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Endnotes
Boom & bust
Social engineering and the contradictions of modernization in Khuzestan's oil company towns, Abadan and Masjed-Soleyman
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1] John Garner, The Model Company Town (Amherst, MA, 1984), pp.6-7

2] Lakewood, California is a special case as it was originally an area of orange groves, taken over by the aeronautics industry and converted into a company town suburb for McDonald Douglas, and eventually incorporated into the greater Los Angeles Metropolis in 1954. See Joan Didion, "Trouble in Lakewood", The New Yorker, (26 July 1993), pp.46-65

3] While it is true that the "paternalism" of classic company towns, such as Pullman, came under criticism even at the time the alternative social welfare models that replaced the rigid paternalist company control have tended to be presented as rational and benign in the more official literature.

4] These include the towns of Omidieh, Aqa Jari, Haftkel, Naft-e Sefid, Gachsaran, Lali, Naft Shahr

5] Many large public industries and institutions continue to build company towns where their employees reside. These include the railroads, petrochemicals, ports (Mahshahr), fisheries, aluminium, copper mines (Sarcheshmeh), Machine tools (Arak), agribusinesses (Dezful, Haft-Tappeh, Shirin Shahr), Steel (Mobarakeh), etc.

6] Of course Iran was never a formal colony. However, as I will attempt to demonstrate in the course of this essay, I believe my use of a number of insightful theoretical contributions of post-colonial theory are justified in the light of the near hegemonic control that Britain had over Southern Iran, especially in the first quarter of the 20th Century, and the subsequent influence of the discursive and institutional practices of Anglo Iranian Oil Company (AIPOC, renamed the Anglo Iranian Oil Company in 1935 (AIOC), and British Petroleum (BP) after 1954) on the technical and bureaucratic elite of Iran, at the provincial and even national levels.

7] Will Swearingen's analysis of the Moroccan agriculture first under French Protectorate, and later under national state direction shows this continuity in convincing detail. See Will Swearingen, Moroccan Mirage:, Agrarian Dreams and Deceptions, 1912-1986 (Princeton, NJ, 1987). The independent post-colonial state basically adopts the institutional, ideological, and practical approaches of the Colonial government with regard to its relation to the peasantry, landed elites, forms of property and property relations, and the adoption of appropriate technology. The strength of Swearingen's historical-geographic analysis lies in his acknowledging the importance of the political shift of power to a national state, while analyzing the important continuities. A national state elite drives its legitimacy and survival from a very different set of parameters and priorities than a colonial elite, being primarily responsive to the demands and expectations of its domestic population, rather than the metropole's. Nevertheless, there is a marked continuity in how 'development' is conceptualized, a fact that has as much to do with the rise and formation of modern professional elites as with the formation and integration of a national economy into a global capitalist system. Janet Abu-Lughod's classic study of the process or urbanization in pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial urbanization in Morocco compliments Swearingen's, while it is also more detailed and insightful about the material and political constraints facing the post-independence state. See Janet Abu Lughod, Rabbat: Urban Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, NJ, 1980)

Frederick Cooper throws light on this continuity by taking the historian's approach to the concept of 'development' itself. The 'development' concept posited that anyone, African subjects included could formulate and implement economic improvement and growth, given the right institutional structures and proper education. As such it gradually replaced the racially based ideologies that served to legitimize European rule and supremacy. Initially formulated as a strategy to save the British and French African colonies by making them both more productive as well as less restive and costly, the universalist concept of 'development' eventually served as an argument to let go of the colonies, while at the same time it was adopted as a progressive and necessary strategy by nationalist elites. See Frederick Cooper, "Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept", in Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard (eds), International Development and the Social Sciences, Berkeley, CA, 1997), pp.64-92.

8] 'Social engineering' was a term much in vogue in the pre-First World War era of scientific management, industrial welfare, and liberal state. See Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman's Paradise (New York and London, 1995), chapter 3, pp.46-60, and especially p.48. For further discussion see the introductory chapter, pp. 1-10.

