| dc.description.abstract | The former headquarters of the international oil corporation that everyone knows today as British Petroleum (BP) were located in the historic
Britannic House, Finsbury Circus, in London. The building has a notable
history, having been designed between 1921 and 1925 by the celebrated
British imperial architect, Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, marking his fi rst
foray into the design of large corporate buildings ( fi gure 0.1 ). To the
left of the entrance to the building is the stone sculpture, “Persian Scarf
Dancer,” of a woman performing a traditional Persian dance, by Francis
Derwent Wood ( fi gure 0.2 ). The sculpture, along with the building itself,
announces the British imperial origins of the oil company in Iran and its
former identity as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Ltd. At the time of
the building’s construction between the two World Wars, transnational
oil corporations, including what is now known as BP, emerged as a new
kind of political actor in the twentieth century. The building of the world
oil industry served as the occasion for one of the largest political projects of technoeconomic development in the latter half of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. Along with railroads, dams, electricity and
communication networks, and other large-scale technical systems, a vast
global network of oil wells, pipelines, refi neries, and transoceanic shipping resulted from this enterprise. One way social scientists explain the
development of this energy system is to think of oil as a natural resource
that affects political systems, social and economic orders, and state formation from the outside while simultaneously blocking the emergence of
democratic forms of politics. | |
