Arbella Bet-Shlimon

City of Black Gold

Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Arbella Bet-Shlimon is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Washington.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 296
• Erscheinungstermin: 28. Mai 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 228mm x 153mm x 25mm
• Gewicht: 484g
• ISBN-13: 9781503609136
• ISBN-10: 1503609138
• Artikelnr.: 53534183

Autorenporträt

Arbella Bet-Shlimon is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Washington.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
The book's introduction raises the fundamental questions that drive this
project: How did the politicization of ethnicity in Kirkuk come about, and
what did that process have to do with petroleum, urbanization, colonialism,
and Iraqi nation building? It argues that, throughout the twentieth
century, oil, urbanization, and colonialism shaped Kirkukis' identity
formation and relationship to the state and that the divided city that
these forces built gave rise to an ethnic conflict. The introduction
explains that oil was the central mediating factor that affected how other
forces transformed Kirkuk in the twentieth century. It explains the
significance of the book's approach to this subject, including the
difficulty of finding a research methodology when studying a city that is
hard to access and whose archives have repeatedly been destroyed. This
introduction situates the book among relevant scholarly conversations about
identity formation, the politics of oil, urban history, and nation
building.
1The Forging of Iraq
chapter abstract
This chapter concerns the beginnings of Kirkuk's process of political
reorientation after the British occupation following World War I severed
the town's formal ties with Ottoman Istanbul. It argues that opposition to
centralization under a Baghdad-based government, which took several
different forms, was the single most important political trend in Kirkuk
and its rural hinterland from 1918 to the early 1920s and was bolstered by
the ambiguity of Kirkuk's status as a part of the disputed Mosul region.
Anticolonial forces in Kirkuk nevertheless had to contend with the
patronage networks built by the officials of the British Empire among some
local notables, and the division between these two groups formed Kirkuk's
most potent political fault line at a time when the distinctions among
ethnolinguistic groups were not at all clear and had little to do with
political interests.
2The British Mandate
chapter abstract
This chapter explores how Mandate rule in Kirkuk produced a variety of
relationships between urban notables, rural leaders, corresponding
communities, and British and Iraqi local and central government
authorities. It finds that these relations were unpredictable as long as
Kirkuk was caught in the territorial dispute between the British Empire's
Iraq Mandate and the Republic of Turkey. After a treaty cemented the Mosul
region's status as part of Iraq in 1926, the Turkish-speaking urban elite
of Kirkuk began to exhibit closer and more consistent ties with Baghdad,
creating an emergent but still minor ethnic dispute with the Kurdish
community, which was more inclined to oppose centralization. The League of
Nations mediation process to resolve the "Mosul question" had assumed that
"Kurds," "Turks," "Arabs," and "Christians" each had distinct interests as
a group, thereby creating a rigid, ethnically based paradigm that
structured regional politics moving forward.
3Oil and Urban Growth
chapter abstract
This chapter begins by analyzing Kirkuk's growth from a provincial market
town into an oil city after the discovery of oil by the Iraq Petroleum
Company (IPC) in 1927, along with the changes in geography, society, and
politics that this process engendered. For instance, Kirkuk began to see
immigration by those seeking work with the oil company at an accelerating
rate. According to Iraqi censuses, many of these immigrants were Kurds from
rural areas close to Kirkuk. At the same time, however, Baghdad expanded
its influence in the city through the growing prevalence of Arabic-language
use in schools. The IPC maintained an isolated existence of segregation
and, despite its enormous influence in the city, lacked productive
relations with its labor force. Kirkuki oil workers were therefore amenable
to organizing under the auspices of the ascendant Iraqi Communist Party.
Urban political tensions culminated in a 1946 strike during which Kirkuk
police killed many oil workers, a watershed moment that stimulated the oil
company's active involvement in Kirkuk's evolving urban political arena.
4The Ideology of Urban Development
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the development and housing projects that resulted
directly from the strike and the violent British-ordered police crackdown
in 1946, defining the trajectory of Kirkuk's urban politics until the
revolution of 1958. It analyzes the ways that these projects became sites
of interaction and competition for influence between the company, British
authorities, and Kirkuki and Iraqi authorities at several levels, lending
increasing significance to the local political domain. The Iraq Petroleum
Company, British officials, and Iraqi officials sought to promote the
values of capitalism among Kirkuki oil workers to counter the influence of
communism. The chapter also examines how the presence of the oil industry
and of development projects aimed at achieving "modernity" also defined
Kirkuk's civic identity as the Iraqi "city of black gold," which Kirkukis,
other Iraqis, and Westerners alike portrayed eagerly in various public
discourses.
5The Intercommunal Fight
chapter abstract
This chapter returns to the theme of the ethnicization of local politics.
It begins with the Iraqi revolution of 1958, which brought the development
projects of the previous decade to a halt, led to the decline of British
influence, and instantly altered the axes around which local politics in
Kirkuk revolved. Unlike in the monarchy era, Kirkukis' political interests
aligned with their ethnic groups in the revolutionary era more than with
any other single attribute, leading to intercommunal violence. The Turkmen
and Kurdish communities sought to assert their control over the city and
its institutions literally and symbolically, demonstrating that the Kirkuki
civic identity that had emerged in recent years exacerbated fault lines
that corresponded with ethnicity. The Kurdish nationalist movement, which
was based in areas north and east of Kirkuk, actively and forthrightly
claimed Kirkuk's oil and turned the Kirkuk province into a battleground for
the first time. Baghdad met these efforts with a level of brutality that,
up to that point, had been unprecedented in modern Kirkuk and its
hinterland.
6Nationalization and Arabization
chapter abstract
This chapter covers the changes that Kirkuk experienced in the era of Ba'th
(Baath) Party rule between 1968 and the 1990s. After the nationalization of
the oil industry in 1972, the company became yet another manifestation of
Baghdad's ever-growing influence in Kirkuk. The Ba'th regime, which was
Arab nationalist at its roots, used ethnicity-in Arabic, qawmiyya-as
shorthand for loyalty to the state, regarding all non-Arabs as suspect. The
Ba'th regime intensified the process of consolidating Arabs' position in
Kirkuk through administrative reforms, resettlement, and gerrymandering.
Many non-Arabs were forced to formally register as Arabs, an active attempt
to combat competing ethnonationalisms as well as cultural pluralism. This
logic of Arabization culminated in ethnic cleansing and the Anfal genocide
against the Kurds, which was planned from Kirkuk.
Conclusion
chapter abstract
The book's conclusion describes events in Kirkuk from the 1990s to the
present, including the era of the Iraq War and the 2017 Kurdistan
independence referendum. It urges readers to consider what the preceding
chapters tell us about Kirkuk, and similar places, today. The conclusion
argues that it is time to think beyond ethnopolitics when trying to
understand the problems and possibilities of a diverse, disputed city such
as Kirkuk. It notes that, for instance, Kirkukis' political stances are not
wholly predictable on the basis of ethnicity. It argues that the complex of
cultures and institutions that accompany the oil industry are part of
Kirkukis' lives and political stances regardless of their individual
relationships to the industry. It concludes with a call for a frank
reckoning with Kirkuk's history of conflict and the role of oil in that
conflict as part of any process of reconciliation.