Roughly a third of the twenty-one experts in petroleum microbiology who gathered at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) on 15–17 January 1979 were based in the Middle East. The remainder hailed from Western Europe, the USA and Japan, mostly from the research departments of some of the world's biggest oil and petrochemical companies, among them British Petroleum, Imperial Chemical Industries, Phillips Petroleum and the Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Company. The Proceedings of the OAPEC Symposium on Petroprotein, published the following year, suggest a distinctly torch-passing tone to the conference. By 1979, the big international companies were almost all abandoning the petroprotein business, having judged their attempts to synthesise food supplements by fermenting yeast or bacteria on hydrocarbon feedstocks to have been scientifically and technically successful but impossible to make profitable. Emil Malick, President and CEO of Provesta Foods (a division of the US-based Phillips Petroleum), captured the state of this field succinctly in his presenta-tion. Provesta's microbial protein supplement would not, his company had concluded, be able to compete with prices for soya or fishmeal as a protein source for the foreseeable future. But, he continued, reiterating a claim he had made in 1976 to the League of Arab States: ‘nations in the Middle East and elsewhere that possess large oil and gas reserves … appear to be in the best strategic and economic position to make and sell [petroprotein] in world trade.’

KISR's 1979 symposium thus contemplated the possibility that a combination of resources unique to the Middle East – abundant hydrocarbons and as-yet-undiscovered microbes – might yet realise the gathered scientists’ dream of bringing to market a new, cheap, safe and efficient way to feed livestock and maybe, one day, humans. Scientists in the Biotechnology Department of the Food Resources Division at KISR had taken up this challenge in 1977, as one of a number of initiatives begun during a significant expansion of KISR led by General Director Dr Adnan Shihab-Eldin. Their work continued, without interruption and with significant success in meeting its targets, until 1990.

In the end, neither livestock nor humans in the Middle East ended up on a home-grown petroprotein diet.

On 17 January 1991, US-led coalition forces launched Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. By mid-February, as a ground offensive became imminent, the Iraqi regime put into effect its ‘Plan for Deferred Destruction’ (khittat al-takhrib al-muʾajal ), which entailed detonating Kuwait's oil wells. When the war ended on 26 February, 735 of around 870 active wells were ablaze and burned 5 million barrels of oil per day for the next nine months. It was initially estimated that it could take five to ten years to extinguish the fires, which, if left alone, could burn for over a hundred years. The first team of American oil firefighters sent by the Kuwaiti government immediately after the liberation to assess the damage got the first glimpse of the enormous task that lay ahead. As Joe Bowden, Sr, founder of Wild Well Control, put it:

One of Bowden's firefighters, George Hill, thought that Joe had ‘lost his mind … his ability to converse – you know, his vocabulary’.

The incomprehensibility and indescribability of Kuwait's burning oil fields reflects the ‘intellectual vertigo’ that characterises the global oil and gas sector. Despite the ubiquity of oil in our everyday lives, ‘the inner workings’ and ‘infrastructural guts’ of the industry remain largely invisible to the vast majority of the world's population, and the full ‘scale and reach’ of the world oil sector is therefore ‘impossible to fully grasp’. Like the oil industry itself, the crisis of the oil fires at first glance appeared impossible to comprehend in its totality. Neither the world nor the industry had ever seen a man-made crisis of this magnitude. But while the dizzying scale of the catastrophic destruction seemed incomprehensible, like other oil-related crises the fires paradoxically made oil itself more visible and tangible than ever before. Kuwait's oil infrastructure lay outside the physical boundaries of the city's metropolitan zone in heavily restricted areas.

This chapter examines the impact of oil on the twin processes of state formation and space-making in the Trucial States and United Arab Emirates and Sultanate of Oman in the mid-twentieth century. In much of the literature on the history of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, these processes are linked through oil concessions. Concessions necessitated the demarcation of domestic and international boundaries in the Arabian Peninsula, a key part of the state formation process. This chapter looks instead at state formation through a new means of oil-fuelled mobility – automobility. Beginning in the early 1950s and surging dramatically at the end of the 1960s, the automobile rapidly displaced older modes of transportation, in the process becoming synonymous with modernisation and state-building. The automobile's speed and power sparked violence, necessitated new modes of regulation as well as a new road network, and made the state visible and tangible in even the most remote areas of the region. New boundaries between states were demarcated, with different rules for travel by car and by foot or animal. In the process, new understandings of space emerged, and state control over territory dramati-cally intensified. Eventually, it became both physically possible and morally permissible for UAE and Omani citizens (and others) to travel to places that had not been open to them before, while other patterns of circulation were closed off by a new international border; automobility and roads created both new freedoms and new restrictions. Through the lens of automobility, oil's role in state formation becomes more complex and contested, as various actors ranging from British Political Agents to local sheikhs wrestled with how new forms of movement ought to be governed.

