Barry, AM; (2015) The Oil Archives. In: Appel, Hanna and Mason, Arthur and Watts, Michael, (eds.) Subterranean Estates Life Worlds of Oil and Gas. Cornell University Press: Ithaca, New York.

Preview

Text The Oil Archives.pdf - Accepted Version Download (202kB) | Preview

Abstract

The historical archive of the oil company BP is housed in a low-rise building on the secluded modern campus of the University of Warwick in the English Midlands, two hours drive from London. This is an archive of a traditional kind. It contains documents relating to the long history of BP, dating from its origins as the Anglo-Persian oil company, to its later incarnation as the state owned British Petroleum, and its more recent transformation into one of the world’s largest multinational corporations. Interested researchers are advised that they can gain access to the Warwick archive and its catalogue by contacting its archivists directly. The archive forms the basis for three weighty volumes of official history published by Cambridge University Press (Ferriet 1982, Bamberg 2009 & 2010). But along with this historical archive, located on the campus of a British University, BP also maintains what one might call an open archive, which is continuously updated and made publically available on the Internet. This latter archive contains an expanding range of documents, which include company annual reports, magazines and glossy publicity material, as might be expected, but also a vast range of more technical and legal documents, which address subjects ranging from environmental performance, social responsibility, and renewable energy, to accidents and oil spills. Similar archives can be accessed through the websites of other major oil corporations, including Exxon and Royal Dutch Shell. It is these active and open archives that, in this chapter, I term the oil archives. While the oil archives are growing and substantial, my aim is not to provide a 3 survey of the range of material now made available, nor do I document the variability of corporate practice in the production of such archives. Rather, I address a series of more general questions concerning how one might understand the politics of the oil archives, their emergence, purposes and constitution. My contention is that any analysis of archival politics must attend not just to their contents, but also to their shifting and contested limits.

Download activity - last month

Export as XMLCSVJSON

Download activity - last 12 months

Export as XMLCSVJSON

Downloads by country - last 12 months

Export as JSONXMLCSV

Archive Staff Only

View Item