City of Black Gold out now from Stanford University Press!
My book City of Black Gold: Oil, Ethnicity, and the Making of Modern Kirkuk is now available if purchased directly from Stanford University Press . (Its official release date if you order it elsewhere is May 28, 2019.) The price starts at $26 for the paperback and e-book editions. In this book, I explore how oil and urbanization made ethnicity into a political practice in Kirkuk, a multilingual city that was the original hub of Iraq's oil industry. I find that, over the course of the twentieth century, Kirkuk transformed from a provincial town into a prominent symbol of urban modernity, developing a distinct civic identity. However, the city became segregated and polarized as a result of British neocolonialism, urban development schemes, the expansion of the oil industry, and Baghdad's systematic attempts to integrate Kirkuk into an Arabized Iraq. Today, claims to Kirkuk's identity, as in so many disputed cities, have become reduced to a zero-sum game between ethnic...