Machineries of Oil

The emergence of the international oil corporation as a political actor in the twentieth century, seen in BP’s infrastructure and information arrangements in Iran.

In the early twentieth century, international oil corporations emerged as a new kind of political actor. The development of the world oil industry, argues Katayoun Shafiee, was one of the era’s largest political projects of techno-economic development. In this book, Shafiee maps the machinery of oil operations in the Anglo-…