Political Geographies of Iraqi Oil
The colonized world witnessed a pivotal moment in British foreign policy after the First World War when the U.S. President Woodrow Wilson espoused the principle of self-determination in his infamous fourteen points declaration. Despite initial resistance to the notion that the language of self-determination could apply to its colonies, Britain was eventually pushed to morph its longstanding doctrine of direct colonial rule into a paternalistic posture of indirect rule, fostering so-called developing countries and colonies towards independence.
The era of naked British imperialism, epitomized by its colonial policy of direct rule in India, was collapsing. Britain’s imperial claims to the resource rich and formerly Ottoman provinces in Palestine and Iraq were defined as “mandates” rather than “colonies". At the outset of World War II the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued the Atlantic Charter in 1941 as a framework for more equitable objectives in postwar geo-politics. The Charter codified eight principles, including respect of all peoples’ right to self-government and a condemnation of territorial aggrandizement, which reinforced the fundamental shift in the language of imperialism.
The emergence of the public relations profession and rise of corporate power became the primary way in which British imperialism translated into the postwar geo-political world map. The Iraq Petroleum Company and its public relations office was thus an active player in the production of a neo-colonial discourse on oil.