caption above were published by Qassim’s socialist government in 1961 in its official Pictoral History of the 1958 Revolution. The graphic handbook on the history of imperialism and revolution in Iraq was produced in Baghdad for local, regional, and international audiences, presumably to “set the record straight” to any one who might be otherwise confused. The “record” in this case is a revisionist narrative, which seeks to challenge international reports concerning the revolution that had focused on the slaughter of the royal family and the termination of Iraq’s relationship to western consultants and companies without critical insight into the reasons behind the communist-backed revolution.

In the book, the text is printed in English, French and Arabic; however, it is the international language of the political cartoon that best indicates the universal reach the regime intended for this message.

This cartoon comes early in the story, explaining the circumstances that served as a catalyst for the revolution during the 1950s. Here, the illustrator uses symbolism, scale and depth to communicate several important points to the viewer.

First, the behemoth and smug-looking imperialist on the run represents the British government and its London-based Iraq Petroleum Company. His arms are firmly wrapped around a fat sack, bulging with the wealth of Iraq’s petroleum resources. Meanwhile his accomplice, a puny Iraqi monarch, manages to escape the scene alongside the fat-cat with an impenetrable moneybag containing his share of the profits. This of course being his token for willingly allowing the British company full control over Iraq’s oil fields.

In the background, three Iraqi men are cast aside with their arms bound. They are paralyzed and forced to watch as the country’s wealth disappears before their eyes. The men are dressed in “traditional” clothes that apparently indicate their working class position in contrast to the European-style suit clothes donned by the king. Notice that categories of Iraq’s middle class and women are absent from the illustration, in favor of a starker and masculinized portrait of disparity between Iraq’s thieves and its victims.

Comparing this example of government propaganda to the iconic image of oil and the working class put forward in propaganda produced by the previous regime and the IPC (see my second post), reveals a key to understanding the ways in which class representation has been manipulated by both pro-British regime/IPC and the revolutionary government to construct a clear message. In the image by IPC, the working class “hero” stands with dignity, while in the illustration he is shown as a victim.

Thus, this retaliatory illustration by the revolutionary government must be read as a portrait of class struggle situated in conversation with the discourse of the previous regime. Distributed by the revolutionary government, this image speaks directly to the perceived misrepresentations of the working class struggle in pre-1958 propaganda, by offering a stark counternarrative.

Obscured by attention to the Development Board’s modernization projects and dominant discourse on national distribution of wealth through irrigation and housing schemes before 1958, the significance and severity of class tensions in Iraq were thus rendered invisible within the international media and political discourse of the period. Thus the revised and “corrected” narrative delivered in this cartoon highlights the critical class tensions that were inherent to the systems of capitalism and imperialism in place before 1958.

Today, the illustration becomes relevant again as a possible warning sign of the system that is steadily being imposed on Iraq’s people thanks to increasing foreign control over Iraqi oil wealth since the fallout of the 2003 invasion. In a revelatory article last week, Juhasz confronted readers with the question of whether recent contracts won by ExxonMobil and other mega-international oil conglomerates represents an ultimate “victory” for Big Oil in Iraq? “Yes,” she confirms, “If the negotiations proceed on their current path, foreign companies will produce the vast majority of Iraq’s oil. How much control they will exert, and who will reap the greatest benefits (and endure the steepest costs) is yet to be determined.”

Image Source: Pictoral History of the 14th July Revolution. 1961. Higher Committee for the Celebrations of the 14th July Revolution: Baghdad. p. 6

This week I found something very special in the archives. The photograph and title pictured above come at the head of a feature article written for Iraq Petroleum Magazine by my great grandfather William Subhiyah in 1955. Jiddu William was an English teacher in Iraq, and frequently contributed perspectives on culture to Iraq Petroleum and the Iraq Times during the 1950s.

The photo exhibits a table crowded with delicious dishes prepared by my great grandmother Salma Subhiyah, who sits at the center of the table. Her daughters Samira and Amira sit beside her, on the left side of the frame. The other two women at the table worked as live in help at the Subhiyah household.

