 Boom & bust
Social engineering and the contradictions of modernization
in Khuzestan's oil company towns, Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman
>>> Page
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Kaveh Ehsani
February 15, 2005
iranian.com
This essay is a comparative study of the design and social impact
of Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman, the first and most important oil
towns built in Khuzestan by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC).
The construction of these company towns almost a century ago forms
an important chapter in the history of modernization and urbanization
in Iran. As a result of this experience a new model of social engineering
and hierarchic modernization was introduced into Iranian social
life by powerful actors that included transnational capital, the
central state, and professional elites.
Company town, a term coined in turn of the century United States
where this urban form proliferated more than elsewhere, refers
to a town owned, designed,
maintained, and managed by a single company - state owned or private [1].
This distinction by exclusive ownership is meant to set company
towns apart from
other industrial or mining urban areas. Industrial cities, such as Detroit
or Manchester, despite the predominance of a major industry, could not be
exactly labeled company towns because the presence of a number
of competing employer
firms undermined the ability of any one of them to impose its singular will
on the urban space in the way that that monopoly ownership affords the unique
proprietor of a company town, such as Pullman-Illinois, or Lakewood-California
[2].
Of the two major aims pursued in the course of the establishment
of company towns the first, which is concerned with housing the
labor force, is transparent
and self-evident. But the second, which is to use the carefully designed
urban space for training, monitoring, controlling, and in short socializing
this
labor force according to the demands of the company, is less explicitly
attended to [3].
In Iran the history of modern urbanization has
been inextricably
tied to the activities of the Anglo Persian Oil Company (APOC). The oil
cities of
Abadan, Masjed-Soleyman, and at least 6 other sister towns [4]) designed
and constructed by APOC in the first quarter of the 2oth Century in Khuzestan,
were the first modern and industrial towns in Iran and the Middle East.
Overtime, these cities came to occupy a special place as a model
and inspiration for
this type of urbanization in the country as other large industrial conglomerates
(mostly state owned) replicated this segregated and hierarchic urban design
in the company towns they built, a practice that continues to this day
[5].
In this chapter I will discuss the history and experience
of the oil company towns of Khuzestan, focusing on Masjed-Soleyman
and
Abadan, the first,
largest, and most complex of these cities. Aside from the inherent fascination
of
looking closely at this formative experience this study can also allow
us to pose several
other related concerns, the importance of which may well transcend the
mere study of an historical urban form in Iran:
First, if it is true as
I claimed earlier that some of the main features and practices
of this type of urban design have become 'nativized' overtime
and tend to be utilized and referred to on a routine basis then we must
conclude that the important changes that have taken place in the
political sphere in
the course of this past century have not seriously affected the norms,
outlooks, and approaches to development and modernization.
It goes
without saying that
this experience has not been unique to Khuzestan and Iran since most post-colonial
states have tended to adopt models and institutions of the previous era,
legitimated by being labeled 'national', and subsequently
used as instruments of governance and rule by the new state [6].
In addition, this reference to
the period of direct European hegemony is also repeated on numerous occasions
in the process of planning new developmental policies, which use similar
methods, approaches and even criteria [7].
What can be deducted
from this experience
is that even profound changes in the political sphere do not automatically
bring the subjectivity and the outlook that shapes social engineering to
critical questioning [8]. The root of this subjectivity cannot
be discovered in the
political sphere alone, but rather in the more opaque and impersonal layers
of the technocracy and bureaucracy that together form the state machinery,
and in the weltanschauung of educated and professional elites [9].
Second, the continuity of the relevance of these models of social
engineering should logically lead to a closer look at their original
formation, or
the colonial period. Modern colonialism involves the coercive domination
of an
alien power whose primary aim is the unaccounted extraction of material
and human resources of a subjugated society. Although Iran has not been
a modern
colony at any time nevertheless the humiliating influence and hegemonic
domination of APOC has always been locally interpreted as a colonial
experience [10].
