Rivers of plastic waste float down streams and alleys in Beirut; an art gallery in Dubai showcases a pile of plastic sandals; geologists in Arabia and Turkey take photographs and rock samples; asphalt roads in the United Arab Emirates cross and frame regional and national borders; family-oriented compounds and labour camps house engineers and rig operators; and refinery fires in Kuwait light the sky with toxins. These are just a few of the ways in which petroleum and petroleum by-products appear in and shape everyday life in the Middle East. Some of these manifestations are recognised as involving petroleum, others less so; some involve specialised knowledge, others are more public. There is so much more; petroleum and petroleum by-products permeate life.

This volume explores how oil has shaped and mediated everyday life in the modern and contemporary Middle East. We aim to highlight the diversity of this experience as a corrective to what we see as the ‘downstream effect’ that we believe has dominated readings and public perceptions of the Middle East's petroleum resources. This ‘downstream effect’, coloured by the inter-ruptions of Middle East oil supplies to European and American consumers, the pernicious effects of petro-dollars flooding financial markets and the global reverberation of the regional geopolitics of oil conflict, has shaped attention on Middle East oil almost exclusively as a site of geopolitics and production. Indeed, we aim to highlight how a range of experiences of oil in the Middle East are shaped by the simultaneity of upstream and downstream processes and dynamics and are embedded in multiple political-economic scales, from the local to the global.

In the chapters that follow, oil is approached as a natural resource explored by geologists, engineers and biologists; as an extractive industry that has triggered contestation over labour and borders as well as environmental degradation; as a commodity forging new national subjectivities and spatial imaginaries, including those shaped by enhanced mobilities and automobility; as potential wealth that structures financial projections, anticipation, anxieties and disappointments; and as a substance and source of energy framed by images in advertising, corporate literature, graphs and aerial photographs, as well as film, art, architecture and design.