Through the Story of a Road and a Pipeline: The Formation of Commodity Frontiers and Modern States Zehra Taşdemir Yasin

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The concept of the ‘ecology of oil’ specifies historically and geographically the relations and processes of exploitation and domination of nature, and of the human-nature interaction, by capital and the nation state. It contextualises the historical creation of an ‘oil field’ with a distinctive spatial and social order, bringing about geographical transformation on the basis of the modern industrial order of crude oil production. Using the concept of the ‘ecology of oil’, this paper explores the transformation of the tribally ruled agro-pastoral human-nature interactions, in order to understand how this transformation became constitutive of the formation and consolidation of national rule and order. The paper underscores the formation of the Mosul oil frontier with a focus on the emergence of a modern relationship of national rule, geography and socio-ecology as a regulative mechanism for the development of the ecology of oil. It explores through the instance of Mosul the relationship between political centralisation and national-administrative domination of geography; and the incorporation of nature in the world market in the form of a nationally ruled commodity frontier.

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