Episode 428

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How do ethnic and confessional identities become the basis for political mobilization? In this episode, Arbella Bet-Shlimon examines the long history of Iraq's first oil city, Kirkuk, to argue that the rise of ethnicized politics was by no means inevitable. She shows how a multilingual city long shared by Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish-speaking communities transformed under Ottoman and British colonial rule, and how the political economy of oil shaped the city's politics in the twentieth century. In so doing, she sheds light on a question that should resonate far beyond Iraq: what does it mean for a conflict to be "about oil?" What does this explanation illuminate, and what does it obscure?

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Contributor Bios

Arbella Bet-Shlimon is Associate Professor of History at the University of Washington. In her research and teaching, she focuses on twentieth-century Iraq and the Persian Gulf region, as well as Middle Eastern urban history. She is the author of City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk (Stanford University Press, 2019). Susanna Ferguson completed her Ph.D. in 2019 at Columbia University. Her work focuses on the conceptual and social history of education, gender, and democracy in Egypt and Lebanon. In 2019-2020, she will be a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area studies. Sam Dolbee completed his Ph.D. in 2017 at New York University. His book project is an environmental history of the Jazira region in the late Ottoman period and its aftermath. In 2019-2020, he will be a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University's Program for Agrarian Studies.

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Images

Iraq. Kirkuk. A street scene in the older town, American Colony (Jerusalem) photo department, 1932 (image via Library of Congress) Iraq. Kirkuk. Main street in the newer town, American Colony (Jerusalem) photo department, 1932 (image via Library of Congress)

Select Bibliography

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