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From ‘Amaleh (Labor) to Kargar (Worker): Recruitment, Work Discipline and Making of the Working Class in the Persian/Iranian Oil Industry*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 January 2014

Touraj Atabaki
Touraj Atabaki*
Affiliation:
International Institute of Social History, The Netherlands
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Abstract

The extraction of oil in 1908 and the ensuing construction of an oil refinery, shipping docks and company towns in southwest Persia/Iran opened a new chapter in the nation's labor history. Enjoying absolute monopoly over the extraction, production and marketing of the oil, the Anglo-Persian/Iranian Oil Company (APOC, AIOC, now British Petroleum—BP) embarked on a massive labor recruitment campaign, drawing its recruits primarily from tribal and village-based laboring poor throughout a region. But, in a region where human needs were few and cheap, it was no easy task to persuade young men to leave their traditional mode of life in exchange for industrial milieu with radically different work patterns. Those who did join the oil industry's work force were then subjected to labor discipline of an advanced industrial economy, which eventually contributed to the formation of the early clusters of modern Iran's working class.

Type
Writing the Social History of Labor in the Iranian Oil Industry
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 84: Crumbling Cultures: Deindustrialization, Class, and Memory , Fall 2013 , pp. 159 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2013 

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Footnotes

*

I would like to extend my gratitude to Marcel van der Linden, Kaveh Ehsani, Jurriaan Bendien, and the anonymous reviewer for their comments and suggestions which improved the quality of this paper.

References

NOTES

1. At the turn of the century, Iranian industries employing 23,500 workers comprised 0.7 percent of the total workforce in the country. See Touraj Atabaki, Willem Floor, and Nazanin Sadeghi, History of Labor Relations 1500–2000. Forthcoming in: http://socialhistory.org/en/projects/history-labour-relations-1500-2000.

2. The free exploitation of the oil deposits in the Absheron peninsula on the Caspian coast in 1872 soon caused the region to supply about ninety-five percent of all Russia's consumer oil. The Russian state authorities anticipated they could benefit from the underground resources of a territory, which, on the eve of its occupation and annexation, was still considered to be only of geopolitical and military importance. The strongly state-oriented industrialization policy in Russia during the late nineteenth century paved the way for a massive expansion of domestic industries, the development of huge mining projects, and a dazzling extension of railway networks into the southern regions of the Tsarist Empire. See: Falkus, M. E., The Industrialization of Russia, 1700–1914 (London, 1972), 44–46 Google Scholar, and 64–66. As a result of the “oil rush,” the population of Baku rose from 13,000 in 1859 to 112,000 in 1879, and to 300,000 in 1917. Another case is the workforce in the Baku oilfields, which grew from 1,800 in 1872 to 30,000 in 1907.

3. Hurewitz, J. C., Diplomacy in the Near East and Middle East: A Documentary Record, vol. 1 (New York, 1956), 251Google Scholar.

4. For a study of the Abadan oil refinery, see Touraj Atabaki, The Making of the Abadan Oil Refinery (forthcoming).

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6. ARC 78726, March 19 and 22, 1907, British Petroleum Archive.

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8. Ferrier, The History of the British Petroleum, 124.

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10. Interview with Houshang Keshavarz, Paris: January 21, 2009. See also Safinezhad, Javad, ‘Asahyer Markazi Iran (Tehran, 1989), 461–71 and 525–48Google Scholar. For more study on Bakhtiyaris and tribe in modern Iran, see Khazeni, Arash, Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle, 2009)Google Scholar; Garthwaite, Gene R., Khans and Shah: A History of the Bakhtiyari Tribe in Iran (London, 2009)Google Scholar and Cronin, Stephanie, Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflicts and the New State, 1921–1941 (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

11. ARC141294, January 1938, Laurence Lockhart, Unpublished Record of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, volume 1, 1901–1918, 68, British Petroleum Archive.

12. FO 248/894, British Charge d'Affaires, Evelyn Grant Duff to Sir Edward Grey, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Tehran, May 18, 1906, British National Archive.

13. Ibid., 90.

14. Ferrier, The History of the British Petroleum, 128.

15. Ibid., 123.

16. For a study of the Indian migrant labor in the Iranian oil industry, see Touraj Atabaki, Indian Migrant Labour in the Persian Oil Industry (forthcoming).