9] The question of whether the modern professional intelligentsia, composed of technocrats, bureaucrats, and intellectuals is a 'status group', as Max Weber maintained, or are a distinct social class as Konrad and Szelenyi, and Alvin Gouldner among others have argued, is a complex and much debated topic that I do not wish to engage here because I find it to be a theoretical mine field that needs to be approached with care and in some detail. Marxists and 'Marxisant' intellectuals have also engaged this question extensively, from Lenin theorizing the role of a professional revolutionary vanguard acting through the party, through Gramsci's theory of an organic intelligentsia forming a historic block with other classes to counter the bourgeoisie's hegemony, through the later theories of middling classes, some influenced by historical and empirical experience, others by structuralism. See Max Weber, Economy and Society, 2 vols (Berkeley, CA, 1978), II, pp.956-1005; George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York, 1979), and "Intellectuals and Domination in Post-Communist Societies", in Pierre Bourdieu and James Coleman (eds), Social Theory for a Changing Society (Boulder, CO, 1991), pp. 337-72; Alvin Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York, 1979); Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (New York, 1971); Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (New York, 1974); David Noble, America by Design (New York, 1977); Pat Walker (ed), Between Labor and Capital (Boston, MA, 1979); James Weinstein, Corporate Ideal in a Liberal State (Boston, MA, 1968); Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (London, 1973).

My own argument is rather eclectic. I find sociological value in Gouldner's thesis of the intelligentsia as a unified, albeit heterogeneous group. But I think it is important to base the overall argument for the rise of a professional middle class/intelligentsia in strong historical argument. Such historical evidence will show since the early era of modern capitalism and nation-state formation there has been an ever more pronounced trend toward the greater professionalization of managerial skills in the larger sense of overseeing the reproduction of society against various internal threats, as well as its advancement (the strive for growth being inherent in competitive capitalism). See Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society; England since1880 (New York and London, 1989). For the profession that primarily concerns our argument here Benevolo traces the rise of the spatial planning profession, as an activity that strives to modify and correct the nefarious results of modernization and class struggle (between labor and capital, as well as between competing capitalists) to the early 19th Century. This is the period when "circumstances had crystallized sufficiently not only to cause the discomfort but also to provoke the protest of the people involved". See Leonardo Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning, (Cambridge, MA, 1967), p.32. John Friedmann, Planning in the Public Sphere ( Princeton, NJ, 1987), pp.51-310; presents a range of various approaches planning theory has adopted over the last two centuries. In addition to historical evidence and theoretical arguments for considering the emergence of a professional class I have also found great value in linking changes in material historical conditions with shifts in 'mentalities' and new discourse formations. Paul Rabinow's exploration of the formation of modern social management disciplines and discourses during the Third Republic in France also sheds light on how various forms of scientific theories combine with explicitly political practices, and become the means of drastic intervention and social engineering aimed at modernizing populations, be it colonized Morocco, or metropolitan France. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York, 1977); Paul Rabinow, The French Modern (Boston, MA, 1991).

10] APOC always maintained that it was a private commercial company, with no explicit political ambitions, although its scale, commercial dealings with the central government, and the shear fact of it being the single largest private and foreign industrial employer in the country inevitably made its presence rather sensitive to the local and national society. This is the general tone of the argument in the official history of the Company. See Ronald Ferrier, The History of the British Petroleum Company; Volume 1 (Cambridge, 1982); and J.H. Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company; Volume 2 (Cambridge, 1994). The British Government became the majority shareholder of the APOC in 1914. This was a strategic move, as both the fledgling company was facing financial difficulties in its early operations, and the British Navy was speeding up its conversion to oil from coal during the War. Despite substantial government ownership APOC continued to be run as a private concern. Nevertheless, the claims of its political impartiality are rather far fetched. For more balanced view see Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle (Syracuse, NY, 1992), and L.P. Elwell-Sutton, Persian Oil: A Study in Power Politics ( London, 1955). The strategic importance of oil to Britain and the Government's relation to the industry and producing countries can be found in Marian Kent, Oil and Empire (London, 1976); a study dealing primarily with Iraq; S.H. Longrigg, Oil in the Middle East: Its discovery and Development, 3rd edition (London, 1967); and Geoffrey Jones, The State and the Emergence of British Oil Industry (London, 1981).

11] See Mostafa Elm, Oil, Power, and Principle , and L.P. Elwell-Sutton Persian Oil: A Study in Power Politics.

12] My intention here is not to equate the independent national state with the colonial state, but rather to draw attention to both striking continuities and similarities often found in their style of rule and relation to the population, as well as the fundamental imbalance of power between the local society and the central power. These imbalances often can take the form of an internal colonial relationship. For the discussion of this concept see Christian Rogerson, "Internal Colonialism, Transnationalization, and Spatial Inequality", South African Geographical Journal, 62:2 (1980), pp. 103-20; Stephen Williams, "Internal Colonialism, Core Periphery Contrasts and Devolution: An Integrative Comment", Area, 9:4 (1977), pp.272-79; John Lovering, The Theory of the 'Internal Colony' and the Political Economy of Wales", Review of Radical Political Economy, 10:3 (1978), pp. 57-67. Two classic studies of the two oldest modern nation-states use the concept of internal colonialism to describe the forceful integration of Britain and France's rural and ethnic fringe and populations into the national polity. See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536-1966 (Berkeley, CA, 1975); and Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914 (Stanford, CA, 1976).

