Middle East oil labor camps imported both indenture and Jim Crow racial controls

Evidence

In the early 1930s, South Asian labor migrants were recruited to work alongside Arabs, Europeans, and, later, Americans in the newly discovered oilfields of the Middle East. In the beginning, British oil companies implemented racial systems of labor control that benefited from the lessons of the indenture model. Americans later equally borrowed from Jim Crow systems of racial segregation and domination developed in the post–Reconstruction South to divide labor camps and subjugate workers (Vitalis 2007). Complaints about the mismanagement of contracts, the mistreatment of workers, harsh conditions, and violations of human rights steadily increased, and the first organized workers’ strike in Saudi Arabia took place in 1942 at a construction site. The first outbreak of labor unrest involving an American-run oil refinery occurred in 1945 (Vitalis 2007, 92–93). — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 492

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the indenture model from earlier chapters onto Middle East oil labor; the Jim Crow borrowing echoes the transnational circuit of racial control techniques discussed throughout the book. — connects to: Shared oil bounty is partitioned into class and racial segregation — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 233
• SEED: Article angle: the genealogical line from Caribbean indenture and Jim Crow to Saudi oil camps — racial labor control as a transferable technology across empires and nations.
• CANDY: Compact odd-but-true fact: American oil companies transplanted Jim Crow segregation directly into Saudi Arabian labor camps.