The control and ownership of oil resources was, from the onset,
a national concern for Iran. At every major related historical
juncture when negotiations
and conflict redrew the balance of power over the possession and control
of petroleum resources - from the D'Arcy Concession of 1908, to the 1919
and 1930 agreements, the oil nationalization movement of 1950's, the post coup
d'etat Consortium, the OPEC Cartel formation and the price hikes
of 1970's, and eventually the Islamic revolution of 1978 - we have
been witnessing a greater
share of the control and possession of oil resources gradually pass
onto the hands of the Iranian State [11].
Nevertheless, if we were to shift our perspective from the 'national' vintage
point, i.e., from the point of view of the central state, and look at the institution
of the 'Oil Company' from the point of view of the local society,
i.e., Khuzestan, then it would be legitimate to ask how much in fact the relation
of power that has existed between these two over the past century has actually
changed overtime?
For the local society in Khuzestan the powerful institution
that controls the petroleum resources of this province may have
undergone many metamorphoses, from the Anglo Persian to the Anglo
Iranian to the National
Iranian Oil Companies and eventually to the Petroleum Ministry,
but it has always remained an awesome, forbidding, mysterious,
and secretive presence
which has been beyond local reach and control.
For local society
this institution continues to appear as a mysterious and alien
empire which miraculously extracts
local resources and riches and transports them elsewhere without
benefiting the local society in any way aside from the wages paid
to its employees. The
resulting wealth ends up being accumulated in other locations,
i.e. in the distant and alien places where decisions about this
local society are also
made, be it London or Tehran!
In other words, the relationship of power that has taken shape
between the local society and the political system in power, whether
a central
national
state or an occupying foreign power, has not been fundamentally
altered despite the significant political changes that have taken
place.
This relationship of power demands separate and autonomous analysis
if for
no other reason
than the relationship between an independent and centralized 'national' state
and its own internal communities can be as exploitative and 'colonialist' as
the domination by an alien power [12].
Third, an analysis of oil towns would inevitably require closer
attention to their raison d'être: the oil
industry and economy, and their role in both shaping and creating
these cities as well as in the larger national
trends and events. Some thirty years ago Hossein Mahdavi published
an essay titled “The patterns and problems of economic development
in rentier states”, which is still referred to as a classic
intervention in the field of comparative political economy. In
this essay, using David Ricardo's
theory of rent, Mahdavi analyzed the impact of oil revenues on
the economic as well as the political sectors of Iran and other
oil producing nations [13].
Undoubtedly the 'rentier state' theory
has played an important role in the clarification and the political
economic analysis of oil producing
societies. On the other hand, like any theory, it is in need of
further modifications and critical reassessment [14]. Here I will
briefly pose two criticisms, which
are related to our present topic: first, the relation between state
and society is far more complex and involved than the financial
interdependence. The primarily
functionalist approach of the 'rentier state' theory
has difficulty in both explaining exceptions, such as democratic
Norway [15], or the popular
democratic reform movement currently taking place in the Islamic
Republic of Iran.
It would be also difficult to explain why despite
generous distribution
of rent, some passive societies suddenly produce sustained social
protest movements, unless such political upheavals are explained
away as a sudden fiscal and financial
crisis, brought about by either drastic falls in oil revenues,
or in the pattern of rent distribution by the state [16]. Neither
of these explanations has been
convincing in explaining the occurrence of the Iranian Revolution
of 1979.
But the second criticism I will level at this theory is
perhaps
more pertinent to the topic at hand: The focus of this theory on
the state's sources
of revenue has limited its analytical scope to the macro economy, thus preventing
it from taking a more serious empirical look at the role of oil industry itself,
and the crucial role it has played in Iran's social history. The claim
that despite its enormous weight in the national political economy the oil
industry has employed only a tiny fraction of the national labor force should
not automatically lead to neglecting the important role that this labor force
has played in the social, economic, and political history of labor in Iran.
In 1951, when the oil nationalization movement was taking shape,
the Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, the renamed APOC) had nearly
80 thousand Iranian
workers, employees, and contractors on its payroll [17], which
was a very substantial portion of the national industrial labor
force at the time. I do not currently
have comparable figures for this year, but we know that five years
later in 1956, i.e. after the fall of the Mossadegh government
following the American-British
Coup d'Etat of 1953, and the establishment of the oil consortium,
and the subsequent downsizing and rationalization of the employment
structure of
the newly established National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) employment
in the oil sector had dropped to 25 thousand, while total national
employment in 'modern' large
industries (defined as those firms employing more than 12 workers)
totaled 60 thousand [18].
