Toiling for Oil

Touraj Atabaki is Senior Researcher at the International Institute of Social History and Professor Emeritus, holder of the chair of the Social History of the Middle East and Central Asia at the Leiden University. He is a past President of the Association for Iranian Studies (AIS) and European Society for Central Asian Studies (ESCAS). Previous publications include Azerbaijan: Ethnicity and the Struggle for Power in Iran (2000), and as editor, Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Atatürk and Reza Shah (2004), The State and the Subaltern: Modernisation, Society and the State in Turkey and Iran (2007), Iran in the 20th Century: Historiography and Political Culture (2009), and Working for Oil: Comparative Social History of Labour in the Global Oil Industry (2018).

Introduction; 1. Discovering oil and its impact on the social setting in Iran; 2. Oil and labour in the First World War; 3. Oil and the authoritarian modernisation: the interwar period; 4. The Second World War: the battle to conquer the world's oil empire; 5. Poised to leap: a short march towards the nationalisation of Iranian oil; 6. The interlude of sovereignty: life and labour in the era of Iran's oil nationalisation, 1951–1954; 7. From socioeconomic disparity to planned development, 1954–1962; 8. Dynamics of oil, workforce, and developmental state in the 1960s and 1970s; 9. Catalysts of change: exploring shop-floor labour activism from the 'white revolution' (1962) to the 'Islamic revolution' (1979); Epilogue.