13] See Hossein Mahdavi, "the patterns and problems of economic development in rentier states", in M.A.Cook (ed), Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East (London, 1970). The gist of Mahdavi's argument was that the relative financial autonomy these states enjoy from their societies as a result of their oil revenues also translates into a related political autonomy of the state from society. Petroleum products are exported abroad and the subsequent income comes from the world market. The oil industry itself employs but a tiny segment of the labor force, and consequently has negligible linkages of any kind to the other integrated productive sectors of the national economy. Oil revenues, like a rent, are directly transferred from the foreign purchaser into the Treasury, and are then distributed according to the whims and choices of the state.

The relationship of the state to society is fundamentally distorted and uneven as a result of the origins of its financial revenues and the special place it comes to occupy within the national economy. According to this theory the relation between state and society are 'normal' and 'natural' only when the source of state income is direct taxation of the citizens' income. State revenue in that case, would be generated from the produced wealth of the nation itself, instead of being a 'rent' derived without significant productive activity, but from monopoly ownership of a strategic resource. This 'normal' relationship obligates the state to be accountable to society and to citizens, as its role is merely the redistribution of wealth resulting from social production. Echoing de Tocqueville the argument goes on to argue that civil society would democratically impose its own claims upon state expenditures and investments through legislative and political institutions, as they are a share of the collectively produced social wealth.

In contradistinction, in a rentier state, where the state's financial revenues are not organically linked to national productive economy, the state becomes the powerful, authoritarian and paternalist distributor of seemingly windfall revenues without being compelled to account for its decisions to society. Deprived of an important economic aspect of its dialectical relationship to the state, the society becomes fragmented into clientelist interest groups, competing to obtain greater shares of the 'rent' distributed by the state. The State, on the other hand, co-opts these groups by selectively distributing resources among them, in exchange for their political passivity and support. Rentier states, in other words are inherently undemocratic, made of a passively apolitical society and an authoritarian state.

14] Two of the most important re-assessments of both the rentier state theory as well as oil-producing economies and societies can be found in Kiren Aziz Chaudhry, The Price of Wealth: Economies and Institutions in the Middle East (Ithaca, NY, 1997); and Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Boom sand Petro-States (Berkeley, CA, 1997).

15] For a discussion of Norway and its social and geographic dealings with its oil industry see Jens Hansen, "Regional Policy in an Oil Economy: The Case of Norway" Geoforum, 14 (1983), pp.353-61; and Terry Lynn Karl, The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Boomsand Petro-States, pp. 213-21. Terry Karl argues that the difference of Norway lies in the fact that nation-state formation had taken place prior to the spectacular rise in oil revenues of the late 20th Century.

16] Giacomo Lucciani probably goes further than most in reducing the possibility of social change in societies ruled by rentier states to the occurrence of a serious financial crisis. Apparently his exclusive focus on Arab states allows him to overlook the uncomfortable example of Iran. The 1979 Revolution did occur simultaneously with high inflation, but this economic crisis could not be taken as the cause, nor as the primary trigger of the events that toppled the Monarchy. The continued economic crisis of oil producing states has not brought about any political challenges elsewhere in the Middle East, any more than it has in other developing countries in the pattern than John Walton has called "Bread Riots'. See Giacommo Lucciani, "Allocation vs. Production States: A Theoretical Framework", in G. Lucciani (ed.), The Arab State (Berkeley, CA, 1990), pp.65-84; and "The Oil Rent, the Fiscal Crisis of the State and democratization", in Ghassan Salame (ed.), Democracy Without Democrats? The Renewal of Politics in the Muslim World (London, 1994), pp.130-55

Theda Skocpol in an attempt to test her comparative theory of social revolutions to the Iranian case came to the conclusion that it did not quite fit her model. She then used the 'rentier state' theory to explain the dynamic of state and society relation and further claims that 'traditional' Shi'a Islam had been able to maintain an autonomous space away from the modernization and the modernity that had otherwise transformed the Iranian society. This marginalization and autonomy allowed this traditional Islam to revolt against the Rentier State when the time came. Theda Skocpol, Social Revolutions in the Modern World (Cambridge and New York, 1994), pp.240-58 (1982).