Employment in the oil sector increased
gradually with the
rise in production, but as a result of technological improvements
and higher efficiency the figures did not exceed 55 thousand, in
1977 at the time of the
revolution, while employment in large industries during this period
experienced a rapid growth reaching 415 thousand people [19].
Despite the relative decline of the share of oil sector workers
in the total industrial labor force we can still see that employment
in this
industry has always been a significant and considerable segment
of
the modern, and
skilled
working class employed in heavy industries. Our aim here is not
to simply stress the numbers, but to also draw attention to the
importance
of the
culture,
organizational
ability and experience, and the complex work ethic that the labor
force of this modern, well-established, and highly competitive
industry had
accumulated over a long time. In other words, despite its relative
decline in numbers,
the oil sector continues to be, to date, probably the most advanced
and competitive
large industry in the country, thanks to its long history and experience!
This maturity and ability is not limited to organizational and
productive abilities, but at many junctures has also had political
manifestations.
In other words,
despite the fact that high wages and salaries, as well as relative
job security by 1970's had turned the oil industry's labor
force into something of a labor aristocracy [20], nevertheless
this affluence and security did not
prevent it from being rapidly attracted to national protests and
political goals that transcended its limited guild interests.
In
1977-8 the industrial
working class, which occupied a strategic place in the national
economy despite its numerically small size, played a key role
through its mass strikes in the
success of the Revolution. Among this class the workers and employees
of the oil industry played the key role by first shutting off
the pipelines and suspending
all production and exports. After the collapse of the monarchy
they succeeded in restarting production and exports without the
help of foreign experts, an
unprecedented and quite significant event in the Third World
[21].
In his study of the labor syndicates during the revolution Assef
Bayat points out that what set the workers' committees in the oil industry apart was
their sustained autonomy and self-confidence, which allowed them to resist
the encroaching 'islamization' which co-opted the other labor organizations.
This independence led to increasing conflicts with the fledgling Provisional
Government in Tehran.
In November 1979 the US embassy was seized in Tehran,
just as a new wave of labor, ethnic, and student unrest was escalating.
A violent wave of islamization of educational and workplaces, dubbed
as 'Cultural
Revolution', was launched in April of 1980. In this tempestuous atmosphere
the Iraqi invasion of September 1980 suddenly overshadowed other internal contradictions.
More pertinent to our subject here, the Iraqi invasion led to the immediate
physical destruction of Abadan and the neighboring port city of Khorramshahr,
and the forced dispersal of their populations across the country as refugees.
This forced and violent break in the history of these cities leads
us to ask the legitimate question that if such a total destruction
had not taken place
in a major, strategic industrial city like Abadan would the course
of Iran's
history in the following two decades have taken another shape?
The population of Abadan had a strong sense of identity, as we
shall see later, rooted in
a rich and somewhat unique history. Despite the repressive nature
of the post 1953 nonarchic regime, this ability was manifested
in the ability of Abadanis
to form the nuclei of autonomous civil institutions, primarily
trade unions, as soon as the opportunity presented itself again
in late 1970s.
The struggle
for establishing popular and independent institutions of civil
society is what the Iranian society is striving for even today.
Had the oil workers' attempts
to defend their independent institutions against co-optation not
been disrupted by war, not such an unlikely possibility given their
strategic role and symbolic
weight in the economy, would they have been able to set an example
and create a center of gravity inspiring the emergence of similar
institutions in other
civil and public arenas, subsequently limiting the expanding sphere
of state's
hegemony? [22] These are speculative, but not unfounded questions,
meant to point out the range of missed historical possibilities,
but also the potentialities
that a large company town like Abadan had opened up at a certain
point in time.
Fourth, it is likely that the above questions may sound surprising,
but I think that if they do, it is because the role of 'space' and 'place' are
by and large neglected in most social studies. Social movements,
relations, and developments do not take place in a void, but are
shaped in specific locales
and material and physical places. This 'space' of social
interaction is a product of social relationships, but at the same
time it becomes an inseparable
organic component of their process of development.
