ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the interrelated concepts of territory, territoriality, and sovereignty as dynamic processes occurring within the Gulf region from pre-oil periods, through oil exploration, discovery, and industry consolidation. The legacies of imperial rule and extractive capitalism produced successive territories and administrative territorialities that governed the region as it moved through various subject relationships with international powers into their own respective, postcolonial, nation-state projects. The multiple layering of Gulf territorial signification simultaneously combined British national and imperial objectives with the corporate objectives of interested oil companies, and the establishment of constituent pre-nation-state urban, territorial, and legal frameworks. These processes have their own palimpsestic qualities, and draw attention to more complex issues of causality for spatial and territorial configurations in oil-producing geographies. By denaturalizing territory construction and demarcation and its associate territoriality administration of this regional transition during the ascendance of the oil age, we can then begin to think about how these processes might continue to layer and metamorphosize “after oil.”