What is common to both these approaches is that the motives leading to popular protest and revolt are not sought within society itself, and all the contradictions and social protests, including political Islam, that capitalist modernization stirs up. Instead, the root causes of social crisis are found in ahistorical or even external factors, such as an 'Islam' that has remained unaffected and somehow 'pure' in spite of decades of profound social change. Edward Said's work convincingly showed how Orientalism tried to locate an unchanging essence in the Middle Eastern societies, to explain their deviation from the norm, the norm being the capitalist modernization as experienced in the Western world. See Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York, 1979). It seems that many of the proponents of the rentier state theory have merely 'secularized' the orientalist discourse: instead of 'Islam' being the key cultural factor explaining the essential un-modernity of the Middle East, an economic factor, oil revenues, is advanced to prove the same point!

17] See Ronald Ferrier, "The Iranian Oil Industry", in The Cambridge History of Iran, volume 7 (Cambridge, 1991), pp.639-704, 692; J.H. Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company; Volume 2 ; and Fred Halliday, Iran: Dictatorship and Development (London, 1978), p.177

18] Mohammad Sodagar, Roshd-e Ravabet-e Sarmayedari dar Iran (n.p., n.d), p.322

19] Ebrahim Razaqi, Eqtesad-e Iran (Tehran, 1988), p.384

20] See Assef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran (London, 1987)

21] This was one of the first instances when the working employees of a developing country succeeded in coordinating independent decisions about running and managing an advanced and strategic global industry. The complex political and psychological impact of this experience comes across in Terisa Turner's "Iranian Oil Workers in the 1978-79 Revolution", and in an oil worker's first hand account of this historic strike both in Peter Nore and Terisa Turner, Oil and Class Struggle (London,1980), pp. 272-302; as well as in Assef Bayat's Workers and Revolution in Iran . However, in the increasingly repressive aftermath of the Revolution, and with the beginning of the Iran-Iraq war the persecution, emigration or flight into exile of large numbers of technical personnel, added to the extensive war damage and lack of proper capital investments caused serious technical damage to oil facilities and wells. See F.Fesharaki's "Iran's Petroleum Policy: How Does the Oil Industry Function in Revolutionary Iran?", in Haleh Afshar (ed.), Iran, A Revolution in Turmoil (Albany, NY,1985), pp.99-117, and Javad Salehi-Esfahani's "The Oil Sector After the Revolution", in Saeed Rahnema and Sohrab Behdad (eds.), Iran after the Revolution (London, 1996), pp.150-74

22] In the period right before and some time after the Revolution an interesting shift occurs in the published studies and analyses of the oil industry in Iran. In the period of political upheaval most of the research conducted or published is focused on the political role of the oil workers, their organizations and institutions, their various political affiliations, and their relations to existing and competing political forces outside their own group. The work of Ervand Abrahimian, Fred Halliday, Mansoor Moaddell, Assef Bayat, and Farhad Khosrokhavar (although the latter's work is about machining workers in Hamedan) fall into this category. In the period after the Revolution gradually this focus on social agency disappears and is replaced with purely economic and functionalist studies of the oil 'sector'. I do not know of any accounts or analysis of social actors, or of the social and political relations of production within the oil industry in the period after early 1980's.

23] See Ferrier, The History of the British Petroleum Company; Volume 1; Ludwig W. Adamec, Historical Gazeteer of Iran; Volume 3: Abadan and Southwestern Iran (Graz, 1989); and Mostafa Ansari, "History of Khuzistan, 1878-1925, A study in Provincial Autonomy and Change" (PhD, University of Chicago, 1976)

24] See Ian Seccombe and Richard Lawless, Work Camps and Company Towns: Settlement Patterns and the Gulf Oil Industry (Durham, 1987), and "The Impact of Oil Industry on Urbanization in the Persian Gulf Region", in H. Amirahmadi and S. el Shakhs (eds.), Urban Development in the Muslim World (Rutgers, NJ, 1993), pp.183-212; Ervand Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions (Princeton,1982); and L.P. Elwell-Sutton Persian Oil: A Study in Power Politics.