Two decades
ago the urban population of Iran, for the first time in history,
surpassed 50% of the total
population. In a coincidence this symbolic passage to a predominantly
urban society happened at the same time that the Iranian Revolution
took place. This
urbanized society is the product of a contradictory modernity,
which has also brought about fundamental changes in the political
structures of the country.
To better understand and analyze this modernity and the many forces
that had shaped it one needs also to look at the spaces that this
modernity has created.
In other words, we need to ask what types of cities has this urbanized
society produced? What types of urbanization? And what forms of
citizenships?
The modernity
that has shaped the contemporary Iranian society, like modernity
elsewhere, and modernity itself, has not been a uniform and homogeneous
process. It has
been continuously contested, struggled over, seduced and enticed,
forced and resisted by an array of social actors. We can capture
the reflection and embodiment
of this conflicted modernity, its momentary congealment, in the
spaces it has produced.
The rest of this chapter is an attempt
to analyze a specific type
of place, the oil company towns of Khuzestan, which happen to have
played a significant role in modern urbanization in Iran.
Archeology of company towns in Iran
From a historical and geographic standpoint, the cities of Abadan
and Masjed-Soleyman have been the center and heart of the oil industry
in Iran. In many ways
the history and experience of their creations is unique and fascinating.
In the
first place, these were the first thoroughly modern cities in Iran.
After the discovery of oil in Masjed Soleyman by employees of the
D'Arcy Concession
in 1908 the Anglo Persian Oil Company (APOC) was incorporated in London. Within
four years the foundations of the cities of Abadan and Masjed Soleyman were
laid in practically unpopulated regions of Khuzestan.
Abadan was a large mud
flat island, situated in the estuary of Tigris-Euphrates-Karun
rivers, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. The island had an estimated
population of some twenty
four thousand Bani-Kaab Arab tribesmen, tending sheep and cultivating
date palms. This population was dispersed throughout the island
in a number of villages
[23]. Similarly, Masjed Soleyman was a mountainous region in the
northeast of the province, and the site of seasonal grazing by
Bakhtiari nomads.
In a pattern established two centuries earlier by the East India
Company in South Asia, APOC initially leased limited amount of
land in both
locations from the Bakhtiari Khans and the Sheykh of Mohammarah
(later Khorramshahr).
It then began building these cities with the sole purpose of exploration,
extraction,
transport, refining, storage, and export of oil. Soon, these towns
became the focal centers of a new geography that transformed the
landscape of
Khuzestan and became the site of the concentration of people and
labor power employed
in this rising global industry.
In a short time, the newly founded
city of Abadan became the country's fifth largest city, and
its population of 225,000 surpassed that of Shiraz by the end of
the Second World War in 1945.
For several decades APOC ranked as the largest employer in the
country, and its workforce exceeded the total number of those employed
in all the private
manufacturing establishments [24].
APOC did not invent the company town. At least from the first
quarter of nineteenth century large capitalist firms in industrial
countries
- especially
in the
US, but also in Britain, France, Germany, and even Russia - had
been involved in providing residence and some amenities, but also
building
whole towns
in isolated and distant locations to house their labor force [25].
But this urban
form began to undergo significant modifications in the last quarter
of nineteenth century.
The historic period of 1870's to 1914 augured
something
of a paradigm
shift in modern history. The political, economic, social, and geographic
organization of the capitalist world and its dependencies, its
mode of regulation and regime
of accumulation, underwent significant shifts following a series
of interrelated crises and reorganizations and adjustments, setting
the
stage for the
next phase that dramatically ended with the Second World War [26].
Western World and its dominions were entering a new phase of progress
and complexity.
The new era called forth a new level and form of
management, discipline, and
regulation. This vast and highly integrated 'system' needed
to be steered with appropriate competence and knowledge, through
a course that
would ensure both its expansion and survival, as well as the collective
interest of both the ruling bourgeoisie and the general population.
Insuring moderation, 'equilibrium',
and general happiness and universal satisfaction increasingly become
the acclaimed goals of the more farsighted segments of the elites
(this would also include
many leaders of social democratic movements).
