British Petroleum’s (B.P) relationship with the Persia
Beginning the summer of 1925, the British Petroleum Company published a series of pictorial announcements for its oil products in the Illustrated London News (ILN). The Persian Series, which cumulatively had twelve advertisements, consisted of painted artwork depicting the history, culture and geography of Persia. It also had paragraphs illustrating the British Petroleum’s (B.P) relationship with the Persia, and its Oil. In the eleventh issue of the series, titled “150 Miles of Pipelines”, urban readers of the ILN are provided with an array of information about Oil and the general living conditions of Persia. Firstly, it is an educative information; Britons are being enlightened about a comparatively new source of energy could radically, and swiftly, change how people in Britain lived, moved and interacted with each other. Secondly, the article informs its readers of a mythological world of Oil which consisted of wild and unnaturalized geographies occupied by brutish people. Further, it is this imaginary region which produced petroleum for the urban, more civilized, British consumers.
The Persians, who lived in this seemingly deserted region, were represented, by this commercial, as a mysterious nomad living among animals, in a desert, eking out a modest living. This is exemplified by a statement in the advertisement which stated that; “over the mountains and deserts of Persia, for countless years, traversed only by camels and the slowly moving caravans”. Readers are also told that the “British Pioneers”, through their industrial prowess, had unlocked endless supply of petroleum in Persia. This had been achieved through their ‘vein of steel’; the pipeline. Moreover, the announcement assured the readers that the pipeline, once constructed, would bridge the gap between the oil-rich, unoccupied Persia and the modern world of British motorists who needed the petrol. And finally, the commercial reminded the urban readers that the British should be fittingly proud since their refinery was the best equipped, producing the best Oil. Indisputably, the oil cultures that were birthed in the past are still present in the contemporary world. Also, they continuously shape our perception of the resource. The “150 Miles of Pipelines” represent Oil as a group of ideas and not a system of items. It also aptly reveals how the legacies of the past still seep through the present oil cultures and beliefs.
In most present-day societies, it is believed that Oil is produced from desolate regions that are backwards and ‘in need of rescuing’. Most individuals, especially Westerners, reckon that those who live in such backward areas ought to be “pulled into modernity”. The advertisement is saturated with the theme of wilderness. Persia is described and depicted as a wild space with innumerable natural obstacles that pose a threat to the safety of people. In this piece’s artwork, a perilous mountain scene is depicted. Here, there are several local Persian workers and pack animals who, at the bottom of a wreckage-strewn valley, are laboring to assemble the sections of the pipeline. Accompanying them are British over-seers. Notably, the workers are depicted as tiny, hardly recognizable figures contrasted to the towering images of the British. To further their claim that Persia was identical to a wilderness, the advertisement assigned qualities of underdevelopment to Persia. This is exemplified by the opening statement, “The Pipelines of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company stretched across the barren wastes of the Persian desert”. Further, imprinted upon this artwork and description is a theme of emptiness. Undeniably, emptiness and wilderness worked concomitantly to paint a picture of Persia that contrasted the metropolitan cities consuming the Oil. Unquestionably, whenever an oil reserve is mentioned, most people think of regions in outer corners of the world, far from civilizations, that lack the necessities for human habitation.
Furthermore, the current constant belief and knowledge, with regards to petroleum mining, is that it requires Western scientific prowess and military strategies to access these seemingly environmentally hostile areas. Also, the countries providing this technology should be accorded the special privilege of mining the product. As per the advertisement, Britain’s discovery of new oil fields was synonymous with their industrial and scientific aptitudes, and comprehension of the natural environment. Besides, Britain, for extracting the Oil, was to be rewarded with a prize in the form of an unending stream of Crude Oil. Scattered throughout the newspaper announcement are visual and text messages that defined Persia as an empty and peripheral landscape not suitable for human survival. Also, the region did not have the scientific, technological or military wisdom to mine the precious product. By picturing Persia as a wild, empty space which was unsuitable for human habitation, British Petroleum transforms the region into a site for its resource supply, enabling British nationals to explore, drill, take away and consume crude Oil. They achieve this by strengthening the narrative that their advanced, audacious and venturesome company was capable of conquering nature’s most taxing obstacles in one of the most remote areas of the world. Consequently, since the British Company had, apparently discovered the oil fields and had the technological abilities, the urban, more advanced British consumer was entitled to the Persian crude Oil. This is typified by the statement “the laying and maintaining of this vast stretch of pipelines is one of the many activities by which the Anglo-Persian Oil Company makes provision for the British motorists’ need for petrol”. To the B.P, and most Britons, “transforming” an arid and barren region made Persia a British asset which would suffice in being an unlimited source of energy that all every British citizen was entitled to own and expend.
To sum up, the present oil knowledge and culture exist within a complex array of historical incidents, bound up and interlaced with the past, in ways tough to pull apart. After a thorough reading of the article “150 Miles of Pipeline”, it is clear that the oil cultures founded in the distant past are alive and being practised in the present. To date, advertisements are still based on the notions of wilderness and emptiness. Just like this commercial painted a picture of dangerous and wild Persia, present-day advertisements transform ecologically diverse, and culturally rich areas, into places the audiences view as barbaric and empty. This, potentially, turns the area into a place with exotic resources that would inherently belong to the people who “discover” and extract the mineral. Nonetheless, it is inaccurate and misleading to envision Oil as an exotic commodity with a magical prize hidden in inaccessible corners of the world. By using a critical lens to probe the romanticized accounts of Oil presented in the advertisement, this essay has extracted how the crude legacies of the past shaped the contemporary understanding of the oil culture and knowledge.
Jones, G. Gareth. “The British government and the oil companies 1912–1924: the search for an oil policy.” The Historical Journal 20, no. 3 (1977): 647-672.