5.3 Southwest Asia and North Africa: What Is the Relationship Among Colonialism, Oil, and Development in the Region?

 

What Is the Relationship Among Colonialism, Oil, and Development in the Region?

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you should be able to:

1. Distinguish formal colonial rule from less formal kinds of imperial control.
2. Explain how colonial borders, infrastructure, and economic arrangements continue to shape the region.
3. Compare the competing historical narratives surrounding Israel and Palestine while recognizing the unequal geography of occupation and state power.
4. Explain how oil and gas can generate extraordinary wealth while also encouraging rentier politics, economic dependence, and uneven development.
5. Use the Strait of Hormuz to show how a small geographic chokepoint can acquire global strategic importance.

Before the Conquest Came the Picture

Empire often arrived carrying a rifle. But it also carried a paintbrush, a surveyor’s chain, a contract, and a remarkably confident map.

The nineteenth-century British artist John Frederick Lewis lived in Cairo and painted lavish interiors populated by richly dressed figures. His pictures were technically brilliant and enormously influential. They also helped European audiences imagine Southwest Asia and North Africa as sensual, mysterious, timeless, and fundamentally different from modern Europe.

The Palestinian American scholar Edward Said called this system of representation Orientalism. In his 1978 book of that name, Said argued that Europeans did more than study a place they called “the Orient.” They constructed an idea of it: exotic but backward, beautiful but irrational, ancient but incapable of governing itself. Europe could then imagine itself as the opposite—modern, rational, disciplined, and naturally qualified to rule.

Said was not claiming that every European description was false or that outsiders could never understand another society. His more unsettling question was this: Who possesses the authority to describe whom?

Who names a region? Who draws its borders? Who selects the images appearing in museums and textbooks? Who gets described as modern, and who becomes “traditional”? Who appears as an individual, and who becomes merely an example of a culture?

Even the names Middle East and Near East place Europe at the center of the map. Middle of what? Near to whom? “Southwest Asia and North Africa” is not a perfect label—no regional label is—but at least it describes location without making London or Paris the starting point of the universe.

This matters because representation and political power often traveled together. Once a society had been described as disorganized, stagnant, fanatical, or incapable of managing its own resources, outside control could be presented not as conquest but as assistance.

Empire had excellent public relations.

Empire with a Ruler and a Red Pencil

Before European conquest, much of Southwest Asia and North Africa belonged to the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman rule was itself imperial, and local communities did not experience it uniformly. The empire governed an enormously diverse collection of Arabs, Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Jews, Greeks, Christians, Muslims, and others through varying combinations of taxation, negotiation, local autonomy, and military force.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, European powers gradually replaced or weakened Ottoman authority. France invaded Algeria in 1830, established control over Tunisia in 1881, and made Morocco a protectorate in 1912. Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, largely because of Egypt’s debts and the strategic importance of the Suez Canal. Italy invaded Libya in 1911.

After the Ottoman Empire collapsed following World War I, Britain and France divided much of its Arab territory into League of Nations mandates. France controlled Syria and Lebanon. Britain governed Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan. Britain also exercised varying degrees of influence over the small states of the Persian Gulf.

A mandate sounded more respectable than a colony. The basic arrangement was familiar: European officials governed another people while promising that the arrangement was temporary and educational. The empire had changed the label on the folder.

Colonial borders were not all drawn randomly, nor were they simply straight lines created by absent-minded officials. But they were often designed around imperial concerns: ports, railway routes, oil concessions, military corridors, administrative convenience, and competition with rival powers. Some borders divided communities that had previously moved across the landscape. Others placed different peoples inside a single state and expected a new national identity to appear on schedule.

Colonial infrastructure followed a similar logic. Railroads and roads often ran from mines, plantations, or oil fields to coastal ports. They were built to move resources outward and troops inward. Connections between neighboring communities received less attention. That pattern survived independence: countries inherited transportation systems shaped for extraction rather than national integration.

Algeria became the region’s clearest case of European settler colonialism. French settlers seized land and attempted to make Algeria an extension of France. Algerian resistance eventually produced a brutal war of independence from 1954 to 1962. More than a century of French rule ended, but the land seizures, cultural conflicts, migration, and memories of violence did not disappear with the lowering of a flag.