The responsibility
for this social engineering and management falls to an emerging
layer of professional elites,
produced by the newly reformed universities and professional training
institutions. From this period onward, the design and conceptualization
of company towns
(called industrial towns in England) increasingly falls to these
professionals. The results of their efforts drastically differ
from the filthy and atrocious
industrial towns of the previous era, which had led to continuous
misery of workers and numerous revolts, in two major respects [27].
First, the idea and principles of general 'welfare' gained an important
place in the design of the company towns of the 20th century [28]. In other
words, the urban space itself was designed as an instrument that allowed the
company proprietor not only to house its workers but, through 'scientific' design
and planning by professional specialists [29] in the field, and through continuous
intervention in all aspects of the quotidian life of this labor force and their
families, to mold them into a skilled and efficient, but also docile, 'happy',
and modern 'human capital'.
The second factor which shaped and reformed the design of new
company towns was colonialism. As mentioned before, in the period
under
discussion (1870's-1914)
colonialism had also entered a new phase where, in addition to
the extraction of cheap and abundant raw materials, the cheap labor
of
the colonies
for producing semi-finished, or even industrial products, as well
as the potential
of colonial
markets for absorbing mass produced products of the core countries
in an increasingly integrated and competitive global market were
being considered
as key strategies.
An important advantage of the colonies was that it allowed technocrats
and professional elites to experiment with new models of social
engineering and
spatial design which, for political reasons, would have been more
difficult to implement in the home country. For that reason, the
distinction
between the 'West' and the rest that is routinely referred
to in most social and political discourses must be taken with a
grain of salt. After all, many
of the experimentations in social engineering that paved the way
for modernization in both western and third world societies were
initially tried out in the colonies,
and only after modification and proven results and safety, were
replicated in the metropolitan countries [30].
In other words,
the traffic of modernization
efforts and experiments was dialectical and back and forth, albeit
certainly not equal in terms of power and decision-making. As
a result, the transnational corporate power who laid the foundations
of the cities of Abadan and Masjed Soleyman in Khuzestan did not
start from
scratch as it had a tremendous wealth of complex and up to date
historical and practical
experience available to it from which it could freely draw. Consequently,
the places that APOC produced in Khuzestan were the results of
the latest experimentations
of advanced industrial capitalism of the day in social engineering
[31].
For this reason, Abadan and Masjed Soleyman, at least in
their initial
years, instead
of sharing similarities with existing Iranian cities belonged to
an international category of company towns that advanced industrial
capitalism
was producing
in various locations on the globe. In these cities, or at least
in the blueprints their designers had drawn, all unpredictable
and spontaneous
elements had
been eliminated and, on the other hand, all details of collective
as well as private
life in the new urban space had been subjected to conscious planning
and design. These designs were drawn at the corporations' headquarters,
or in the offices of the professional planners. In other words,
in distant places foreign
to the locales where the towns were to be constructed, and by planners
and designers who rarely had an empathetic knowledge and insight
into the needs
and characteristics of these local societies.
In Khuzestan, as in
most other similar developments, the locations of the company towns
had little to do with favorable environmental
considerations,
economic
factors, or existing local communities, but were rather dictated
by the requirements of the oil industry. Masjed Soleyman was founded
around
a
series of remarkably
productive oil wells, in the middle of barren mountains (home to
only seasonal Bakhtiari nomads grazing their sheep), and Abadan
in a marshy
island, populated
by tribesmen and palm trees, but which could also provided port
access for tankers and cargo ships.
From the onset Abadan, Masjed Soleyman and their smaller sister
cities were frontier migrant towns. Their initial populations were
mostly
men who came
from elsewhere, from diverse ethnic and regional backgrounds, in
search of jobs and income. In this period Iran was taking its initial
fledgling
steps
towards becoming a modern, centralized and integrated nation-state.
The political atmosphere of the country was unstable and crisis
ridden. The
population
was predominantly peasants and nomads.
