L’Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) est un consortium britannique formé le 30 mai 1929 et qui prend la suite de la Turkish Petroleum Company qui opérait sur l’ensemble de l’Empire ottoman. Sa mission est de trouver, exploiter et transporter du pétrole brut provenant de ses vastes concessions au profit de ses actionnaires. C’est l’Irak qui se trouve au cœur de l’entreprise pétrolière que les Majors comptent mener au Moyen-Orient, tout au moins à ses débuts. L’IPC exploite à partir de 1925 une concession qui s’étend à l’est du Tigre. En juillet 1938 et en mai 1939, deux de ses filiales, la Basra Petroleum Company (BPC) et la Mosul Petroleum company (MPC), gèrent respectivement les territoires situés au sud et au nord du 33e parallèle. À la veille de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, c’est donc la presque totalité de l’Irak qui est aux mains du consortium britannique pour une durée de 75 ans. Entre 1948, date à laquelle les Majors américaines prennent le contrôle effectif du consortium, et la nationalisation de tous les avoirs de la compagnie en Irak en 1975, l’IPC doit faire face à de profondes mutations, tant en ce qui concerne l’industrie pétrolière que la situation géopolitique du Moyen-Orient. Tandis que le Moyen-Orient devient la première région exportatrice de pétrole au monde grâce aux efforts des Majors, l’affrontement entre le monde arabe et l’État d’Israël exacerbe le nationalisme des pays producteurs de pétrole. De simples pays hôtes percepteurs de redevances, ceux-ci réclament au nom de la souveraineté nationale et de la lutte contre l’impérialisme de contrôler l’action des Majors et de prendre activement part dans l’exploitation de leurs richesses nationales. Ainsi, l’IPC, avec d’autres consortium pétroliers internationaux opérant au Moyen-Orient, se trouve affectée, voire impliquée, dans les choix diplomatiques que les gouvernements occidentaux développent pour prévenir l’instabilité du Moyen-Orient, zone stratégique essentielle pour leur approvisionnement énergétique dans un contexte de guerre froide. / The Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) is a British company that, in July 1928, succeeded the Turkish Petroleum Company, which held a concession in Iraq. Since its creation, the IPC had been both an emanation of the major Western oil groups and the concrete expression of the oil policy pursued in the Middle East by the major Western powers, the United States, Great Britain and France. It was a petroleum production consortium whose activities were mainly in Iraq. From his creation in 1929 to his nationalization in 1975, IPC associated all of the Western Majors. In 1932 and in 1938, the Mosul Petroleum Company (MPC) and the Basrah Petroleum Company (BPC) rounded out this system in the southern part of Iraq. So, on the eve of World War II, the area of the concessions covered all Iraq.Until the 1970s, the concession system governed relationships between operating companies and producing countries. In those agreements, the producing countries did not control the amounts produced, the level of exports, or prices. But, as of the 1950s, the complex oil system implemented by the Majors was threatened by the de-colonization movement. The Soviet threat and the Israeli-Arab conflicts strengthened this increasing instability. So the battle for freeing the Arab nation incorporated the fight against IPC to return Arab oil to the Arabs. The revolution of 14 July 1958, which overthrew Nouri Saïd’s pro-Western government and brought General Abd el-Karim Kassem to power, intensified a constant political desire for re-appropriation of the Iraqi oil economy in the name of Iraq’s development and national sovereignty.

This dissertation explores the relationship between foreign oil capital, transnational infrastructures, and power in the Middle East through an examination of the history of the trans-border pipeline system that exported Iraq’s oil to Europe via the Mediterranean. Built in 1935 by the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), an international oil consortium jointly owned by a group of Western oil companies, the Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines ran from northern Iraq to two points on the Mediterranean coast, crossing the borders of five states. The Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines were the product of large capital investment and were constructed during a period of European imperial rule. They could not be easily moved or diverted once built. This dissertation asks, in what ways did trans-border flows of oil shape and were shaped by processes of decolonization and the emergence of independent nation states? Existing studies of Middle East oil development rarely consider the fact that oil infrastructures extended beyond the territorial boundaries of the nation-state, focusing instead on the effects of oil revenues on the political economy of oil-producing states. Rather than reading oil as a stand-in for something else, such as revenues, geopolitics, or modernity, this dissertation examines the material structures and technical organization of the oil industry itself. Drawing on extensive research in oil company archives, government archives and published materials in English, Arabic, and French, this dissertation argues that the Iraq-Mediterranean pipelines shaped temporally and spatially uneven and overlapping forms of corporate and state power during successive phases of planning, construction, and operation from the late 1920s to the early 1970s.