Egypt’s struggle over the Suez Canal exposed the changing shape of empire. When President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the canal in 1956, Britain, France, and Israel invaded. Pressure from both the United States and the Soviet Union forced them to withdraw. The crisis demonstrated that the old European empires could no longer act quite as they once had. It did not mean that outside interference had ended. It had merely acquired new sponsors and new techniques.

Iran: Never Quite Colonized, Never Left Alone

Iran complicates any tidy map of colonialism. It was never formally colonized like Algeria or Egypt, but it was repeatedly subjected to foreign pressure. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russia and Britain competed for influence over Iranian territory, trade, and government. In 1907 they divided much of Iran into spheres of influence. British interests also gained immense control over the country’s petroleum through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later renamed the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

This is an important distinction: the United States did not formally rule Iran. But the United States and Britain did intervene in Iranian politics when control of oil and the direction of Iran’s government appeared threatened.

In 1951, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized Iran’s oil industry. He argued that a sovereign country should control the resource beneath its own soil—a position that sounds considerably less radical when phrased that way. Britain responded with economic pressure. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence helped organize the coup that removed Mossadegh and strengthened Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Declassified American documents now make the U.S. role unmistakable. (U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian)

The shah promoted industrialization, education, land reform, and closer relations with the West. He also concentrated power, restricted opposition, and relied on the feared SAVAK security service. For many Americans, the shah appeared to be a modernizing ally. For many Iranians, he represented an authoritarian government protected by the same foreign powers that had helped overturn Mossadegh.

That history helps explain the intensity of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The revolution overthrew the shah, established the Islamic Republic, and transformed the United States from Iran’s principal supporter into its principal enemy. The hostage crisis that followed hardened the hostility on both sides.

But “Iran” should not be confused with “the Iranian government.” Iranian society contains vigorous disagreements over religion, gender, democracy, economic policy, and relations with the outside world. The 2009 Green Movement challenged a disputed presidential election. Economic and political grievances produced major demonstrations in 2019. In 2022, the death of Mahsa Jina Amini after her detention by Iran’s morality police helped ignite the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Women removed head coverings in public, students demonstrated, and protesters openly challenged the clerical state.

These movements did not overthrow the government, but they made something clear: a country of roughly ninety million people does not have one mind.

Iran’s nuclear program, regional alliances, missile capabilities, and support for armed groups in Lebanon, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen have meanwhile placed it at the center of regional confrontation. In June 2025, Israel attacked Iranian nuclear and military sites, and the United States subsequently struck facilities at Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan. The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed damage to several nuclear sites while warning about the danger of further escalation. (IAEA, June 13, 2025; IAEA, June 22, 2025)

The confrontation escalated again in 2026. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the conflict beginning on February 28 effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz and disrupted global petroleum shipments. A U.S.–Iran memorandum signed on June 18 sought to end the fighting and reopen the strait. Tanker traffic then began returning, but the EIA projected a gradual recovery rather than an instant return to normal. A memorandum can suspend a war. It cannot by itself settle decades of mistrust, nuclear disputes, sanctions, regional rivalries, or domestic political conflict. (U.S. Energy Information Administration, July 2026)

Iran therefore illustrates several different forms of power at once: informal empire, covert intervention, revolutionary resistance, authoritarian government, popular protest, sanctions, military deterrence, and control over strategically important geography.

Palestine and Israel: Two National Histories on the Same Land

Few conflicts demonstrate Said’s argument about language and power more clearly than Israel and Palestine. The people involved tell different histories, but those histories occupy the same landscape.

Jewish connections to this land are ancient. For centuries, Jewish communities maintained religious and cultural ties to Jerusalem and other places in the region. Modern Zionism emerged in nineteenth-century Europe amid antisemitism, pogroms, exclusion, and eventually the Holocaust. To many Jews, Zionism represented national self-determination and the desperate need for a place of refuge.

Palestinians, however, were not scenery awaiting the arrival of somebody else’s history. They were an Arabic-speaking society of farmers, merchants, laborers, landowners, Christians, Muslims, villagers, and urban residents. Their families, towns, religious sites, orchards, cemeteries, and memories were already embedded in the landscape.

