Dissertation Research: Anglo-Persian Oil and the Making of Modern Iran, 1901-1953

本文以1901-1953年间英国控制的伊朗石油工业为研究对象，对《科学技术史》中的《改进·格兰特》一文重新思考了现代中东政治。NSF的支持将资助政府和商业档案的研究，以审查一系列涉及石油勘探、产权、劳工组织、地质知识、会计方法、石油分配以及利润计算和控制的争端和危机。其目的是了解自然、技术和政治之间的相互作用如何重塑石油地区的地方政治，以及这些因素如何反过来塑造民族国家和跨国石油公司的出现。英国在伊朗的石油工业是世界上最早也是最大的海外石油业务之一。公司经理、石油工程师和石油工人面临着前所未有的技术挑战，建立了新的金融和社会安排，并在一系列危机中帮助塑造了现代伊朗国家的政治。伊朗或中东任何其他国家的现有历史都没有与石油开发密切相关。在科学和技术研究的文献中，除了杰弗里·鲍克(1998)对一家法国石油服务公司的调查外，没有一种学术研究现代石油工业的发展。这个项目的目的不仅是提供中东石油生产的技术历史，而且研究石油与政治如何相互作用。它建立在科学技术研究传统的基础上，这种传统挑战了一边是技术研究，一边是社会经济研究之间的分工。其目的不是为了更好地理解技术和社会之间的关系，将两者作为独立的领域，而是将历史和政治视为社会技术过程。如果不认真考虑其技术层面，就无法充分理解中东或世界任何产油区的政治。同样，只有从塑造这个世界的历史和政治力量的角度，才能正确地理解石油的技术世界。中东的石油政治是当代非常令人担忧的话题。人们普遍认为，一个拥有大量石油收入的国家在经济发展和建立民主政治形式方面面临着不同寻常的挑战。然而，人们对石油诅咒的原因知之甚少。这是因为人们通常只从其财务收入及其影响的角度来研究石油。采取社会技术方法将产生新的理解，通过考虑与石油有关的权力关系、劳工斗争、技术控制、金融安排和财产制度的形式。因此，拟议的研究将提供一种新的方式来思考石油的政治经济学和中东的现代政治。

This Dissertation Improvement Grant in the History of Science and Technology rethinks the politics of the modern Middle East, through a study of the British-controlled oil industry in Iran from 1901 to 1953. NSF support will fund research in governmental and business archives in order to examine a series of disputes and crises concerning petroleum exploration, property rights, the organization of labor, geological knowledge, accounting methods, oil distribution, and the calculation and control of profits. The goal is to understand how interactions between nature, technology, and politics reconfigured the local politics of the oil regions and how these in turn shaped the emergence of both the national state and the multinational oil corporation. The British oil industry in Iran was one of the world's first and largest overseas oil operations. Company managers, petroleum engineers, and oil workers faced unprecedented technical challenges, forged new financial and social arrangements, and, through a series of crises, helped shape the politics of the modern state of Iran. No existing history of Iran, or of any other country in the Middle East, deals closely with the development of oil. In the literature of Science and Technology Studies research, with the exception of Geoffrey Bowker's (1998) investigation of a French oil services company, there is no scholarship that examines the development of the modern oil industry. This project aims to provide not just a technical history of oil production in the Middle East, but a study of how oil and politics interact. It builds on the tradition in Science and Technology studies research that challenges the division of labor between studies of technology on one side and studies of society and the economy on the other. The intention is not to better understand relations between technology and society, leaving the two as separate spheres, but to approach history and politics as socio-technical processes. The politics of the Middle East or any oil producing region of the world cannot be understood adequately without taking seriously its technical dimensions. Likewise, the technical world of oil can be understood properly only in terms of the historical and political forces through which that world has been shaped. The politics of oil in the Middle East is a topic of great contemporary concern. It is generally accepted that a country that enjoys large oil revenues faces unusual challenges in economic development and in creating democratic forms of politics. Yet the reasons for this oil curse are poorly understood. This is because oil is typically studied only in terms of its financial revenues and their impact. Taking a socio-technical approach will produce new kinds of understanding, by bringing into view the forms of power relations, labor struggles, technical controls, financial arrangements, and property regimes that develop in relation to oil. Thus the proposed research will offer a new way to think about both the political economy of oil and the modern politics of the Middle East.