‘Abadan — the Fruit of British Industry that Persia Covets.’ Illustrated London News, 8 September 1951. Cited in Damluji, 2013. 

The Rise and Fall of An Oil City: A Sociological (Hi)story of Abadan

By Ahmadreza Hakiminejad and Mahsa Alami Fariman 

 

Synopsis

In 1909, the London-based Anglo-Persian Oil Company was born and by 1912, the liquid began to flow in the pipeline from the oil fields of Masjed Soleyman to what was yet to become the world’s largest oil refinery on the desert island of Abadan; putting a deprived Iranian village on the map. In this paper, we tend to depict a contested sociological portrayal of the oil city of Abadan, through literature, poetry, film, oral history and archival methods. This piece aims to tell a social (hi)story of ‘the oil town’ from its colonial past to its post-revolutionary present. 

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This work was presented as part the panel 'Histories of Oil Cities' in Petrocultures 2024: Oil Cities and Post-Oil Cities at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, US, 15-18 May 2024.

The conference program can be found here.