Subhiyah’s article was written for ex-pats living in the Middle East, English-speaking Arabs, and company personnel of various nationalities living in London. By 1955 the Iraq Petroleum magazine had been in circulation for over four years. Through the monthly publication, the petroleum company stepped into the role of producing and disseminating knowledge about Arab culture to readers. The magazine featured regular original articles on archaeology, architecture and art in Iraq, focusing on the success stories of the Iraq Development Board’s modernization schemes in education, building, and agriculture.

What does it mean for a petroleum company to concern itself with the problem of cultural production? Although Iraq Petroleum was extremely well-circulated and popular in cities across the Middle East and in London, I find it remarkable that during the first four years of its publication, the editors had only bothered to include dinner party menus - in a regular column, called “For the Ladies” - that catered to the British palette; including recipes for jellies, cakes and sandwiches.

In fact, Subhiyah’s article was the first of its kind to appear in the magazine, broaching the subject of food in the Arab world. He wrote of Middle Eastern cuisine as a novel subject, in a time before it was established as an object of modern western knowledge. Today, we might take for granted that kabob stands are a dime a dozen in US and European cities and as many brands and varieties of hummus are on display in supermarkets as there are ice cream flavors.

Subhiyah begins his article by highlighting cultural differences between Arab and European customs of serving and eating food. He writes with a noted unapologetic tone, sense of pride and wit,

We always cook much more than we can consume at one meal. Even if we expect no guests, people may call unexpectedly while we are eating and, by our traditional laws of hospitality, we are required to ask them to partake of our food. To prove this, call at any Middle Eastern house about meal-time and see if you are not sincerely invited to the meal. Moreover, if you are invited to a luncheon or a dinner party, you can always take along one or two friends with you without having to warn your host beforehand.

He goes on to describe the food and atmospheres he encounters while traveling across the region, from city to city. With each stop on his journey - from Cairo, to Tripoli, and Aleppo - he reminds the reader that within Arab nation one discovers a diverse and rich range of culinary traditions and tastes. The author’s mobility should remind us of the mobility that was still possible in these early decades of the modern Middle East before borders were hardened and militarized. Subhiyah speaks of “nationalism” not in reference to differentiated “Iraqi” or “Lebanese “national cuisines or cultures, but in reference to the vision of a heterogenous yet unified Arab national identity, which is an idea that ruled the day. Today this is a concept that is difficult to imagine in what has become a deeply fragmented Middle East.

Among other things, reading Subhiyah’s article today raises interesting questions about how and when “Middle Eastern cuisine” was actually commodified into a mainstream fare in the U.S. and western Europe. As an example, he writes a mouthwatering description of food he is sure to try when visiting Beirut,

In Beirut I go as a self invited guest to any Tabbuli party that may be given at the time in Ras Beirut (Tabbuli is well-soaked Burghul mixed with chopped parsley, mint, onions and tomato, rubbed in lemon juice and olive oil, and eaten with scoops of vine, lettuce or cabbage leaves); I buy a box of Baqlawa Samadi or Bahsali (thin sheets of pastry with a layer of crushed nuts, cardamons and sugar in the middle, baked and drenched with syrup), Idine of Kibbi Bissiniyah and Hummus Bi Taheenah (Kibbi is a paste made of meat pounded in a mortar with crushed wheat, spread in a tray in two layers, with a layer of minced meat, pine kernels and onions in between, and baked after cutting in diamond shapes. Hummus is a thin paste made of boiled chick peas crushed with crushed sesame, garlic and lemon juice and decorated with parsley, slimmac and red pepper).

Taken in its context, we must realize that his explanatory descriptions point to the fact that quotidian supermarket “products” like baklavah and tabbouleh were veritably unheard of fifty years ago in cities like London and Paris - of course to all but Europe’s best-traveled colonial administrators and orientalists.

