000 02063cam a2200217 4500500
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041 _afre
042 _adc
100 1 0 _aBiglari, Mattin
_eauthor
245 0 0 _aToxic Standards : Pollution, ‘Slow Violence’, and the Environmental History of the Abadan Oil Refinery, Iran
260 _c2024.
500 _a61
520 _aThis article examines the environmental history of the Abadan oil refinery in Iran’s southwest province of Khuzestan, 1912-1951. During this period the refinery was the centre of operations in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), now known as BP, and a crucial node for the supply of oil for the British empire. Reading the corporation’s own archive against the grain and drawing on the ‘bodily archive’ of former Iranian residents and workers, the article makes two main contributions. First, it shows how the refinery embodied the coloniality of the oil company in its transformation of local ecologies, creation of new racialised environments, and epistemic erasure. Second, the article offers insights into how the sacrifice zones of the Global North and South were connected and where they diverged in the making of the Anthropocene. Through the refinery, pollution followed a double standard of the oil industry : on the one hand, AIOC standardised refining processes in line with US refineries, and on the other, shared the same negligence of local environments as US oil companies. However, AIOC also went further to actively render toxicity invisible by casting ill health as endemic to local society. This helped maintain the coloniality of the refinery through the Iranian government’s nationalisation of oil in 1951, even as the oil company was expelled.
690 _aAnthropocene
690 _aImperialism
690 _aLabour
690 _aOil
690 _aPollution
786 0 _nJournal of Energy History | o 12 | 1 | 2024-11-20 | p. 1d-20 | 2649-3055
856 4 1 _uhttps://shs.cairn.info/journal-of-energy-history-2024-1-page-1d?lang=en&redirect-ssocas=7080
999 _c1112327
_d1112327