The Iraq Petroleum Company’s Infrastructure of “Desert Control” during the British Mandate in the Middle East

Abstract

This article discusses the infrastructure of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) in the interwar British Mandatory Middle East as belonging to a larger British imperial project for “desert control” through architecture. Britain’s so-called “desert control” was, more accurately, a programme for control over the pastoralist Bedouin tribespeople who were the primary inhabitants of the Mandatory territories’ desert zones. This article identifies the two pillars of Britain’s “desert control” strategy: the use of Bedouin police forces, and the architectural annexation and restriction of water resources from Bedouin tribes. It argues that Mandate Britain’s “desert control” programme was replicated and adapted by the IPC for its own needs to protect its commercial infrastructural investment, the Iraq–Mediterranean Pipeline, in the British Mandatory territories. It compares two building typologies, the Mandate’s “desert outposts” and the IPC pipeline’s pumping stations, as sites where the Bedouin were alternately welcomed into and excluded from imperial and commercial projects in the interest of controlling them.