In recent years global climate change and their far-reaching implications for people around the world has prompted increased scholarly attention to the ways in which societies are co-constituted with their natural environments. Part of a broader movement to foreground the role of nonhuman factors in the histories of human societies, such perspectives offer new ways of understanding the rapid and far-reaching developmental and industrializing transformations of Middle Eastern societies in the twentieth century. Focusing on water and petroleum as essential parts of their broader environmental settings, this panel considers how the two substances both enabled and complicated competing developmental ambitions in Iran and Lebanon. Adopting perspectives that range not just horizontally across the world's surface but also vertically--delving into the earth to consider soil, underground water, sedimentary rock layers, and the varied compositions of petroleum reservoirs--this panel traces the interfaces between land and liquid, finding in them crucial factors that shaped the region's recent past.

The papers in this panel focus on local environments as well as those who lived and worked in them, aiming to understand how particular geographies, both subterranean and surface, have shaped both the developmental choices made in the region as well as the competition and conflict that often surrounded them. The first focuses on Abadan Island in Iran's extreme southwest, examining the environmental changes that accompanied the construction of what would one day become the world's largest oil refinery. It charts the creation of a petroleum landscape rooted in the combination of oil refining, water transport, and the ideologies of empire. The second paper concentrates on rural agriculturalists in Lebanon's Bekaa valley and their efforts to ensure access to the fruits of the Litani River development project. Seizing upon the exploratory wells that U.S. Bureau of Reclamation hydrological engineers had drilled as part of their work for the project, Bekaa farmers demanded that many more such wells be created so that they might better exploit the area's subsurface aquifers. In doing so, they transformed the promised but distant future benefit of the Litani hydropower project into immediate and tangible gain derived from subsurface conditions. The third paper delves further beneath the earth, focusing on the deep geologic layers of southwestern Iran and their connection to the country's developmental ambitions. Focusing on a 1960s-era petrochemical project on the shores of the Persian Gulf, the paper explores how the varying pressures and hydrogen sulfide levels of petroleum reservoirs turned the region's geologic history into a crucial influence on Iran's developmental policies. The final paper returns to water, examining the intertwined histories of soil science, freshwater management, and democratic politics in twentieth century Iran, showing how the cost-benefit analyses undertaken in the building of the Dez dam became the language governing the relationship between humans and the soil beneath their feet.