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Urban Sights: Urban History and Visual Culture

Political Geographies of Iraqi Oil

The dominance of British oil concessions encircling the Gulf region by the mid-twentieth century cannot be understood apart from the map of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that emerged after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Britain and France divided the region into territories of influence and control, shaping the modern map of nation-states that exists until today. The geography of the borders and concessions negotiated by western states and petroleum companies after the First World War undergirds any understanding of the history of Iraqi oil and its representations.

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.

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Introduction No sector of society made more enthusiastic use of the sponsored film than the oil companies; no medium was more enthusiastically embraced by them than the documentary film, and so nobody interested in the relationship of media to society can afford to leave the post-war oil documentary out of its history.
-- Patrick Russell, Shadows of Progress: Documentary Film in Post-War Britain

Summoning the popularity and prestige of cinema, the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) invented the image of Baghdad for Iraqi audiences as the sight/site of oil modernity in the 1950s. In other words, oil urbanization, or the modernization of the city as shaped by the petroleum industry and its revenues, in Iraq cannot be understood apart from the representation of Baghdad as visible evidence of petroleum’s promise to benefit the national population. The British-controlled oil company in Iraq produced a program of at least two-dozen sponsored films and cine-magazine episodes between 1951 and 1958, which this essay examines as an emblematic case of neo-colonial film, constituting an archive of media practices that bridge the categories of colonial film on one hand, and industrial film on the other.
After the Second World War, the Atlantic Charter reinforced the right to democratic self-rule as a global norm and the British state developed creative tactics to abet its continued control over strategic resources in its colonized territories. Oil above all became central to this story and, as this essay will show, British oil companies played a fundamental role towards reinventing the imperial project in the postcolonial context of Iraq. Through a contextualized analysis of the IPC films, I argue that the company public relations office utilized the conventional approaches and standard formats of colonial and industrial film – including montage, scripted voiceover, and staged b-roll – to narrativize the association between neo-colonialist practices of oil extraction and national development as causal, inherent, and positive. Following the invention of still and moving image technologies, industrial operations the world over have entailed the systematic production of massive image archives. Indeed, these corporate image worlds should not be dismissed as a subordinate function of industry, but rather recognized as a primary dimension of company operations. During the early twentieth century, as I show elsewhere, the petroleum industry in particular not only used film technologies for internal company needs, but also institutionalized new networks of production and distribution that were chiefly responsible for globalizing the British documentary film movement after World War II. At its peak in the 1950s, the IPC’s public relations media strategy included the bilingual production of annual reports and monthly periodicals, as well as in-house units for documentary photography and film. This IPC Medienverbund served as a critical discursive dimension of the postcolonial landscape of oil extraction in Iraq after World War II. As we know from Melanie McAlister’s analysis of the relationship between culture and foreign policy in the United States, cultural texts do not simply “reflect” or “reproduce” existing social realities but are “active producers of meaning” situated in precise historical contexts. Thus, this essay aims to better understand how oil companies used film, and more specifically cinematic representations of the modern city, as a strategic aspect of the neocolonial British project to control oil in the Middle East after the Second World War. In particular, this essay shows how its prestige films and cine-magazine worked to legitimate political acts of foreign exploitation and control of Iraqi oil, land, and labor from 1951 to 1958 within a regional context of mounting anti-imperialist discourse and nationalist movement building. The IPC films were the first moving images of modern Baghdad to be shot on location and circulated widely among general audiences in Britain and, more significantly, to upward of one-third of the Iraqi population. This essay focuses on an historical and visual analysis of a selection of the known IPC sponsored film titles that were produced and distributed prior to the 1958 July Revolution that diminished Britain’s hegemony in Iraq. Since no comprehensive archive of IPC films exists today, this essay introduces ttwo films among the limited number that have been conserved and made available in the archives of the British Film Institute, British Petroleum Video Library, British Pathe and personal collections of former IPC employees. From this small but significant sample, this essay determines that, irrespective of IPC's distinct approaches to production, an underlying set of objectives remained consistent throughout the oil company’s film use: to naturalize the neo-colonial practice of oil extraction, to render the British-controlled IPC invisible in the story of Iraqi oil, and to define oil wealth as a promise of postcolonial urban modernity.

Next - Oil Films in Context

All Sections
1. Introduction
2. Oil Films in Context
3. The Iraq Petroleum Company Medienverbund
4. Iraq's First Public Relations Picture
5. Iraqis Behind the Camera
6. Conclusion

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Sykes-Picot Agreement