In lieu of a thorough historiography, like that presented in a 2007 exhibition at Yale on Middle Eastern & Islamic cuisine, I will briefly contextualize Subhiyah’s article with a condensed overview of how “Middle eastern cuisine” has been produced as an object of western knowledge over time. Historically, writing on eating and cooking customs in the Arab world falls into one of three broad categories: English translations of medieval Arabic texts, travelogues by Arab immigrants, and tutorial texts written by Arabs in English for western audiences.

The best examples of the first category are the many 20th century English editions of a manuscript written in the 10th century by a Baghdad native during the time of the Abbasid caliphate. The original author spent more than twenty years compiling his descriptions of the elite culture of food, drink, and table manners. Thanks to A.J Arberry’s 1939 translation, Kitab al-Tabikh or “A Baghdad Cookery Book” was the only Arabic Cookery book known to the English-speaking world at the time. In 2006, a new translation of the classic text was published.

The last category is a kind of writing tradition that likely began with articles like this one written by my great grandfather. By 1973 the English-speaking world had access to illustrated how-to recipe books like, The Arab World Cookbook: the Book of One Thousand and One Delights, a self-orientalized parade of “Arabian delicacies which are the only rival to the Chinese and French cuisines”. The commodification of Middle Eastern cuisine can be detected in a book like this which promises, “easy and simple recipes that make your neighbors and guests savor the aroma coming out from your kitchen.”

Perhaps bringing the tradition of food writing in my own family full-circle, this year my cousin Salma Abdelnour, a first-generation Lebanese-American living in New York, has started a mouthwatering food blog in which one of her most popular entries is a review of where to procure the best mana’eesh in Manhattan. Perhaps inevitably, I have also been blogging about the meals I have had the pleasure to indulge in while traveling over the past year. A deep appreciation of food and love of writing surely runs in my family; though I am now struck by how profoundly the world in which we write and the “Middle East” about which we write about has changed in these fifty-four years.

Image source: Subhiyah, William. 1955. A Gourmet in the Arab World. Iraq Petroleum 4(11): 24.

Ageless Iraq is a documentary film that was sponsored by the Iraq Petroleum Company in 1954. This still of a young Iraqi woman admiring her own reflection in a dress shop is taken from one of the final sequences of the film. The narration for this scene tells a story of Iraq’s newly liberated generation of women. Women who have visibly benefited from the recent modernization of the country under the Iraq Development Board.

The following narration begins over a montage sequence that shows different young Arab women in school and at work, and closes on this image of the dress shop scene. A deep and confident male British voice explains,

When you see these young girls in their Western clothes, so assured and confident, you’re inclined to forget how surprised their mothers would have been at the idea of training for jobs their daughters take in their stride. Jobs they thought only men could, and should, do. Now girls as well as the boys can take up almost any profession they choose, and know they have a good chance to succeed. […]

It’s natural that with all these modern developments, the women of Iraq are breaking away from their traditional style of dress, unaltered for centuries, to wear the comfortable, practical clothes that are right for this new way of life. It’s a turn of events significant of a wider change, of a more liberal attitude to life.

At the time of its release in 1954, Ageless Iraq was classified as a factual and educational film about the history and development of Iraq; however, when viewing the film today, it becomes clear that more than anything else the film was created as a propaganda tool for the British petroleum company to legitimate its powerful and profitable presence in the country.

First, notice how the modernization of women in Iraq is explicitly equated with westernization. Secondly, I want to point out that within the broader context of the entire film narrative, the message that is constructed is that any promise of progress or change - i.e. for the liberation of women from a “traditional” life to one that is decidedly “modern” - is necessarily made possible only through the prosperity of the oil company.

It is true that in 1951 the Iraqi government renegotiated its agreement with the British oil company, which led to a split in share the industry revenue and the creation of a Development Board that began improving overall conditions for women’s education. However, the singular representation of women in this film sequence assumes a direct relationship between development and the modernization - education and liberalization - of women. However, as Al-Ali discusses in her book Iraqi Women, the women’s movement in Iraq actually began in the 1920s. Al-Ali explains that in these early years of the movement, “while women of elite background were encouraged by their families to obtain an education, neither the Iraqi state nor its British advisers actively promoted women’s education or women’s rights” (Al-Ali, 2007: 12).

