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example, came to reinforce communalism because Turkmen and Assyrians were more likely to have the resources to purchase IPC-built homes, whereas the company’s Muslim and Kurdish employees were generally poorer and thus likely to take up residence in the city itself (pp. 113–14). Ultimately, this book calls upon Iraqi studies scholars to look beyond the zero-sum framework of ethnic conflict; after all, as Bet-Shlimon reminds us, “political, social, and economic trends over the course of the twentieth century subjected every Kirkuki to profound harm in some way...” (196). The extension of state authority using (and if necessary, creating) privileged communities or classes allowed to accrue monetary and sociopolitical capital in return for loyalty, consent, or cooperation is a much more consistent feature than the saliency, legibility, and status of ethnic identities in modern Iraq. Centering analysis on political economy and the way that specific, contextual, contingent decisions by members of communal groups may have contributed to the subject or time period in question actively deconstructs constructed ethnic categories that hinder the search for solutions to short and long-term problems faced by all Kirkukis. This is not just responsible scholarship; this is the value of public-facing scholarship that holds Iraqi and American leaders accountable for perpetuating ethnic, regional, and communal categories that put all Iraqis, all of Iraq, at risk, and prevents advancement of encompassing, universal reforms. City of Black Gold is highly recommended. Bet-Shlimon’s interdisciplinary research provides clear evidence of the role of institutions—state, private, and those in-between—in the state-building process in both colonial and post-colonial settings. The book itself ably roots those developments in different eras of Ottoman, Hashemite, and Republican Iraq, highlighting what is unique while showing continuities and legacies that influence regional and communal responses to politics over time. As a work of urban and sociopolitical history, it is required reading for any scholar of modern Iraq, the oil industry in the Middle East, or the material and psychological legacies of using ethnicization as an instrument for political and economic aims. This concise, organized, and clearly-written book, which also includes new versions of maps of Kirkuk that are otherwise difficult to find, will be equally useful in the classroom at the advanced undergraduate and graduate level. In keeping with the book’s attention to perception, power, and management of information and resources as a form of political power, Bet-Shlimon’s insightful essay on the archives of the Iraqi Baʿth Party, held by the National Defense University and the Hoover Institution in Washington, D.C. and Stanford, CA, respectively, should also be read by all scholars working on these and other imperial archives.