City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk by Arbella Bet-Shlimon (review)

The city of Kirkuk sits at the heart of the so-called disputed territories of northern Iraq. The dispute in question concerns the future political status of a broad swath of oil-rich territory stretching from the Iranian border in the east to the Syrian border in the west that is marked by a high degree of ethnic and religious diversity. Kirkuk is without doubt the most emotive and contentious of the territories in dispute, and efforts by Iraq's political leaders since 2003 to resolve its future status—essentially, whether or not it should be incorporated into the autonomous Kurdistan Region—have reached a contentious impasse. Arbella Bet-Shlimon's City of Black Gold acknowledges the centrality of oil and ethnicity to the dispute over Kirkuk but contends that they interact in ways that defy simplistic characterization. Indeed as this very welcome addition to the literature on the history of Kirkuk's urban development makes clear, the oil industry and its various concrete manifestations (employment, housing for workers, infrastructure projects, and so on) were integral to the physical evolution of the city and the identities of its inhabitants in myriad different and fascinating ways.

The meat of the book consists of four chronologically ordered chapters dealing with Kirkuk's development during the creation of Iraq (Chapter One), the British mandate years (Chapter Two), the first decade or so of independence (Chapter Three), and the postwar years until the end of the monarchy in 1958 (Chapter Four). The final two chapters examine the traumatic events of 1959, when serious levels of interethnic violence erupted for the first time in Kirkuk, with Turkmens as victims and (mainly) Kurds as perpetrators (Chapter Five), and the insidious process of "Arabization" conducted from the 1960s onward by the Ba'th regime that sought to change the demographic composition of Kirkuk and its environs (Chapter Six). To those well versed in the history of Kirkuk, these two chapters offer little new in terms of substance, but the author's use of eyewitness accounts to the 1959 massacre and Ba'th Party archives to illustrate the party's manipulation of ethnic categories breathes new life into familiar narratives.

In terms of original contributions, Chapters One through Four stand above the rest. As the author correctly observes, most extant histories of Kirkuk are written by Turkmen/Kurdish scholars with the express intent of demonstrating why Kirkuk is/always has been/deserves to be a Turkmen/Kurdish city. Hence, their focus tends to be on events and processes that further thse claims—the massacres of 1924 and 1959 for Turkmens, and the Arabization process for Kurds, for example. Generally neglected by these histories is any consideration of the broader socioeconomic forces that drove the urban development of Kirkuk over the 1920–59 period, and it is here that City of Black Gold makes its most telling contribution. For example, the author provides convincing evidence that the major political cleavage in northern Iraq at the time of Iraq's creation was pro- versus anti-centralization, rather than ethnic and that "group" identities remained fluid and dynamic until at least the midpoint of the 20th century. Likewise, Chapter Four's detailed analysis of the impact of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) on almost every facet of life in Kirkuk—social, political, economic, and cultural—is simultaneously fascinating and a powerful reminder of the sheer richness and complexity of the relationship between the oil industry and Kirkuk's urban history. Most obviously, the IPC was the region's largest employer, but it also initiated the construction of largescale housing projects for its workers, provided vocational training and education for its employees, sponsored cultural products, and even supplied the city with free drinking water. Of course, as the author repeatedly reminds us, the motive that lay behind these projects was not altruism; rather, the intent was to undercut the appeal of the Iraqi...