25] The Main sources I have relied on for understanding the comparative aspects of the company town experience in the West, and how the practice of designing industrial towns took shape, evolved, and was replicated in various locations are John Garner (ed.), The Company Town ( New York, 1992); and John Garner, The Model Company Town; Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman's Paradise; James Allen, The Company Town in the American West (Norman, OK,1966); ManuelCastells, The City and Grassroots (Berkeley, CA,1983), Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power (Berkeley, CA, 1991), Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, (London,1985); Anthony Sutcliffe, The Rise of Modern Urban Planning (New York, 1981); Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream (Boston, MA, 1981)

26] See Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London, 1979); especially chapter 3 (pp.151-213). This is of course the period that Fordism takes shape. One of the criticisms leveled against regulationist school is that its view of fundamental shifts in modes of regulation and regimes of accumulation overlooks the basic unity and continuity of capitalist relations of production. Capitalism has displayed the ability to adjust to successive crises it generates, while remaining fundamentally the same. Furthermore, capitalism's flexibility allows the survival and continuity of various modes and relations of production within the same social formation, as long as they are subjected to the market's hegemony. This criticism notwithstanding, I think the period beginning at the last quarter of the 19th Century and ending with the Second World War does mark a fundamental historic watershed. For a brilliant summary see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (New York, 1987). In the case of Khuzestan this is a period when the modern nation state is formed in Iran, marking a definite historic break within national and provincial history.

27] Urban conditions in 19th century industrial cities are the topic of Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Chicago, IL, 1984) classic study of Manchester. The fear of threatening urban crowds and the rising movement for reform is brilliantly discussed in the case of London by Gareth Stedman-Jones, Outcast London (New York,1984). For comparative looks at France, Germany, and US in this period see Michelle Perrot (ed.), A History of Private Life; Volume 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1990); Hall, Cities of Tomorrow; Sutcliffe, Towrads the Planned City; John Burnett, A Social History of Housing; 1815-1985, 2nd edition (London, 1986), Wright, Building the Dream; Rabinow, The French Modern; and Benevollo, Origins of Modern Town Planning. Colonial cities at the same period were being used as laboratories of social engineering, and their destiny cannot be seen as separate from Metropolitan experience. See Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago, 1991); Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations (Berkeley, CA, 1997); Mariam Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities (Delhi etc., 1991); Anthony King, Colonial Urban Development (London, 1976). Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution (Boston, MA, 1981), a brilliant classic, discusses the repercussions of these social changes and the reformist movement on gender relations and on domestic space.

28] See Crawford, Building the Workingman's Paradise; Garner, The Model Company Town; and Wright, Building the Dream. The idea of welfare was by no means limited to company towns, but a cornerstone of the rising social reform movement that affected the types of social responsibility for general welfare that the state was willing to undertake. This led to a massive expansion of the state sector in the major western nation states. See Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power; Volume 2 (Cambridge etc., 1993), p.363; for a sense of the scale of the expansion of the bureaucracy and state functionaries in these five decades.

The theories and practical experiences of the so-called Utopian Socialists of the early 19th Century was an important influence on the reformers of the last years of the Century. In retrospect Marx and Engels' critique of these early reformers as 'utopian' seems justified. Owen, St Simon, Fourrier, or their followers had used the vast expanses of North America for creating experimental communities of the future. However, after the end of the American Civil War the conquest of the rest of this continent by immigrants and Eastern States' industrial capital begins in earnest and none of these communities manage to survive the wave that eventually integrates the national space and population. See Carl Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative, (Ithaca, 1991). This was even the case for very isolationist religious communities, such as the Mormons, as argued by Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire (New York and Oxford, 1985), pp.74-82. Despite the disappearance of socialist urban experiences many of their mottoes and practices, such as the ethos of hard and collective work, the primacy of collective over the personal interest, and the collective right to equality and welfare, reappeared in the praxis and discourse of social reformers and especially urban planners of the turn of the century, such as Geodes, Ebenezer Howard, Lyautey, etc. On this connection see especially Roger-Henri Guerrand "Private Spaces", in Perrot, A History of Private Life, pp.359-450; Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution; Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1981); Hall, Cities of Tomorrow; and Benevollo, Origins of Modern Town Planning.

29] See footnote 9, above.

30] On this point see Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations; Wright, The Politics of Design; and Rabinow, The French Modern.

