Simply a Matter of Transport? Pipelines and Nationalism in the Post-Suez Middle East

In 1957, officials from the British Government and Britain’s two domestically-based oil companies, British Petroleum (BP) and Shell, met to discuss a plan to stabilize the transport of oil from the Middle East. The Suez Crisis a few months prior had seen the major transport route for Europe’s oil supply, the Suez Canal, closed in the midst of the conflict, causing a temporary oil shortage. With the Canal still in the hands of Egyptian President G.A. Nasser, these officials believed that the future stability of BP and Shell’s large Middle Eastern concessions would depend on finding alternative routes of transport. With this in mind, company officials proposed the construction of a new pipeline connecting the Iraqi oilfields around Kirkuk to the Turkish port of Iskenderun. This pipeline would transit two British allies, avoiding territory controlled or influenced by Nasser. Although this pipeline made strategic and commercial sense, it also revealed a certain naiveté on the part of both the Foreign Office and the companies. With concessions in friendly states such as Iraq and Kuwait, it seemed that oil security was a matter of transportation rather than production. But what both the Government and the companies failed to realize was that oil was not simply a matter of commerce but an issue becoming infused with nationalist symbolism in the producing states. This paper will argue that discussions and debates around the issue of the Kirkuk-Iskenderun Pipeline from 1957-1958 reveal how the true lessons of Suez were only slowly grasped by British officials. The gradual realization that resource nationalism was a real and powerful force in the region would open up significant differences in the strategies advocated by the British Government and those employed by the companies in their effort to assuage the growing demands of the oil-producing states.