During the first half of the twentieth century, the British government sought to maintain its dominance over oil production in Iran and the Arabic-speaking Gulf. Central to maintaining this position was curbing the influence of American, Russian and local political groups. The British attempted to realise this geostrategic goal through oil concessions and also through controlling the workforce at oil projects in the region. One avenue used to achieve a stable workforce was a policy that specified that British subjects, including persons from British India, should staff oil company projects, as British subjects were seen to be more sympathetic to the British government. The staffing of oil projects by Indians was possible given the already strong presence of Indians in the Gulf, and the skills Indian workers had developed at other British oil projects, such as Burmah Oil Company; and also because large numbers of Indian labourers could be efficiently mobilised through the refashioning of the system used to move Indian indentured labour throughout the British empire in the nineteenth century. As a result, Indians had worked in the Gulf's oil industry since oil was first discovered at Masjid-i-Sulaiman in South West Iran in 1908 and at the Awali oilfield in Bahrain in 1932.

While British companies and the British colonial government preferentially sought to hire Indians for oil projects, Indian workers were not always sympathetic to British imperial projects. For example, in 1920, 3,000 Indians went on strike at Abadan, Iran, and were soon joined by Iranian workers. In Bahrain, less than six years after oil was discovered at Awali, the Indian workers at Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) went on a series of disruptive strikes in co-ordination with Bahrainis and other Arab workers.4 At these strikes and other moments of collective action in the first half of the twentieth century, workers in the Gulf's oil industry often formed alliances across ethnic, national and linguistic divides. However, by the mid-twentieth century, worker solidarities increasingly segmented along national lines. The reasons for this shift from class- to nation-based solidarity include workers’ experiences, postcolonial nationalism and corporate management practices.

Labour is often invisible in examinations of the oil industry, except in moments of ‘spectacular collective action’.