Britain’s 1917 Balfour Declaration supported the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine while Britain was taking control of the territory. It also stated that the rights of existing non-Jewish communities should not be harmed. Reconciling those promises proved impossible, particularly as Jewish immigration increased and both Jewish and Palestinian Arab nationalism grew.

In 1947, the United Nations proposed partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states. Jewish leaders accepted the plan as the basis for statehood; Arab leaders rejected a division that they considered unjust. Israel declared independence in 1948, and neighboring Arab armies entered the war. Israel survived and expanded beyond the boundaries proposed by the United Nations.

For Israelis, 1948 became independence. For Palestinians, it became the Nakba, or catastrophe: mass displacement, the destruction or depopulation of hundreds of communities, and the creation of a refugee population that now spans generations.

In the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula, and Golan Heights. Egypt later regained Sinai through a peace agreement, but Israel retained control over the other territories in different forms. Israeli settlements spread through the West Bank and East Jerusalem, producing a fragmented landscape of Palestinian towns, settlement blocs, restricted roads, military zones, barriers, and checkpoints.

The 1990s Oslo Accords established the Palestinian Authority and divided the West Bank into Areas A, B, and C. The arrangement was presented as a stage on the road toward Palestinian statehood. Instead, the supposedly temporary geography became remarkably durable. Palestinian authorities gained limited control over disconnected areas, while Israel retained decisive control over borders, movement, security, and most land in Area C.

Israel removed its permanent settlements and ground forces from inside Gaza in 2005. Hamas took control of the territory in 2007, after which Israel and Egypt imposed severe restrictions on movement across Gaza’s borders. Israel controlled most access to Gaza’s airspace, coastline, trade, and population registry, while Hamas governed internally and periodically fought wars with Israel.

The Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023, killed Israeli civilians and soldiers and took hostages into Gaza. Israel’s subsequent war devastated Gaza’s cities and infrastructure, killed large numbers of Palestinians, and displaced most of the territory’s population. By June 2026, the United Nations reported that most of Gaza’s approximately 2.1 million residents remained displaced. (United Nations OCHA, June 26, 2026)

Violence and displacement also continued in the West Bank. OCHA reported that more than 3,200 Palestinians had been displaced there during the first half of 2026 because of settler attacks and demolitions. (United Nations OCHA, July 10, 2026)

Many Palestinians and a number of historians describe Zionist settlement and the continuing occupation as settler colonialism: an incoming population establishes sovereignty while displacing, confining, or subordinating an existing population. Many Israelis reject that framework, arguing that Jews are indigenous to the land, that Zionism was a movement of national return and refuge, and that Israel’s wars arose from repeated threats to its survival.

Students should understand both arguments without pretending that the present distribution of power is equal. Israel is a sovereign state with a powerful military, control over borders, and extensive international support. Palestinians remain divided among occupied, blockaded, refugee, exiled, and politically fragmented populations.

In a 2024 advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice concluded that Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory was unlawful and that its settlement policy violated international law. Israel rejected the court’s reasoning, but the opinion placed the legal geography of occupation squarely before the international community. (International Court of Justice)

Said helps us notice how vocabulary organizes this conflict. The same person may be described as a settler, resident, colonist, pioneer, refugee, militant, terrorist, soldier, or freedom fighter. These words are not interchangeable, and none should substitute for evidence. But the choice of words determines whose movement appears natural, whose suffering is visible, and whose claim to the landscape is treated as legitimate.

The conflict remains unresolved. Ceasefires, negotiations, diplomatic recognitions, and military victories are events, not conclusions.

Oil Changes the Bargain

Oil did not create imperial interest in this region, but it gave that interest a powerful new engine.

Early oil development frequently operated through concessions granted to British, American, French, and other foreign corporations. These companies received access to large territories and controlled production, refining, transportation, and pricing. Local governments received royalties, but foreign firms initially retained much of the expertise, decision-making power, and profit.

Over time, governments renegotiated contracts, nationalized resources, and created state-owned petroleum companies. Iran nationalized its oil in 1951. Algeria, Iraq, Libya, and the Gulf monarchies later expanded national control. In 1960, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela created the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, in Baghdad.

