{"product_id":"machineries-of-oil-an-infrastructural-history-of-bp-in-iran-9780262037044b","title":"Machineries of Oil: An Infrastructural History of BP in Iran","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe emergence of the international oil corporation as a political actor in the twentieth century, seen in BP's infrastructure and information arrangements in Iran.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 700;\"\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the early twentieth century, international oil corporations emerged as a new kind of political actor. The development of the world oil industry, argues Katayoun Shafiee, was one of the era's largest political projects of techno-economic development. In this book, Shafiee maps the machinery of oil operations in the Anglo-Iranian oil industry between 1901 and 1954, tracking the organizational work involved in moving oil through a variety of technical, legal, scientific, and administrative networks. She shows that, in a series of disagreements, the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, which later became BP) relied on various forms of information management to transform political disputes into techno-economic calculation, guaranteeing the company complete control over profits, labor, and production regimes. She argues that the building of alliances and connections that constituted Anglo-Iranian oil's infrastructure reconfigured local politics of oil regions and examines how these arrangements in turn shaped the emergence of both nation-state and transnational oil corporation.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eDrawing on her extensive archival and field research in Iran, Shafiee investigates the surprising ways in which nature, technology, and politics came together in battles over mineral rights; standardizing petroleum expertise; formulas for calculating profits, production rates, and labor; the “Persianization” of employees; nationalism and oil nationalization; and the long-distance machinery of an international corporation. Her account shows that the politics of oil cannot be understood in isolation from its technical dimensions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Bargain","offer_id":42820390092880,"sku":"9780262037044B","price":17.49,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0592\/8173\/5760\/files\/9780262037044-l.jpg?v=1785879566","url":"https:\/\/bookoutlet.com\/products\/machineries-of-oil-an-infrastructural-history-of-bp-in-iran-9780262037044b","provider":"Book Outlet","version":"1.0","type":"link"}