City of Black Gold

“This fine social history of the city of Kirkuk, in northern Iraq, traces a century of political upheaval.” —John Waterbury, Foreign Affairs Kirkuk is Iraq’s most multilingual city, for millennia home to a diverse population. It was also where, in 1927, a foreign company first struck oil in Iraq. Over the following decades, Kirkuk became the heart of Iraq’s booming petroleum industry. City of Black Gold tells a story of oil, urbanization, and colonialism in Kirkuk—and how these factors shaped th