31] See Institut D'Etudes et de Recherches Sociales (IERS), "Abadan : Morphologie et Fonction du Tissu Urbain", Revue Geographique de L'Est, No. 4 (1964), pp.337-86, and " Abadan : Tissu Urbain, Attitudes et Valeurs", Revue Geographique de L'Est, No.3/4(1969), pp.361-78. The team that conducted these brilliant and insightful studies comprised of Paul Vieille, Abolhassan Banisadr, later the first elected president of the Islamic Republic who had to escape into exile in 1982, and Zafardokht Ardalan. See also Seccombe and Lawless, Work Camps and Company Towns, and "The Impact of Oil Industry on Urbanization; Bamberg, History of the British Petroleum Company, volume 2; Ferrier, History of the British Petroleum Company, volume 1; and Xavier de Planhol, "Abadan", in Ehsan Yarshater (ed.), Encyclopedia Iranica, (Los Angeles, 1990). I came across Mark Crinson, "Abadan: Planning and Architecture Under Anglo-Iranian Oil Company", Planning Perspectives, 12 (1997), pp.341-59; only very recently. His research and conclusions parallel many aspects of my own, primarily because he is the first to systematically use the BP archives for his research. On Masjed Soleyman see the excellent essay by Kamal Athari, "Masjed Soleyman; sherkat-shahri madaniat-yafteh", Ettelaat-e Siasi Eqtesadi, No.47/48 (1991), pp. 65-69. There is in addition Danesh Abbasi Shahni, Tarikh-e Masjed-Soleyman (Tehran,1995); a local history of Masjed Soleyman, substantial parts of which are quotations without reference to works of others, including the aforementioned article by Kamal Athari.

32] On Khuzestan in this period see Ahmad Kasravi, Tarikh-e Pansad-Saleh Khuzestan (Tehran, 1934), and Zendegani-ye Man (Tehran, 1946); Ansari, History of Khuzistan; Adamec, Historical Gazeteer of Iran; Arnold Wilson, Southwest Persia: A Political Officer's Diary, 1907-14 (London, 1941); and Sir Henry Layard, Early Adventures in Persia, Susiana, and Babylon (London, 1971(1894))

33] For more detailed information about travel time and distances see Haj Abdolghaffar Najmel Molk, Safarname-ye Khuzestan (Tehran,1984 (circa 1872) ; Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Iran, 1800-1914 (Chicago, 1971); Ahmad Kasravi, Zendegani-ye Man ; Abrahimian, Iran Between Two Revolutions.

34] See William Strunk, "Britain, Persia, and Shaykh Khaz'al: The Genesis of a Special Relationship", in Roger Olson (ed.), Islamic and Middle Eastern Societies, (Brattleborough, VT, 1987), pp.152-71; Ansari, History of Khuzistan; Wilson, Southwest Persia; George Lenckowski, "Foreign Powers' Intervention in Iran During World War One", in C. Bosworth and C. Hillenbrandt (eds), Qajar Iran (Edinburgh, 1983), pp.76-92.

35] On the critical importance of time discipline and temporal coordination in the modern social life under capitalism see especially Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (London, 1976); and the seminal essay by E.P. Thompson, "Time, Work Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism", in his Customs in Common (New York, 1993 (1967)), pp.352-403. Nigel Thrift, Spatial Formations (London etc.,1996), pp.169-212, questions Thompson's main point that modern time discipline is inherently linked to industrialization, without convincingly overturning Thompson's main argument about the fundamental modernity of the new time discipline and its links with capitalism. This point is also demonstrated from a non-marxist perspective by Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge, MA, 1983). Without the establishment of unified and standard units of time the complex, modern, and highly coordinated social life is impossible. Georg Simmel made the brilliant point in his essay on "The Metropolis and Mental Life", in Philip Kasinitz (ed.), Metropolis; Center and Symbol of our Times (New York, 1995 (1903)), pp. 30-45. Practically all interconnected aspects of modern life, from traffic lights to the simultaneous appearance of all employees at their work place every day, need to be subjected to the global central hegemony of the Greenwich Mean Time. This does not mean that resistance to the time regime, or competition by alternative time disciplines (the religious time of Muslim rituals, for example) is not exercised.

36] Wilson, Southwest Persia, p.140.

37] Shahni, Tarikh-e Masjed-Soleyman.

38] The close connection between modernity and the transformation not only of material conditions, social imaginaires and discourses, but also of individual bodies and souls, is the subject of the work of Foucault, Discipline and Punish.

39] Company towns are tremendously costly affairs to build and maintain. See Crawford, Building the Workingman's Paradise. Information is rarely available on the topic, but Kamal Athari, Masjed-Soleyman, p. 65-66, presents one of the rare balance sheets on the topic: The copper mine company town of Sar Cheshmeh in the central province of Kerman was built for 2500 households, with a total population of 12,000 at the cost of 160 billion Rials (in 1991 Rials). This figure exceeds the total state development budget for the entire housing sector during the 1989-1993 five-year plan (15.6 billion Rials), or the urban development budget for the same period (101 billion Rials), or the public mining sector (121.7 billion Rials).