Two spatial imaginaries frame the chapter's analysis – the pre-oil dirah, rooted in seasonal migrations and kinship relations, and the nascent dawla (state), which required free movement within demarcated boundaries. The shift from the dirah to the dawla is traced through several episodes involving automobile travel. The potential of automobility to undermine the existing political and spatial order is seen in the 1938 Majlis Movement in Dubai and in a 1950 conflict in Shaʾam, in northern Ras al-Khaimah.

The Searchers

Al-Bahithun (The (Re)searchers) is an art project that highlights the link between nationalised knowledge and oil wealth. The nationalisation of the Iraqi oil industry in 1972 allowed the Iraqi state to utilise unprecedented revenues from the sale of oil. My work explores how this wealth was dependent on, and tied to, the empowerment of local expertise and how a good portion of oil revenues went into training and educational programmes as well as supporting the welfare of scientists, researchers and university graduates. My project's name is borrowed from an Iraqi film made in 1978 entitled Al-Bahithun (The Searchers).

I play on the double meaning of the Arabic term al-bahithun: ‘the searchers’, and ‘the researchers’. While the al-bahithun featured in the film are primarily oil explorers, assembled to search for oil in the marshes of Southern Iraq (al-Ahwar), in my work I explore what has been made possible by the revenue generated by these (oil) discoveries: the development of a national research culture that helped secure the autonomy of oil as an Iraqi national industry as well as the structures of power and politics underlying it. This chapter describes how the objects I featured in my art project Al-Bahithun reproduce the condition of (re)searchers who oscillated between the projects of nationalisation, knowledge, art, architecture and war as precipitated by oil. Finally, I aim to highlight how these oil movements are, as in the film, accompanied by attempts to hear the sounds that call(ed) the (re)searchers to the oil fields.

The core team featured in the film The Searchers represent a constituency of Iraqi society in the late 1970s – an engineer, a revenge-seeking peasant, a geologist and a treasure-seeking explorer. These men live and work on the water and conduct their explorations with a strange-looking tractor (Figures 5.1 and 5.2), a floating workstation equipped with telecommunication devices. When a phone call alerts the team that they are floating on a sea of oil, they explode with joy, except two of the men, who split from the group to embark on a secret search for a legendary land, a ‘lost paradise’.

In this chapter I investigate the post-Qajar era and demonstrate that, after the establishment of the Pahlavi state in the 1920s, the process of spatial abstraction reached new heights. In the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the Pahlavi state, particularly in the main cities of the country, undertook a massive project of social reform with widespread spatial ramifications. In Tehran, the municipality became the central state’s executive organ. The spatial strategies of the municipality resulted in the further decline of the communal sphere and the consolidation of the state’s domination over people’s daily lives and spaces. The codification of space was the state’s main method for accomplishing social reforms, modernization, and Westernization. By designing and imposing detailed guidelines for various communal spaces of the old city, the state disturbed the old, established forms of communal life. Similar to Foucault’s concept of the carceral archipelago, the Pahlavi state succeeded in imposing strict social control and discipline over urban populations through spatial guidelines. The state’s spatial codes, similar to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, stretched the state’s omnipresent control to every corner of the communal sphere. The Pahlavi state transformed the lived spaces of the old city into representations of space and means of social control.

Regarding this Lefebvrian framework, the political struggles of the 1940s and the early 1950s in Tehran pose significant questions that this chapter seeks to examine. After decades of spatial abstraction and the (re)production and development of the city through abstract spaces, how did the people of Tehran transform state spaces into a political arena to contest the hegemony of the state? What was the relationship between spaces of daily life produced in the Reza Shah era and the new spaces of protest in Tehran? Why did people choose the new streets and squares of the city for protesting against the monarchy? Why did they not take bast in the mosques of the old city as they did in the constitutional era? To analyze this spatial shift, this chapter scrutinizes political groups and forces of this era and their political gatherings, protests, demonstrations, and parades in public spaces of Tehran. This examination suggests a dynamic political scene that cannot be dichotomized into the conventional binary opposition of people against the state, as was examined during the constitutional era.

This book is about an ontological shift in the conceptualization and representation of the spatiality of Tehran, the capital of Iran, as the outcome of the formation and establishment of a novel spatial discourse. Between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, this novel discourse sidelined the indigenous knowledge of Iranian urban society and the state and became the legitimate sources of imagining and producing the spatiality of Iranian cities. It transformed the spaces of the social, political, and economic processes in Tehran and elsewhere in the country. This shift was ontological and spatial, meaning that it brought about novel frameworks for urban society and the state to produce the spaces of their daily practices and strategies. This shift was discursive, leading to the abandonment of the traditional and indigenous spatial understanding in a long process of knowledge production; society and the state internalized a novel form of knowledge as the authentic source of producing the spatiality of social, economic, and political relations. This shift targeted both the state and society; it was top-down and bottom-up simultaneously. As the book suggests, since the mid-nineteenth century, this new spatial discourse has reproduced Tehran; the contours of the current city should be read through the analysis of this discursive transformation.

