On 22 March 1951, on the first day of the Persian calendar year, and just two days after the Iranian parliament had passed the oil nationalisation bill, employees of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) began a strike in the port of Bandar Mahshahr in South West Iran. Over the next few days and weeks, thousands more joined in the strike across the company's areas of operations in the oil-rich province of Khuzestan, especially in the refinery town of Abadan. Lasting until 27 April, the strike succeeded in halting the flow of oil in the Abadan refinery – the largest refinery in the world at the time – and signalled AIOC's imminent expulsion at the hands of popular resource nationalism.

Yet participation in the strike was not confined only to full-time employees of the oil company. In the words of the onlooking US embassy, the ‘outstanding characteristic’ of the strike was that it was ‘created, and long sustained, by fewer than 400 students’. These were students at AIOC's training centres in Abadan, especially the Abadan Technical Institute. The company had built such centres to produce skilled, loyal employees, yet these trainees used such spaces to mobilise against the company, performing sit-ins and holding secret meetings there to co-ordinate with workers in the refinery. Such was the fear among military officials about the Abadan Technical Institute and student hostel being ‘hubs of the strike’ that the military eventually blockaded both to prevent further intrigue. Not deterred, students continued to be at the forefront of resistance against the police during the strike, consequently suffering bloodshed and fatalities. It is surprising, therefore, that their main demand should seem so trivial: that pass marks in exams were unfairly high.

This episode offers a window on understanding the purpose and impact of training in the history and politics of the global oil industry. AIOC envisaged training as not only producing productive, docile employees, but also as helping it to meet its political obligations to the Iranian government in ‘Iranianisation’, increasing the number of Iranians in senior staff positions. Thus, exploring AIOC's training schemes in the preceding years better illuminates how an oil company negotiated local entanglement in the desire to ultimately remain disentangled and removed from national or local politics. Scholars have already shown how oil companies have strived towards such aims through strategies of racial segregation, welfare paternalism and urban planning.