Migrant workers in Khuzestan,
which at the
time was perhaps the most isolated, marginal, and also the wildest
region in the country, hired themselves out to an advanced capitalist
industrial
corporation
in exchange for money wages, selling their labor power in order
to produce directly for the world market. Their continued settlement
there, their
occupation, the organization of their material and cultural lives,
and the socialization
of their households in these new places in a sense created a new
ethnicity, a new sense of social identity: that of being an Abadani
or a Masjed
Soleymani.
This new sense of identity took shape as these towns were rapidly
being constructed, with a steady stream of migrants feeding its
labor demands.
For the new migrants
settling in the radically new and alien places also meant a break
from their previous social and spatial settings. As a result, in
the two
and a half
decades between 1912 and the occupation of Iran during the Second
World War, when Abadan
and Masjed Soleyman had already taken their mature shape, their
diverse and heterogeneous populations had undergone a generation
of being
subjected to
and shaped by new modes of organizing and ordering of their cultural
and material lives, profound changes in their collective private
and family
lifestyles, and the education and molding of their young generations
by the newly established
educational, technical, and recreational institutions.
The modernity that laid the foundations of these company towns
distinguished them, and especially Abadan, from the other historic
Iranian cities,
even Tehran the capital. From the Safavid period (16th century)
to the fall
of the Qajar
dynasty (1926) the province of Khuzestan had come to be known as 'Arabistan',
due to the increasing migration of various Arab Bedouin tribes there from the
Arabian peninsula and Mesopotamia [33]. Khuzestan was a frontier territory
with virtual autonomy from the central government.
In the first two decades
of the 20th century, following the Constitutional Revolution (1906-11),
numerous centrifugal forces began to gather momentum, leading the
moribund Qajar dynasty
onto its last march towards disintegration. This period was the
nadir of central power in a decaying and ineffective feudal-tribal
state. Sheykh Khaz'al
of Mohammerah (later renamed Khorramshahr), who was also the Vaali or
governor of the province, had become the most powerful provincial
governor
in the country, and only paid nominal allegiance to the Court and
rarely sent the agreed upon taxes and tributes to Tehran.
At the
time, the plains of Khuzestan
were a distant and forbidding territory to the rest of the country,
separated from the central plateau by the bulk of the Zagros mountain
range, itself populated
by unruly and 'wild' Kurd, Lur, Bakhtiari, Qashqai,
and Kuhgalu tribesmen. Traveling the 750km distance between Tehran
and Dezful, the province's
northernmost and largest city at the time routinely took several
weeks, and it was often safer to travel through Ottoman territory
(Tehran-Kermanshah-Baqdad-Basrah),
or sometimes through Russia and the sea route via Suez Canal (Tehran-Anzali-Baku-Black
sea-Suez Canal-Persian Gulf-Mohammerah) to reach that destination!
[33]
For Sheykh Khaz'al, the increasing presence of British merchants and
officials in the Persian Gulf and his territory presented an opportunity for
gaining protection and greater leverage from the central government. . Khaz'al
saw the formal agreement between Britain and Sheykh Mubarak al Sabbah, the
ruler of Kuwait, which put the latter under Britain's protection against
the Ottoman Empire, as an ideal model for his own relations with APOC and the
British government [34].
Both Khaz'al and the Bakhtiari Khans were seeking
similar agreements that would define and protect their autonomy as well perhaps
their eventual independence. Meanwhile, in 1908, the D'Arcy
concession discovered its first, phenomenally productive oil well
in Masjed Soleyman,
and event that dramatically changed the balance of forces throughout
the region. Shortly afterwards, the industrial cities of Abadan
and Masjed Soleyman rose
like Phoenix out of the hills and mud flats of Khuzestan.
In contradistinction to 'ordinary' cities, which tend to gradually
come together as diverse cultures and economic activities collect together
and complement each other, company towns are primarily founded on a much more
singular purpose: to satisfy the unavoidable needs of a labor force (for shelter
and reproduction) near locations where productive or natural resources owned
and exploited by the Company are situated.
Consequently, the role of workers
and the labor force in company towns is vital, both as agents of
production of surplus value and accumulation as well as the very
raison d'être
for the construction of a company town in the first place. In Khuzestan,
the Oil Company needed to attract its labor force to the region
from the very onset.