The 1870s expansion of Tehran was a vehicle for the spatial commodification of vast sections of the new city. Through this expansion, the Qajar court managed to produce the new spatiality as a lucrative commodity. The commodification of the city accompanied an unprecedented socio-spatial bureaucratization. A combination of several factors –from preventing outbreaks of diseases to organizing a novel relationship between the state and society – helped the state to stretch its control and dominance over the spatiality of the city. In its initial steps, these early attempts were the manifestations of a fundamental shift in the relationship between the state, society, and the city. To use Lefebvre’s concept of abstract spaces, Tehran went through a process of spatial abstraction particularly after its 1870s expansion. This chapter demonstrates how this expansion followed delicate economic objectives, and how the Qajar court had pursued this commodification process through its spatial policies long before the actual expansion of Tehran. Afterwards, the chapter focuses on the bureaucratization process and argues that, from the first half of the nineteenth century, the state had already generated spatial strategies to prevent cholera outbreaks in the city. The chapter moves to the examination of the spatial strategies of the state for the legitimation of its power and demonstrates how the expansion of Tehran helped the state to stretch its spatial control and domination beyond the confines of the royal compound. It continues with the study of the social life and spaces of the new neighborhood at the end of the nineteenth century and finds that the Qajar elites produced semi-private spaces modeled after European social space. Finally, the chapter concludes with the investigation of the spatial strategies of the state and the impact of the two processes of commodification and bureaucratization on Tehran.

By utilizing the notions of the communal sphere and segmented urban society developed in Chapter 1, this chapter investigates the relationship between society and the state as mediated through the spatiality of the city. It studies Iranians’ political practices in public spaces that contested the state during the 1905–6 Constitutional Revolution. It seeks to better understand the troubled relationship between society and the state and its geographical manifestations. As a result of this troubled relationship, Iranian society managed to delimitate the absolutist monarchy and bind it to certain political and social norms. Two theoretical concepts stand out in this context: the public sphere and the political public space. This chapter deals with the relationship between these two concepts in a different geography, beyond the dominance of Western European and North American narratives. Drawing in part on Jürgen Habermas’s discussion in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, here I understand the public sphere as a medium between society and the state that enables the former to exert influence on the latter. Political public spaces provide unique platforms for people’s collective political activities, and do so in ways that intersect with other aspects of urban life.

Aiming to highlight the agency of ordinary people in Tehran’s transformation, I mostly scrutinized the shifts in two seemingly independent but inherently interconnected socio-spatial relationships: the spatiality of social life and social movements. Throughout the main storyline of this book, I illustrated that the transformations of these two relationships shared four common characteristics. First, there is an apparent departure from communal to class-based identities. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the social spaces of nineteenth-century Tehran were the outcome of the shared communal identity of their users; people’s communal ties colored coffeehouses, bathhouses, takīyyihs, and zūrkhānihs. In the same vein, communal ties played the main role in the formation of political public spaces and the public sphere during the Constitutional Revolution. However, the structural transformation of Iranian urban society resulted in the demise of the communal sphere and the rise of class consciousness based on shared economic and political interests. As Chapter 5 demonstrated, the modern middle class produced the main social spaces of mid-twentieth-century northern Tehran. Chapter 6 illustrated the role of this class alongside the urban working class in the production of political public spaces of the city in the 1940s and the early 1950s.

From the late eighteenth century, various sections of Iranian society, particularly the court and the elites, developed an acquaintance with European and American cities, their social lives, and spaces through direct visits, postcards, geographical texts, pictures, and other means of knowledge transfer. The analysis of Iranians’ wonder-like appreciations of Western cities helps to illustrate how this novel spatial knowledge determined the future of Iranian cities. This chapter suggests that the post-1870s spatial transformations of Tehran had been incubated in Iranian society – at least among the elites and the Qajar court – for decades. I argue that these transformations were the outcome of the gradual formation and development of a spatial discourse, rather than an abrupt change and a sudden disjuncture from the past. By adopting the Foucauldian conception of discourse, this chapter focuses on Iranians’ acquaintance with European cities, their social lives, and social spaces. The exposure to new ideas was not limited to the political landscape and had an impact on various aspects of Iranian society. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the growing relationship between Iran and European countries generated new forms of knowledge and transferred them to Iranian society. From culinary culture to the establishment of a new educational system, and from painting and theater to industrial and monetary organizations, various aspects of this impact have been investigated before.