The Collision of Oil and Anticolonial Nationalism in the Persian Gulf

Date: 2025-01-01

Creator: Vaughn Vial

Access: Open access

In the 1950s and 1960s, Arab nationalism swept across the Arabian Peninsula from Egypt and the Levant, carried by migrants, refugees, and in magazines and newspapers that circulated across national borders. In the Gulf countries this wave of Arab nationalism collided with a flow more material in nature: the movement of enormous amounts of carbon energy in the form of oil. In Arab nationalism, oil workers at Aramco in Saudi Arabia and Bapco in Bahrain found not only a direction for political change but a means of overcoming religious and national divides with their fellow workers. Strikes and labor actions soon ensued at a scale that was unprecedented in these countries. This project explores how the confluence of oil flows and anticolonial nationalism both imbued this moment with the potential to effect egalitarian political change and, simultaneously, limited that potential.