Setting the Scene – From Europe to the Persian Gulf

It was early spring 1924 when Swiss petro-geologist Arnold Heim (1882–1965) departed Zurich by train for the Persian Gulf with the purpose of investigating at first-hand oil deposits in the region. Earlier that year, the Eastern and General Syndicate Limited, a London-based company, had contacted Heim requesting that he carry out a ‘geological examination and exploration’ in Eastern Arabia of various concessions the company held or hoped to obtain, including the Hasa Concession, the Neutral Zone Concession, the Koweit Concession and the Bahrain Concession, ‘in respect of their mineral and especially oil possibilities’. For a period of five months (until August 1924), Heim's task was to assess the availability of exploitable resources in the region, especially but not exclusively petroleum. According to early twentieth-century methods of preliminary geographical surveying, Heim did so by immersing himself into the landscape of Eastern Arabia, effectively sensing crude in the wild. In the 1920s, petroleum had not yet been found in substantial quantities in the region. It was still unknown if such fossil deposits even existed. Also, the extent to which the black gold would mould life into a global petro-culture was probably far from imaginable.

From today's perspective, neither the worldwide importance of the discovery of petroleum in the Gulf in the first half of the twentieth century nor the effects of oil industrialisation and petro-modernity on local communities can be overestimated. Yet, the naturalization of fossil energy usage in the region and the world at large has mainly worked to abstract petroleum-the-raw-material in the process. Today, oil gives way to a complex regime of (in) visibility because it is somehow everywhere and in everything, but its synthetisation redirects our experience and knowledge of petroleum via other materials, forms of energy, infrastructure and images. Our encounter with crude oil is negotiated through the car's speed, the view from an airplane, a trainer's plastic material, or oily skin care. Sensing petroleum-the-raw-material, as smell, fire or sticky substance, in contrast, has become emblematic of calamities such as the Gulf War in 1990/1 and Deepwater Horizon. But what about the traces of crude in its natural habitat prior to the pipeline–refinery complex? Pre-industrial sighting and sensing of crude oil in the Arabian Peninsula desert have so far not received much scholarly attention.