Reconciling Memory and History in Abadan, Iran
Oil, it goes without saying, has played a central role in the modern history of Iran. And nowhere more so than in Abadan, the ancient city that mushroomed into a de facto company town under control of the Anglo Persian Oil Company following discovery of oil in southwest Iran by the British in the early twentieth century.
Like other company and colonial towns of its era, the design of Abadan under APOC and its successors served to maximize profits by controlling labor, in part by exploiting racial and ethnic differences. The result was a place deeply inscribed by inequality.
And yet while exploring Abadan’s past by collecting oral histories of employees and children of employees of the oil company, I was surprised to find that many residents, past and present, felt positively about its landscape and operation, and grateful for what it provided them and their community. How can the injustices of semi-colonial subjugation be reconciled with these warm feelings?
Figure 1. Screenshot of British Petroleum’s webpage Our History, First oil – 1901-1908, on BP.com, with photograph of the first commercial discovery well at Masjed Soleyman, where a large oil reserve was found in May 1908. British Petroleum, or BP, is a successor firm to the Anglo Persian Oil Company. Accessed May 12, 2023.
Oil was first discovered in the region in Masjed Soleyman in 1908, by the D’Arcy Oil Concession (Figure 1). Although Persia (renamed Iran in 1935), was never a British colony, the British maintained a huge presence there by the mid-nineteenth century. The new APOC soon built a pipeline linking Masjed Soleyman with Abadan, 200 km to the southwest near the Persian Gulf, along with a refinery. Abadan quickly transformed from a sparsely populated rural outpost into a modern oil boomtown (Figure 2).
Under the influence of the company, the town’s organization reflected the British ideologies of discrimination, hierarchy, and domination that it had pioneered nearly a century earlier, in its plan for Singapore. To the west of the refinery, upwind from its strong odors and polluting gases, the company built Braim, an enclave for higher-ranking British employees, with well-equipped bungalows and modern infrastructure, services, and facilities. Downwind of the refinery, to the east, sat old Abadan Village and several newer settlements, which the British collectively referred to as “native town,” where most of the workers lived (Figure 3). Later additions to the city followed the same pattern.
Figure 2. Aerial view of Abadan (circa 1950) showing, bottom to top: Bawarda garden suburb, “native town” and workers’ quarters, the refinery, and Braim. From Illustrated London News, Sept. 8, 1951. Courtesy Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans.
This arrangement not only segregated and marginalized most of the local population, but offered them a highly racialized view of modernity. It endured for decades, not breaking down until AIOC’s successor was nationalized, in 1951. Only then did the majority of residents gain access to quality housing and modern services.
Conducting oral histories, in 2020, I expected to find strong distaste for the era of subjugation, and for the legacies of British prejudice and economic exploitation that defined the city’s architecture and geography. Instead, I mostly found gratitude.
As one might anticipate, the better-off expressed this more strongly. Fataneh, for example (and here I am using pseudonyms to protect confidentiality), talked about Abadan’s history with fondness. Born in the city just after the company was nationalized, she had grown up in Braim and other “European” neighborhoods, enjoying its fully equipped bungalows with their green lawns, boxwood hedges, and colorful gardens. She also emphasized positive engagement with Westerners and their culture, crediting the National Iranian Oil Company (as it was then known) for providing “great . . . European furniture such as comfortable couches, dining tables, and kitchen appliances [that] were totally new to the Iranians, who were culturally used to eating and sitting on the floor over Persian rugs.”
Figure 3. Map of Abadan (1938), annotated by Leila Saboori, showing the Anglo Persian Oil Company (by then National Iranian Oil Company) refinery (center, highlighted in red); Braim, the initial British bungalow area (left); and “native town” and other workers’ quarters (right). A second enclave built for British and senior Iranian employees, Bawarda, is shown under construction to the right of Abadan Village, separated by roads, an industrial site, and a dredged channel. East India Company, the Board of Control, the India Office, or other British Government Department. Courtesy Qatar Digital Library.
Dariush remembers things more critically. Born in Abadan in 1945, he recalled segregation. In particular, he cited a sharp contrast between the layout of European garden neighborhoods like Braim and Bawarda, on the one hand, and his poor neighborhood, Ahmadabad, on the other. He and his neighbors, he pointed out, “could easily see and feel the differences.” “Initially, the urban infrastructure, such as roads or water canals, was used as a definitive social border,” he explained, “separating different groups of people. . . . The layout of the ‘formal’ company-built areas for the high rank staff was well-planned. . . . However, the ‘informal’ urban areas inhabited by the local lower rank laborers or kargar showed a random and inconsistent layout.” Still, Dariush did not condemn the company. “They introduced modernity to Abadan, modern institutions such as banks, insurance companies, police departments, fire house[s], social institutions, [and] health care institutions.”
Other residents, rich and poor, I interviewed also expressed a similar appreciation for APOC’s legacy.
“The town’s organization reflected the British ideologies of discrimination, hierarchy, and domination.”
What does this ambivalence, bordering on nostalgia, reveal? In part it betrays a dissatisfaction with the present. In recent years, conditions in Abadan are perceived to have deteriorated, eliciting a sense that things were better in the past, particularly in the economically robust 1960s and 1970s.
But it also underscores the importance of making use of a variety of sources when writing histories of place; of speaking to actors and subjects, of capturing lived experience from the perspective of those who were there, alongside considering more conventional historical records in the archives. More important, it suggests the complicated and ambivalent relationship between history and memory—reflecting the interpretive nature of memory, the variations in how history is remembered, and the complex relative meaning of past and present.
Citation
Leila Saboori, “Reconciling Memory and History in Abadan, Iran,” PLATFORM, May 15, 2023
