The Nationalisation of Iranian Oil

In 1951 the Iranian parliament, led by the nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, voted to nationalise the country's oil industry, until then owned and run by the British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, whose enormous refinery at Abadan on the Shatt al-Arab was the largest in the world. Iranians had long resented that the wealth of their oil flowed overwhelmingly to Britain while Iran received a small share and Iranian workers laboured in harsh conditions; nationalisation was a popular assertion of sovereignty over the nation's own resources. Britain responded not by accepting it but with a worldwide boycott and blockade of Iranian oil that crippled the country's exports and economy, and when this failed to dislodge Mosaddegh, the British and American intelligence services organised the coup of 1953 that overthrew him and restored the personal power of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who then ruled as a Western-backed autocrat until the revolution of 1979. The episode became a defining example of the post-colonial world's struggle for control of its own resources, and the 1953 coup left a deep and lasting bitterness toward Western, and especially British and American, intervention in the region. This scene depicts the Abadan refinery at the heart of the dispute, its towers, tanks and tanker, with the lion-and-sun flags of the nationalised industry, in the years 1951 to 1953.