Petroleum revenue transformed societies. It funded roads, schools, hospitals, universities, ports, airports, electrical systems, public-sector employment, food subsidies, and some of the world’s most ambitious cities. In several Gulf states, governments developed extensive benefit systems for citizens. Oil and gas also supplied sovereign wealth funds whose investments now reach around the planet.

Oil wealth is real. So are its contradictions.

Political scientists use the term rentier state for a government receiving much of its income from external rents such as oil exports rather than domestic taxation. In a heavily taxed society, citizens may demand a voice in how their money is spent. A petroleum state can reverse that relationship: instead of taxing citizens, the government distributes salaries, housing, subsidies, and contracts.

The famous slogan “no taxation without representation” gains an odd mirror image: limited taxation can sometimes accompany limited representation.

This does not mean that petroleum automatically produces dictatorship. Norway is an obvious counterexample, and regional countries differ enormously. Oil acts less like a political destiny than an amplifier. It can strengthen institutions that already exist, finance social development, or provide rulers with money for patronage, surveillance, security forces, and protection from public pressure.

The broader tendency is sometimes called the resource curse. Countries rich in a valuable resource may experience corruption, authoritarianism, conflict, or economic instability. Outside powers may support repressive governments because those governments promise reliable access to energy. Local elites may struggle over control of the state because controlling the state means controlling the revenue.

Yet calling petroleum a “curse” can be too convenient. Oil possesses no political opinions. Institutions, corporations, governments, foreign powers, and citizens decide how its wealth is distributed.

The Skyline and the Workers Beneath It

The glittering cities of the Gulf are often presented as monuments to oil wealth and technological ambition. They are also products of migration.

Millions of workers from South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Africa, North Africa, and other parts of Southwest Asia build towers, maintain roads, clean hotels, staff hospitals, deliver food, operate ports, and care for children. In several Gulf countries, foreign-born residents form a majority of the population. Citizenship, however, is rarely available simply because someone has lived and worked in a country for many years.

The result is an unusually layered society. Citizens may receive substantial benefits and occupy privileged legal positions. Highly paid expatriate professionals work in finance, engineering, education, and energy. Lower-wage migrants frequently live under temporary labor arrangements in which residence depends on employment. Reform has occurred in several countries, but workers may still face restricted mobility, withheld wages, poor living conditions, or limited avenues for legal protection.

A skyscraper does not rise from petroleum alone. Someone mixes the concrete, installs the windows, cleans the rooms, and drives the elevator at three in the morning.

The region’s demographic dependence on immigrant labor is therefore not a side issue. It is part of the geography of oil-based development: capital arrives from one direction, workers from another, and citizenship remains more stationary than either.

When Oil Crowds Out Everything Else

Petroleum exports can also distort an economy through a process called Dutch disease. Large export earnings may raise the value of a country’s currency and direct investment, workers, and political attention toward the energy sector. Manufactured goods and agricultural products become easier to import than to produce domestically. Other industries weaken, leaving the economy dependent on oil.

This creates an uncomfortable paradox: a country country may become fabulously wealthy while its economy becomes less diverse.

Oil dependence also exposes governments to price swings. When petroleum prices are high, governments can spend heavily. When prices collapse, projects stall, budgets shrink, and social promises become harder to keep. Countries may borrow during bad years while assuming that another boom will eventually arrive.

Governments across the region are now pursuing diversification. The United Arab Emirates has invested in aviation, logistics, tourism, finance, technology, and renewable energy. Qatar has built global investments around its natural-gas wealth. Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 promotes manufacturing, tourism, entertainment, mining, and new urban projects. Oman emphasizes ports and trade, while several governments are investing in solar power and hydrogen.

These programs may diversify state assets and government revenue. Whether they create durable private industries, meaningful work for young people, and broader political participation is another question. A country can diversify its investment portfolio without diversifying power.

Hormuz: Geography’s Narrow Hallway

The Strait of Hormuz is a classic geographic chokepoint: a narrow passage through which a disproportionate amount of global traffic must move. The strait connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the wider Indian Ocean. Iran lies along its northern shore; Oman occupies the southern side.

In the first half of 2025, approximately 20.9 million barrels of petroleum liquids passed through Hormuz each day—roughly one-fifth of global petroleum consumption and about one-quarter of oil traded by sea. (U.S. Energy Information Administration, World Oil Transit Chokepoints)

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates possess pipelines capable of bypassing the strait, but those pipelines cannot replace all the oil and gas normally shipped through it. That makes Hormuz useful as both a transportation route and a political threat.