This is not to say that come the 1950s, under the final years of the monarchy and after the efforts of the Development Board, that there were not women in Iraq that closely fit the description (and even the likeness) of the westernized Iraqi featured in the film still above. In fact, to the contrary, I have seen boxes of precious black and white family photographs revealing that my grandmothers, great aunts, and their girlfriends living in Baghdad during the Fifties boasted the same European tastes for hairstyles and fashion, as well as the ambitious career-driven and empowered spirit described and pictured in this sequence in Ageless Iraq.

Nonetheless, the film clearly fails to acknowledge that the women being represented were of a certain privileged class. Indeed, the distribution of the benefits of development in Iraq during the prosperous 1950s were distributed unevenly across Baghdad, and across the entire country. Women were not consistently offered the same opportunities, and due to continued economic hardship in many parts of the country, not all women who may have had access to education were able to take advantage of the opportunity.

However, the greater point of my post today is not that this film presents a work of fiction, though it once claimed to be fact. Indeed, all documentaries manage to commit this same offense in one way or another, to varying degrees. Instead, what is crucial to take away is that the way that this film uses the symbolic representation of women - as a means to legitimate programs for national development - is a discursive technique and tactic that exists within the historical context of imperial discourses about the Middle Eastern region, which continue until today.

Images of women have been manipulated in the media and by politicians as symbols of national development throughout the twentieth century. Examples of this range from the secular agendas of Ataturk that “emancipated” Turkish women [e.g. see Arat’s chapter “The Project of Modernity and Women in Turkey”], to the manipulative depictions of “oppressed” women in Islamophobic web-based campaigns today. Furthermore, feminist critiques of orientalist literature, painting, and photography from 18th century establish how a dichotomy between “modern” western or westernized women and “traditional” (subjugated yet exotic and erotic) veiled harem women is deeply rooted in the texts and media that served to legitimate various imperial European exploits in the Middle East beginning with the French occupation of Egypt in 1798. [See, Alloula 1986; Graham-Brown 1988; Lowe 1991; Lewis 1996]

Whether corporate-sponsored or government-made, today’s media is still crowded with examples of how the image of women are used to justify neo-imperial actions in the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia. Germane to this post, Al-Ali and Pratt argue in What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq that contemporary political and media discourse on the liberation of Iraqi women from the oppressive bonds of Islamic “tradition” by the hand of (and only the hand of) western champions remains until today as a key tactic that the United States has employed in order to justify the military invasion and continued occupation of Iraq.

Image Source: Ageless Iraq. Dir. Wallace, Graham. Iraq Petroleum Company and Associated British Pathe. 1954. <http://www.britishpathe.com/results.php?search=ageless+iraq>

I found these two images juxtaposed, just like this, at the front of a promotional pamphlet for the first of many Iraq Petroleum Company films. The Third River was produced in both Arabic and English, and released respectively in Iraq and London during 1952.

Berger argues that visual representations such as these produce and reproduce particular ways of seeing that are embedded in our cultural assumptions.  What then does this particular example and the editorial decisions that shaped it - decisions to present these selected images and text, adjacent to one another, in this very order, and at this determined scale - tell us about the context of the historical moment in which this film was produced and promoted?

The first (left) image is of an oil worker and a rig in Iraq. The heroic low-angled composition and full-page scale dictates powerful associations with this image that cannot be mistaken: triumph, dignity, and magnificence. Here, the anonymous Iraqi worker stands to represent the company, the industry, the nation, and of course modernization.

As a stand alone image, or poster, this image is not terribly potent or rich. It is a familiar image of capitalist industrialism. It has been produced over and over again, across the globe, in different forms, as a result of this hackneyed, yet powerful marketing logic.

