Sinews of War and Trade. Laleh Khalili
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in their duplication of the contours of other Palm islands further up the coast. Unfinished terminals and breakwaters also appear on the map. The port, heaving with activity and exhaling haze and pollution, is constantly metamorphosing, expanding, convulsing with production and trade.
The material needed for all this construction and manufacture had to come from somewhere, especially as the pace of commerce, town planning, and the fashioning of infrastructures gathered in the 1960s and 1970s, raising the demand for cement and sand, aggregate and stone. The UAE did not acquire a cement factory until 1975.34 Most of the cement was imported from Japan and other sources. Even the sand and stone required for the construction of harbours in Abu Dhabi and Dubai had to come from somewhere. Ghalilah and Khor Khwair in the poorer northern emirate of Ras al-Khaimah became the source for aggregate for construction in 1963 and thereafter.35 The first jetties in Ras al-Khaimah were built at the behest of Abu Dhabi in 1966, to facilitate the extraction of aggregate for the construction of Abu Dhabi’s Port Zayed. The proximity of Ras al-Khaimah’s quarries in the mountains to the new jetty on the shore and the quality of the mountain rocks, rich in silicate and limestone, made the emirate an ideal source for construction material. Precisely because these construction materials were so precious and so necessary for the expansion of the UAE’s infrastructures, extracting them was not without conflict. Local groups clashed with one another and with the ruler over rights of access and profits from their richer southern neighbour’s exploitation of these coveted commodities.36
The building of harbours and ports in the UAE has grown apace. Today, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Fujairah, and Ras al-Khaimah all have major oceangoing ports as well as a number of smaller harbours and oil terminals on and offshore. In 2012, Abu Dhabi inaugurated Port Khalifa, a mere seventy kilometres south of Dubai’s Jabal Ali. Port Khalifa replaces Port Zayed, which is centrally located within the city of Abu Dhabi, and will soon be ‘redeveloped’. Abu Dhabi has clearly followed the precedent set by Jabal Ali: a vast free zone (Khalifa Industrial Zone Abu Dhabi, or Kizad) benefitting from proximity to an oceangoing port with deep channels. Whether Khalifa will ever be as significant a cargo port as Jabal Ali has to do not only with economic calculations and incentives but also the push and pull between the rival emirates. Khalifa itself is built on land reclaimed from the sea and sits astride forty million cubic metres of materials dredged from the access channels and harbour area. Although its construction included a breakwater meant to protect a rare coral reef near the site, an environmental impact assessment by Halcrow produced at the start of the project indicated that there was very little environmental data available as a baseline. Nor had there been any consultation on environmental impact before the master plan was put forward. Like so many other ports in the region, it displays a gaping chasm between the discourse of preservation and the practice of port-building.
The story of Dubai is emblematic of other port-states of the British Empire. Dubai may be ridiculed as a kind of mirage in the desert and an embodiment of hubris, but neither its headlong rush to capitalisation nor its mercantile history nor even its ignominious story of exploitation of migrant workers and hierarchies of expertise and management are too dissimilar from Singapore or Hong Kong. In its constant scramble for ever-deeper harbours; in its ruthless moulding, whittling, and carving up of sea into land and land into more land; in its stories of colonial control and decision-making; even in the self-serving legends told about its visionary local leaders, Dubai is like so many other nodes in the great matrix of commerce and capital worldwide. As Jabal Ali rises, Port Rashid becomes something else – serving passengers, not cargo, while the commerce seeping from the skin of Jabal Ali’s vast port and free zone keeps the engines of dhows, feeder ships, intermodal transport vehicles, and even air cargo well-lubricated.
With the transformations of Ports Rashid and Zayed in the Emirates and Port Qabus in Muscat into cruise-ship ports, as in other ports throughout the Peninsula and beyond, old ports close to the cities and embedded in the thriving life of the urban quarters begin to disappear or cease functioning in the lively way they had done at their inauguration. In his account of the decline of European ports, Allan Sekula writes:
Harbors are now less havens (as they were for the Dutch) than accelerated turning basins for supertankers and containerships. The old harbour front, its links to a common culture shattered by unemployment, is now reclaimed for a bourgeois reverie on the mercantilist past. Heavy metals accumulate in the silt … The backwater becomes the frontwater. Everyone wants a glimpse of the sea.37
The new cargo ports that replace city-centre ports are vast, securitised, and far from the heart of the city, nearly impossible to access. The transformation of the old ports into places of entertainment, consumption, and tourism resonates with the inception of semi-automated cargo ports. ‘Technology, trade and tourism’ (the motto of Dubai), the far port, the ‘accelerated turning basins’, environmental impact assessments as afterthoughts, and automation are all fundamental to the working of economies of these modern free ports, where ecological degradation and exploitation of labour are obscured in the haze of efficient commercial functioning and the technological sublime of colourful cargo boxes. So much of this history is tinged by colonial decision-making.
Aden has a different story. In 1837, the East India Company’s Court of Directors agreed to convert their ships to steam to escape the directional tyranny of the monsoon winds.38 Captain Stafford Bettesworth Haines set off to survey the coasts of Arabia and first alighted on the island of Soqotra. When, after a scant few months, Soqotra’s harbour and climate proved inhospitable, Haines decided that Aden would be a useful refuelling port for steamships on their way to Suez and overland to Alexandria. A pretext was needed to conquer Aden. The grounding of a Bombay ship that was looted by locals (probably in collusion with its owner, for insurance takings) provided the excuse. Aden was occupied in 1839 by the warships of the British governorate of Bombay under the command of Haines himself, citing ‘outrage against’ women passengers of the stranded ship. Haines was then appointed Political Agent of Aden by the Bombay Presidency of the East India Company, and went on to transform Aden into a coal depot and naval base to serve the Company’s Indian Ocean trade. Beyond using Aden as a strategic refuelling outpost, however, successive governments of Bombay (whether ruled through a corporation or the empire) were not interested in developing the Aden harbour for commerce and even rejected a local proposal to build a new wharf there in the early twentieth century.39
Aden’s crucial strategic value was predicated on it being one of the most important coaling stations in the world, at one point bunkering more ships than any other port besides London, Liverpool, and New York City. To protect their strategic outpost from Yemeni tribes, the British created a buffer zone, a bulwark of ‘British troops, mostly Indian’ around the port city.40 The port itself had always been a multilingual place of work for lighterers and fishermen (prominent among them Somalis) and for traders from the four corners of the world.41
Once the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the strategic position of Aden and its fine, deep natural harbour made it even more important to the British. It was easily the empire’s most indispensable strategic node east of Suez at the time. Like so many other city-states, it had been absorbed by the empire as an outpost in the ocean, in a chain of port cities from Gibraltar to Hong Kong that bolstered British trade in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In his account of visiting the Arabian Peninsula in the 1920s, Ameen Rihani described Aden’s two important commercial sites:
the one for replenishing steam-power, the other for guiding at night; the one consists of black piles rising in squares and pyramids near the water and adding a touch of realism to the inferno of Steamer Point, the other stands aloft, above all the heights, housed