Skilled personnel and managers came from Europe, semi skilled and
security staff from India and the Caucasus, and the unskilled from
neighboring regions.
Industrial production demands a constellation of behaviors and
disciplines, which are not limited to mere familiarity with modern
machinery.
In the first place, the industrial labor force must become familiar
and
incorporate
time
discipline in its body and soul. As E.P.Thompson persuasively argued
in his classic essay on time discipline, the conception of time
in an agrarian
and
pre-industrial society, as Khuzestan certainly was in that period,
is the tempo of nature and agriculture. The rise and setting of
the Sun,
seasons' changing,
and even fluctuations in climate dictate the tempo of pre-industrial
life. Industrial time discipline, on the other hand, is imposed
by two factors: first,
the units of a clock, each of which is equal to the next and remains
unaffected by natural fluctuations. Second, the penetration of
markets and commercial
relations, and the increasing calculation of social interactions
and human needs by money [35].
The imposition of this industrial order of work and time discipline
were among the very first and most critical tasks of the Oil Company
in Khuzestan.
According
to Arnold Wilson, the British government's representative
in the region at the time, “Food is so cheap that the Oil
Company must, paradoxically, pay higher wages to get people to
work at all. Men's needs are few and
they are 'lazy'. In other words, their standard of
living includes a large element of leisure, and who shall blame
them?” [36].
Machine driven time discipline is the necessary basis of a complex
division of labor
and cooperation upon which the modern industrial order has been
founded. The other leg of this productive system stands on the
hierarchy that distinguishes
its various interrelated components from one another - such as
laborers, supervisors, managers, engineers, white collar staff,
and the unemployed - assigning to
each its specific place. The industrial system, coupled with a
market economy is fundamentally a class-based system. Consequently,
in the tribal and non-industrial
society of Khuzestan at the time the oil company had to, de facto,
forge these class relations and identities to replace the only
hierarchies that were in
place, between Khans, Sheykhs, peasants, and white beards [37].
In order to mold a raw and unskilled labor force into proper 'human capital' fit
to function in a modern advanced industry, it is necessary to first
separate it from its existing social and physical environment and
then to reshape it
like clay in the hands of a skilled sculptor, through various mechanisms
ranging from training, encouragement, seduction, to imposed new
material conditions,
disciplining, enforced insecurity and alienation [38]. In other
words, in a process similar to the formation of any other form
of capital, raw and unskilled
labor power needs a primary accumulation and investment of capital,
followed by continuous circulation, use, and maintenance, and reinvestment.
The ironic
paradox of the capitalist industrial order is, on the one hand,
in its need for a skilled and cheap labor force capable of operating
the expensive and
complex manufacturing machinery, which requires the coordination
and simultaneous collaboration of many, juxtaposed on the other
hand to the fact that the production
and maintenance of this cheap labor force itself is an expensive
undertaking, and requires heavy and continuous investments [39].
Consequently, the company
town, from the point of view of the company itself, is like a second
factory, built next to the main plant (oil wells and refineries
in our specific case
here), for the production of the other essential component of the
production process, namely labor power. The physical spaces of
company towns, as we shall
see later, are specifically designed with these goals in mind and,
therefore, are highly charged symbolically and ideologically.
After the 1857 Indian uprising against the East India Company,
the British government took charge of the Subcontinent and its
colonial
rule entered
a new phase of direct rule. One of the important instruments of
British colonial rule in India was the design, renovation, or outright
founding
of colonial
cities, such as Calcutta, Bombay, Simla, Madras, and New Delhi
[40]. At roughly the same period in the British Isles urban reforms
and
experimentations, together
with innovative housing provisions had come to rank among the highest
priorities
for philanthropies and social reformers, socialist politicians,
and farsighted industrialists. Suburbanization, blockhouse buildings,
new industrial
towns, and half implemented visionary schemes like Garden Cities
were changing
the
urban landscape of Britain.