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22. Ibid.

23. Ferrier, The History of the British Petroleum, 151.

24. Ibid., 128.

25. Ibid.

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27. Ibid.

28. Ferrier, The History of the British Petroleum, 276.

29. The figure presented here as the population of Masjed Suleiman around 1920 is based on the estimation derived from differed data collecting from the British Petroleum Archive and the National Library and Archive of Iran.

30. For making Masjed Suleiman and Abadan as company towns, see Ehsani, Kaveh, “Social Engineering and the Contradictions of Modernization in Khuzestan's Company Towns: A Look at Abadan and Masjed Suleiman,” International Review of Social History 3 (2003): 361–99Google Scholar.

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32. ARC 185578, Capito, C. E., “Early Days in Masjed Suleiman,” Naft, 16/4 (1940): 5–11 Google Scholar. British Petroleum Archive.

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35. ARC 70335, July 24, 1911, British Petroleum Archive.

36. Ibid.

37. Cipolla, Carlo M., Clocks & Culture 1300–1700 (London, 1967), 88Google Scholar.

38. For a comparative study of time and labor discipline in Iran and Turkey, see Atabaki, Touraj, “Time, Labour Discipline and Modernization in Turkey and Iran,” in The State and the Subaltern: Society and Politics in Turkey and Iran (London, 2007), 1–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. In the North of Iran, in the region bordering the southern side of the Caspian Sea, the horn was called sisto (from Russian word svistok, referring to the horn or claxon apparatus). One of these sistos was assembled in a silk preparation factory in the Amin al-Zarb district in the city of Rasht.

40. Avanesian, Ardeshir, Safahati chand az Jonbesh-e Karegari va Komunisti da Dowran-e Avval Saltanat-e Reza Shah (1922–1933) (Leipzig, 1979), 75–83 Google Scholar.

41. For a detailed study of labor activities aiming to reduce the working day in Iran, see Atabaki, Touraj, “The Comintern, the Soviet Union and Labour Militancy in Interwar Iran,” in Iranian-Russian Encounters. Empires and Revolutions since 1800, ed. Cronin, Stephanie (London, 2012)Google Scholar. For further study of the Abadan 1929 strike, see Bayat, Kaveh, “With or Without Workers in Reza Shah's Iran: Abadan May 1929,” in The State and the Subaltern: Society and Politics in Turkey and Iran, ed. Atabaki, Touraj (London, 2007), 111–22Google Scholar; and Cronin, Stephanie, “Popular Politics and the Birth of Iranian Working Class: The 1929 Abadan Oil Refinery Strike,” Middle Eastern Studies 5 (2010): 699–732 Google Scholar.

42. See for example, Ashtiyani, Ali, “Formation of the Working Class in Iran,” Nazm-e Novin 5 (1984)Google Scholar.

43. Lockman, Zachary, “Reflections on Labour and Working-Class History in the Middle East and North Africa,” in Global Labour History: A State of the Art, 2nd edition, ed. Lucassen, Jan (Bern, 2008), 136Google Scholar.

44. Lockman, Zachary, “Imagining the Working Class: Culture, Nationalism, and Class Formation in Egypt, 1899–1914,” Poetics Today 5 (1994): 158–59Google Scholar.

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46. For a detailed study of petitions in Persia and beyond, see “Petitions in Social History,” International Review of Social History Supplement 9 (2002); Schneider, Irene, The Petitioning System in Iran: State, Society and Power Relations in the Late 19th Century (Wiesbaden, 2006)Google Scholar; Nezam-Mafi, Mansoureh Ettehadieh, “The Council for the Investigation of Grievances: A Case Study of Nineteenth Century Iranian Social History,” International Society for Iranian Studies 22 (1989): 51–61 Google Scholar; Chalcraft, John “Engaging the State: Peasants and Petitions in Egypt on the Eve of Colonial Rule,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 37 (2005): 303–25Google Scholar.

47. 240014788, December 11, 1910, National Library and Archive of Iran.

48. 293005892, August 27, 1921, National Library and Archive of Iran. In south and southeast Asia, the term tandil was often used to name the overseer or foreman. See Jones, Russell, ed., Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay (Jakarta, 2008), 312Google Scholar.

49. Documents of the Fifth Parliament, June 5 1924, National Library and Archive of Iran.

50. Ibid.