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"In the mid-twentieth century, the Arabian Peninsula emerged as a key site of oil production. International companies recruited workers from across the Middle East and Asia to staff their expanding oil projects. Unruly Labor considers the working conditions, hiring practices, and, most important, worker actions and strikes at these oil projects. It illuminates the multiple ways workers built transnational solidarities to agitate for better working conditions, and how worker actions informed shifting understandings of rights, citizenship, and national security. Andrea Wright highlights the increasing associations between oil, governance, and racialized management practices to map how labor was increasingly depoliticized. From the 1940s to 1971, a period that includes the end of formal British imperialism in the Arabian Sea and the development of new state governments, citizenship became both an avenue for workers to advocate for their rights and, simultaneously, a way to limit other solidarities. Examining the interests of workers, government officials, and oil company managers alike, Wright offers a new history of Middle Eastern oil and twentieth-century capitalism--a history that illuminates how labor management and national security concerns have shaped state governance and economic policy priorities"--
List of contents
Acknowledgments
List of Oil Companies and Major Contractors
Introduction: Producing Labor Hierarchies
1. Building Solidarities
2. Contesting Sovereignty
3. Advocating for Rights
4. Shaping Nationalism Outside of the Nation-State
5. Writing Labor Laws
6. Curtailing Cooperation
7. Securing Oil Projects
Conclusion: Depoliticizing Labor
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Andrea Wright is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Asian & Middle Eastern Studies at William & Mary. She is the author of
Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Stanford, 2021).