Across the Atlantic American industrialists
as well as social engineers (architects, urban planners, social
scientists,
public health officials, concerned politicians, and other technocrats)
were
also impressed
by the bold and paternalistic design of Pullman Illinois and other
such experiments in top-down socio-spatial reforms. Across the
Channel, after
the unsettling
experiences of Haussmann's reshaping of Paris in the 1850's
and 60's, followed by the trauma of the Commune in the 1870's,
French social engineers
had a more constricted field for implementing their reformist and
experimental designs at home. Their most talented and ambitious
members were compelled to
flock to the colonies to give free rein to their ideas [41].
By 1914 innovations in urban design had become an accepted and
crucial instrument of urban reform and social engineering in the
capitalist
world and its dominions.
But APOC, a rather sober and tight fisted private commercial outfit,
partly owned by the Scotsmen of the Burma Oil Company, had little
inclinations for such ambitious undertakings. What it was first
and foremost interested
in
was to ensure and maintain its profit margins.
APOC has often been
accused of entertaining
colonialist designs, especially after its dispute with the nationalist
government of Mossadegh led to its direct confrontation with the
government of Iran and
the oil nationalization disputes, the embargo imposed on Iran by
the government
of Britain, and finally the 1953 Coup d'Etat. But the truth
of matter seems to be that APOC harbored little political appetite,
and that it at no
point was, wanted, nor could be another East India Company. In
Khuzestan APOC had discovered a goose that was generously laying
golden eggs for it. The dilemma
was to keep the goose going, by preventing it from getting more
restless or demanding. The awkward and heavy handed actions of
APOC over the four decades
it maintained a monopoly over the oil resources of Khuzestan should
be seen in that light.
Nevertheless, the company had no choice but to house its workers.
The choice of location for the founding of Abadan and Masjed Soleyman
was
dictated
by the logistics of technical needs of the industry - meaning the
extraction, transport, storage, refining, distribution, and export
of oil and its
derivatives - and not the social and environmental requirements
of the staff and the
workforce. These cities were built in isolated and rugged locales,
but eventually
this
geographic isolation itself became an important instrument for
separating the workforce from their previous physical and social
environments,
and for molding
and shaping them through mechanisms we shall describe later [42].
After the initial historical experience of constructing these
cities the
practice of
isolating company towns from existing centers of population became
a common and regular feature of this type of urban design everywhere
in
Iran.
As mentioned before, the practice of designing industrial
and company towns had, by the first quarter of the 20th century,
become
an
international professional occupation. Urban design specialists
had access to and
used their colleagues
and predecessors' experiences and theories through university education,
specialized journals and publications, multinational conferences, and competitive
international projects and commissions.
In the initial plans of Abadan and
Masjed Soleyman one can detect the traces of two different, but
complementary influences, i.e., industrial urban design in Europe
and America as well as
in the colonies. Consequently, from the onset Khuzestan's company towns
were 'dual cities' [43], in the sense that their original geographies
were designed so as to divide the city into several segregated spaces.
 To begin
with, there were the 'formal' and the 'informal' cities,
the former designed and constructed by the company and remained
under its maintenance and management, the latter growing side by
side with the formal town, and in
spite of the company's desires, by migrants, workers, and
dwellers attracted to the new city. The 'formal' company
town was further subdivided into strictly hierarchic and segregated
spaces, while the 'informal' city
was an amalgam of styles, cultures, and social groups.
This glaring
contradiction within and between these spaces -between the formal
and informal spaces, the
legal and subversive, the ordered and disciplined and the chaotic
and lively, rich and poor, modern and hybrid, controlled and
repressed and anarchic and
spontaneous - overtime came to define the character of these
company towns >>> Page
2
>>> Endnotes
About
Kaveh Ehsani is a member of the editorial board
of Goft-o-Gu quarterly
(Tehran). This paper first appeared in the International
Review of Social History (IRSH 48:2003, pp.361-399). Earlier
versions of this paper were presented
to Middle
East Studies Association, 1998, Chicago;
and
at the conference
on 'Iran: Social History from Below', at the International Institute
for Social History, Amsterdam, in 2001. A written version in
Persian was first published in Goft-o-Gu (No.25, 1999).
He would like to thank Touraj Atabaki, Norma Moruzzi, Setenyi
Shami, Morad Saghafi, Ahmad Maydari, and Kaveh Bayat for their
intellectual influence, comments, and friendship.
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