40] On New Delhi see King, Colonial Urban Development; Robert Grant Irving, Indian Summer (New Haven, CT, 1981); and Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision (Berkeley, CA, 1989). On Bombay see Dossal, Imperial Designs and Indian Realities. LawrenceVale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity (New Haven, CT, 1992); offers an important comparative perspective by showing how the production of planned symbolic space in various capital cities is connected to the self-perception of nation states and their ruling political elites.

41] See Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations; Wright, Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism; and Rabinow, The French Modern.

42] A classic instance is Worcester Massachusetts. According to Margaret Crawford this is the first 'modern' (Post paternalist) company town in the U.S., built by the Norton Company after the fiasco of the Pullman strike. Norton Co. attempted to create a layer of dependable skilled laborers who would consider themselves 'middle class' through home ownership. What Crawford's otherwise excellent account misses is the geographic isolation of the city. Although the third largest city in Massachusetts and located between Springfield and Boston, Worcester is not directly placed on any major road or highway linking these other major cities. At the time, the relative isolation of this industrial city was a deliberate act on the part of its corporate elites and political leaders. My gratitude to the late Professor Romeo Moruzzi for this information. On Worcester's historic geography and the politics of gender and industrial organization see Susan Hanson and Geraldine Pratt, Gender, Work, and Space (London and New York, 1995). Geographic location in isolated population centers is today, as much as before, a key strategic ploy of capitalist corporations in the U.S. See John Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes; The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley, CA, 1987); and Brian Palmer, Goodyear Invades the Backcountry (New York, 1994).

43] I have taken the expression 'dual city' from Janet Abu-Lughod, Urban Apartheid, a classic study of the politics of place in colonial and post-colonial Rabbat. Although I think Peter Marcuse's criticism of the concept as too reductive is well taken but I think the particular case of these company towns, under foreign ownership and management, with a population seen as either homogeneously 'native' or 'European' warrants the use of the term. See Peter Marcuse, "Dual City: A Muddy Metaphor for a Quartered City", International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 13 (1989), pp.697-708

44] This pattern has been practiced in both colonial settings as well as in company towns in the West. Boleslaw Domanski, Industrial Control over the Socialist Town (Westport, CT, 1997) shows that this practice is equally applied in 'socialist' company towns. On the importance of creating distinctions in modern class society see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (Cambridge and London, 1984).

45] Obviously not even all skilled personnel or staff, let alone the tens of thousands of unskilled workers had access to Company housing or services. Housing crisis and shortages of amenities and services long remained a major concern of the Company as well as the Municipality, as well as a bone of contention between them and between the Company and the Central Government. The rapid and substantial growth of the informal sections of Abadan and Masjed Soleyman were the result of these shortages, and the only practical solution for it as far as the Company was concerned. Nevertheless, the 'ideal type' company house and services as a realistic and achievable goal was used as an important motivation to encourage both worker and employee loyalty as well as to stir up competition among the employees and workers.

46] See Pierre Bourdieu, Le Sens Pratique, (Paris,1980); and Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley, CA,1988)

47] de Planhol, Abadan.

48] As Zeynep Çelik shows in the case of Algiers, French architects and planners working toward re-organizing the city's space and providing housing for the population also claimed to respect local architecture and cultural values, especially with regard to private space, while in fact a major unrecognized aspect of their work was to modernize the urban population and to dominate them. See Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations.

49] On the key role of the family under capitalism and in modern society see Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families (Baltimore, MD, 1979): and David Harvey, Limits to Capital (Chicago,1982). On the key role of regulating family space as a strategy to integrate the family into market sphere see Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream (New York, 1984), and The Grand Domestic Revolution; and Perrot, A History of Private Life.

50] Extended family can include several generations and several brothers. In Khuzestan the historic pattern of domestic space for this type of household has been several rooms built around a central courtyard. This flexible model allows new couples to move into a separate room, or to build a new room, space permitting. The domestic architecture of company towns, build for nuclear families, consists of one or several rooms, all built under the same roof. This lack of spatial flexibility implies that only the parents and children (of limited numbers) can occupy the house. See Kaveh Ehsani and Mohammad Reza Pourparviz, "Revolution and War in Ramhormoz: Evaluation of an experience", Goft-o-Gu, No.25 (1999), pp. 95-120; and Grace Goodell, Elementary Structures of Political Life (Oxford and New York, 1986).