However, this image does not stand alone in the least. Rather, a companion image (right) introduces an altogether different architecture into the frame - one that would not otherwise be associated with the petroleum industry.

The ruined arches of the ancient city of Palmyra are pictured in a similarly glorified low-angle shot; yet this otherwise impressive image is dwarfed here in relation to the scaling and cropping of the first image.

In sum, the oil rig (soaring out of the frame) stands more triumphantly, and with more dignity and magnificence, than the breathtaking expanse of ancient columns at the two thousand year old site of Palmyra.

Moreover, the juxtaposition of these images with the accompanying text convey a deliberate message and narrative that are echoed in ad nauseam in all of the Iraq Petroleum Company films. Namely, that the history of Iraq is the history of oil.

The narrative constructed both here and in the film itself works to persuade viewers that the splendor of ancient civilizations have paved a straight path towards the triumph of Iraq’s future, it’s modern civilization. “Over two thousand years ago, in the old Mesopotamian home of the human race…a strange pitch-like substance oozed from the earth…which was probably near the site of modern Kirkuk.” Here, the path is depicted as a literal one, where the ancient ruins come to represent mere markers of the route of IPC’s pipeline stretching from Kirkuk to the Mediterranean coast.

Ultimately, the this narrative concludes that the exploitation of oil is thus equivalent to the modern progress of the nation. History is rewritten as such.

Finally, I’d like to note that for all my analysis thus far, I have not even begun to address the problematic aspects of the editor’s major geographical blunder - i.e. Palmyra was  located in Syria, not Iraq - and explicitly gendered overtones - i.e. various phalli of capitalism; male-centric historiography - represented here. For now I will end, and take up these further analytic perspectives in future posts.

Image Source: The Third River (Pamphlet). 1952. Iraq Petroleum Company Film Unit. London: Newman Neame Limited. p 1.

My inaugural post features the original cover for the book “Adventures in Oil: The Story of British Petroleum”, published in 1959. Here, Longhurst seeks to write the definitive text on the then nascent history of Britain’s “glorious” exploits in petroleum extraction around the globe - in the Middle East, Africa, South America & beyond.

In his forward for the book, Winston Churchill writes, “The pioneering of the vast oil industry of the Middle East is a story of vigour and adventure in the best traditions of the merchant venturers of Britain.” The image of an off-shore oil rig on the book’s cover captures the sense that for these oil pioneers, the towers stood akin to a climber’s flagpole mounted firmly within the rocky soil at Everest’s peak.

For Churchill - who himself pioneered a ruthless bombing campaign to squash anti-British/imperialist uprisings in Iraq during the initial British colonial occupation in 1920 - these “best traditions” surely include the violent means by which imperial authorities have traditionally sought to capture, colonize and control the resource-rich lands and people of the Middle East.

What makes this book so fascinating is that it was written precisely at the most definitive moment in the history of Iraq in the twentieth century: in the year after the 1958 Revolution in Iraq.

After the figureheads of the British imperial authority in Iraq were toppled by the military coup-cum-people’s revolution in 1958, the Euro-American stranglehold on Iraqi oil reserves was gradually loosened by presiding Iraqi governments. In 1972 Saddam Hussein nationalized the oil industry once and for all.

The chapters dedicated to Britain’s “adventure” in the Middle East, and especially Iraq, are the most salient to consider in light of the U.S. and Britain’s current neocolonial tactics in the region. These attempts to reclaim a firm grip on Middle East petroleum resources is shameless and blatant today, as it was at the time this book was written in 1959.

Fifty years after this book was first published, we continue to bear witness to the story of the U.S. and Britain’s long-standing colonial adventure in the Middle East. Today’s news of BP’s prized oil deal in Iraq bluntly reminds that the “Story of British Petroleum” in the Middle East is far from over.

Image Source: Longhurst, Henry. 1959. Adventure in Oil: the story of British Petroleum. London: Sidgwick and Jackson.