| The purpose of this project is to develop a social history of labour in the Iranian oil industry. The discovery of oil in Iran in 1908 created new social, political, economic and even cultural realities at local, national, regional and international levels. Now, a century on, Iran's geopolitical role and significance continue to grow. In many fundamental ways, the commodity oil, and those producing it, has played a central role in shaping a model of development, of social mores and behaviours, and of political and social relations in Iran, and beyond. The existing literature on the historiography of oil has been limited to, firstly, the economic history of oil as an export commodity, and of petroleum as an economic sector, and, secondly, to the mostly political memoirs and professional reminiscences of elite actors (such as managers, ministers, party activists and leaders), mainly about the oil nationalisation movement of the early 1950s or the OPEC and related issues prior to the 1979 Revolution. Despite considerable scholarly effort to document the official history of British Petroleum Company, there is no single and continuous history of the oil workers as a social class in Iran. What is more evident is the fact that there are no known accounts or analyses of social actors, or of the social and political relations of production within oil sector, in the period after the early 1980s. As a detailed social historiography of the oil working class, this project will consider these discontinuities. More importantly, it will provide a comprehensive synthesis of results from individually conducted subprojects, which would otherwise be impossible to accomplish. |