A chokepoint is geography turned into leverage. It is a narrow hallway in which the world economy suddenly becomes claustrophobic.

During the 2026 U.S.–Iran conflict, shipping through Hormuz was effectively halted. Oil prices and insurance costs reacted immediately because markets do not wait for a ship to sink before calculating risk. The threat of mines, missiles, drones, seizures, or further attacks was sufficient to disrupt traffic. The June memorandum helped reopen the strait, but recovery remained gradual.

This episode shows why geographers study chokepoints. Control does not require permanently closing a route. The ability to interrupt it—even briefly—can affect fuel prices, shipping schedules, government budgets, and household expenses thousands of miles away.

It also shows why claims that a conflict has been “settled” deserve caution. Ships may begin moving before the underlying political problems have moved at all.

Empire Did Not Disappear; It Changed Its Wardrobe

Formal European empires largely vanished from Southwest Asia and North Africa during the twentieth century. Their effects did not.

Colonial borders remain. Extraction-oriented transportation systems remain. Disputes over land and sovereignty remain. Foreign military bases, arms sales, sanctions, oil concessions, covert operations, security alliances, and international financial pressures can influence countries without requiring a colonial governor to sit behind an enormous desk.

But colonialism cannot explain everything that has happened since independence. Regional leaders possess agency and responsibility. Governments make choices. Citizens organize, resist, negotiate, migrate, innovate, and sometimes support policies outsiders find difficult to understand. Treating every local action as nothing more than a consequence of Western empire would repeat the very habit Said criticized: turning millions of people into passive objects in somebody else’s story.

Said’s larger lesson is not that we should replace one simple narrative with another. It is that we should become suspicious of simple narratives—especially those told by people with the power to make their version appear on the map.

Oil helps us see flows of wealth and influence. Hormuz shows how physical geography becomes strategic power. Israel and Palestine show how competing national histories become built into settlements, barriers, borders, and displaced communities. Iran shows how foreign intervention, revolution, authoritarianism, protest, and international conflict can accumulate in the same political landscape.

History is not over in this region. It has not even agreed to sit still.

Concept Check

1. How did European representations of an “Orient” help justify colonial control?
2. Why is Iran an example of informal imperial influence rather than formal colonization?
3. In what ways do Israeli and Palestinian historical narratives differ, and how does the current geography reveal an unequal distribution of power?
4. How can petroleum wealth expand public services while also weakening political accountability or economic diversity?
5. Why can the Strait of Hormuz influence the global economy even when it is not permanently closed?

Works Cited

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Beblawi, H., & Luciani, G. (Eds.). (1987). The rentier state. Croom Helm.

Fouberg, E. H., & Moseley, W. G. (2017). Understanding world regional geography (2nd ed.). Wiley.

International Atomic Energy Agency. (2025, June 13). Statement on the situation in Iran. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/statements/statement-on-the-situation-in-iran-13-june-2025

International Atomic Energy Agency. (2025, June 22). Update on developments in Iran. https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-on-developments-in-iran-5

International Court of Justice. (2024, July 19). Legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem. https://www.icj-cij.org/case/186

Khalidi, R. (2020). The hundred years’ war on Palestine: A history of settler colonialism and resistance, 1917–2017. Metropolitan Books.

Morris, B. (2008). 1948: A history of the first Arab-Israeli war. Yale University Press.

Ross, M. L. (2012). The oil curse: How petroleum wealth shapes the development of nations. Princeton University Press.

Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. Pantheon Books.

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. (2026, June 26). Humanitarian situation report. https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-report-26-june-2026

United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. (2026, July 10). Humanitarian situation report. https://www.ochaopt.org/content/humanitarian-situation-report-10-july-2026

U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. (1989). Foreign relations of the United States, 1952–1954, Iran, 1951–1954. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1951-54Iran

U.S. Energy Information Administration. (2026). Global oil markets. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/global_oil.php

U.S. Energy Information Administration. (n.d.). World oil transit chokepoints. https://www.eia.gov/international/analysis/special-topics/world_oil_transit_Chokepoints