This chapter challenges simplistic representations of the intercommunal violence that took place during the 1946 oil strike in Abadan, in the Iranian province of Khuzestan, as rooted either in primordial ethnic hatred or in an imperialist plot. The chapter reconstructs in detail several days of tensions and clashes, and places them within a historical context of coercive industrial urban development, labor activism, ethnic mobilization and global politics. Using oil company records, national archives and personal accounts, the focus of the analysis is the socio-spatial unit of the club as a place for socialization, a site of strife in the life of an oil city, and as a key political space with significance in the evolution of the modern Iranian nation state.