51] For the case Sugar cane plantation in Haft Tappeh see Ministry of Agriculture,Tarhe eskane karkonane vahedha-ye haftgane-ye tarhe tose'e-ye neyshekar va snaye-e janebi, (Tehran, 1990). On Dezful's agribusiness towns see Goodell, Elementary Structures of Political Life. On planned industrial townships in Iran see Azam Khatam "Molahezat-e Ejtema-yi dar Makan-yabi va Ehdas-e Shahrha-ye San'ati", Ettelaat Siasi-Eqtesadi, No.53/54 (1992), pp.59-60. Khatam's research is based on fieldwork and interviews with many residents of several company towns in Khuzestan, Arak, and Isfahan. See also J.Varesi, Ministry of Housing and Urbanism, Do negaresh be sakht-e do no-shahr dar shahrha-ye jadid-e Iran", (Tehran, 1994).

52] On the historical morphology of cities on the Iranian Plateau see Massoud Kheirabadi, Iranian Cities (Austin, 1991); and Michael Bonine, 1980. Yazd and its Hinterland, Marburger Geographische Schriften, Heft 83 (1980), and "Morphogenesis of Iranian Cities", Annals of Association of American Geographers, 69 (1979), pp.208-24

53] See (IERS), Abadan : Morphologie et Fonction du Tissu Urbain, and Abadan : Tissu Urbain, Attitudes et Valeurs.

54] Shahni, , Tarikh-e Masjed-Soleyman, pp.349-50)

55] I follow Jane Jacobs' notion of public space here, as collective space owned neither privately, nor by the state. The importance of public space lies in the fact that it equally 'belongs' to all citizens, regardless of social distinctions of class, race, or gender, who can use and be present within it simultaneously. Public space can provide the physical arena for practical experience of common urban identity, itself the basis of collective citizenship. As such, public space is an integral part of 'civil society'. See Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1961).

The public space in Khuzestan's company towns cannot be considered as genuinely 'public', as they were owned and controlled by the Company. If urban life in these towns broke out of the rigid straightjacket of company control it was due to the formation of autonomous and truly public spaces within the informal sectors of the city. On the subversive power of un-incorporated spaces and populations see the brilliant essay by Frederick Cooper, "Urban Space, Industrial Time, and Wage Labor in Africa", in Frederick Cooper (ed.), Struggle for the City (Beverly Hills, CA, 1983), pp.1-50.

56] Kamal Athari, Masjed-Soleyman, p.67

57] ibid.

58] Pierre Bourdieu and Abdelmalek Sayad, Le Deracinement (Paris, 1964). For example, Berbers managed to maintain their ties to their places of origin, even when working as migrant workers in France. These ties allowed them to create stronger solidarity and support networks in France itself, which gave them a better standard of living, better pay, and more security. Asghar Karimi and Jean Pierre Digard make a similar argument for Bakhtiari nomads in Iran, when the central state was forcefully trying to settle the tribes in the 1930's. See their "Les Baxtyari sous influence Occidental; Acculturation et Déculturation", in Yann Richard (ed.), Entre L'Iran et L'Occident; Adaptation et assimilation des idées et téchniques occidental en Iran (Paris, 1989), pp. 105-16.

59] Goodell, Elementary Structures of Political Life.

60] See Kaveh Ehsani, . "Bohran-e Ab, Bohran-e Abadan", Goft-o-Gu, no.27 (2000), pp.162-72.

61] Shahni, Tarikh-e Masjed-Soleyman, p.345.

62] "Special Section: The Future Without Oil: Today's Masjed Soleyman [is] Tomorrow's Iran Without Oil", Iran-e Farda, No.50 (1999). It seems that both positions adopted by this important political journal (now banned) about an economy without oil being the ideal solution for correcting the distortions of rentier state, as well as a fearsome threat and specter of a poverty stricken future are rather exaggerated.

63] Bernard Hourcade and Farhad Khosrokhavar, "L'Habitat Revolutionnaire: Téheran 1979-1981", Hérodote, No.31 (1983), pp.62-83; Asef Bayat, Street Politics (Cairo and New York, 1998) are among the most insightful studies of urban change in post-revolution Iran. For a detailed study of the revolution and war-related transformations at a local provincial level in Khuzestan see Ehsani and Pourparviz, Ramhormuz in revolution and war.
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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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