3rd World Congress of Environmental History

Oleaginous Island. Oil, British imperialism and the environmental transformations of Abadan Island in the early twentieth century

• In Event: Energy and History: Wind, Water, and Oil

Abstract

Located in south-west Persia, approximately thirty miles from the Persian Gulf, Abadan belonged to the ecosystem of the Shatt-el-Arab at the end of the nineteenth century. A flat and sandy island with marshes and numerous plantations of palm trees, Abadan was partly inhabited by the Bani Kaab tribe and governed by Sheik Khaz'al. In 1908, an antecedent of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, —D’Arcy’s First Exploitation Company— struck oil in commercial quantity in south-west Persia in the heart of the Zagros mountains. For the Oil Company’s agents and British diplomats posted in Persia, Abadan was an ideal site to build a refinery, where the oil extracted in the Zagros mountains would be refined and exported. In July 1909, after negotiations with British diplomats and the agents of the British oil company, Sheik Khaz'al agreed to a rental agreement for Abadan Island. In 1912, the Anglo-Persian Company opened the first refinery in the Middle East on Abadan island.
This paper combines, first, archival perspectives —notably a collection of photographs held in the British Petroleum archives— depicting Abadan Island at the beginning of the twentieth century; and, second, a literature focused on the development of oil concessions — above all the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, an antecedent of British Petroleum (BP) — in precisely the same region in the decades before and after the first discovery of commercially-viable oilfields. Charting the development of the refinery of Abadan and the consequent environmental transformations of the island, this paper argues that the creation of a petroleum landscape was accompanied by an imperial-tinged ideology of development and modernisation. Sites of refinery, housing for labour staff, hospitals, recreational sites — crickets fields, cinema, tennis courts— tanker port, engineering buildings were all elements of this new petroleum landscape.

Author

• Guillemette Crouzet, Postdoctoral Fellow, History Department, University of Warwick