With the commencement of oil extraction from the Naftun oilfields in 1908, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company designated Abadan Island in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, Iran, as the pivotal locus for refining and exporting Iranian oil. This decision transformed the island into a company town while embedding it within the broader geopolitical and economic framework of British imperialism. From its inception, the oil company town of Abadan was conceived as a strategic hub in the British Empire rather than an isolated settlement. Its architecture and infrastructure were designed to standardise spaces, ensuring Abadan's integration into imperial circuits, in preparation for imperial expansion, powered by oil's strategic mobility. Two central elements of the project were the reconfiguration of property rights and the cultivation of a spatial imagination that reinforced colonial hierarchies. The result was a racially segregated "island within an island," where expatriates enjoyed privileged environments while local and non-European labourers were confined to inferior living and working conditions. Drawing on archival materials, including maps, correspondence, and contractual records from British governmental and corporate sources, this paper examines the political, legal, and spatial strategies that shaped Abadan Island and its oil company town between 1908 and the 1930s. It argues that Abadan's early urban form was a calculated imperial construct, rather than a conventional company town, and thus intended to materially situate a local oil site onto the British imperial map.
Tunisia's pavilion at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition was more than just an Orientalist set piece on the Seine. Its components, by French architect and archaeologist Henri Saladin, incorporated recognisable elements drawn from several Tunisian monuments, while its functional market (souk) staffed by Tunisian merchants and craftsmen attracted considerable attention. Transcending the spectacle, the complex also had didactic aims. Its main building housed three distinct sections that featured exhibitions on agriculture, industry, and art and archaeology, reflecting the priorities of the relatively new French colonial administration (1881-1956). The pavilion's evocation of Tunisia's noteworthy Roman history in its central space celebrated ancient productivity while substantiating contemporary narratives that claimed the Roman Empire as precedent for France's North African interventions. This article situates Saladin's pavilion within the context of late nineteenth-century agricultural settlement policies in Tunisia and parses components of the pavilion's structure and displays in light of developing colonialist rhetoric that was both retrospective and opportunistic in its support of emigration at a time of intense demographic competition with Italy in occupied Tunisia.
