A long slow tutelage in western ways of work: Industrial education and the containment of nationalism in Anglo-Iranian and Aramco, 1923--1963

This dissertation examines the historical processes through which two global petroleum companies developed a wide range of training and education programs within their concessions to enable the replacement of imported expatriate labor with skilled host country nationals. Whereas company historians and annuitants would later portray these programs as examples of wisdom and generosity, this study demonstrates that corporate agendas for human resource development were reactive and represented the companies' efforts to minimize capital outlays while retarding the growth of labor activism within the concessions. The British Petroleum Company, known first as the Anglo-Persian and then as the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), produced oil in commercial quantities within its Persian concession for an entire decade before initiating formal education and training programs for Persian staff in 1923. The Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) began commercial oil production within its Saudi Arabian concession in 1939 but only embarked upon an intensive training program for Arab labor ten years later. The rise of political nationalism in combination with labor activism compelled both companies to establish, or financially support, dedicated training institutes for host country nationals along with elementary schools for the children of local employees and expatriate staff.;Taking these gross similarities between AIOC and Aramco programs as a starting point for further comparative analysis, this study attempts to explain the timing, influences, institutions and effects of these programs as they evolved within the local contexts of Southern Persia and Eastern Saudi Arabia. As the first study to take an explicitly comparative approach to the history of education and training in the petroleum industry, this dissertation makes a unique historiographical contribution to the study of commerce on the global mineral frontier. Bringing to bear previously unused archival materials from participants in the ARAMCO training and education programs, and taking a fresh look at archival materials from the AIOC programs, it argues that the programs in AIOC and Aramco are two instances of a more general phenomenon in which global corporations were compelled by the politics of emergent nationalism and labor activism to develop human capital within their local operating environments.