Sinews of War and Trade. Laleh Khalili
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of immensely embarrassing errors in the first draft of the manuscript); Captain Roy Facey (who taught me many things about Aden and about the business of shipping); Lamya Harub (for introducing me to so many crucial people in Oman); Antony Joseph (of the Forward Seamen’s Union of India for an unforgettable introduction to and hospitality in Kerala); Simeon Kerr (for imparting his incisive insights in Dubai); Ryan Kim (for enlightening conversations about migrants’ rights in Manila); Bilal Malkawi (of ITF Middle East, for sharing his ideas and stories); Munzir Naqvi (for being such a great tour guide in Mumbai); Keith Nutall (then of Gulftainer, for a foundational visit to the port of Khor Fakkan); Vicente Rafael (for brilliant introductions in Manila); and Maria Rashid (for setting up such a productive interview for me in Karachi). Thank you to Sebastian Budgen for his terse emails, endless (and endlessly useful) references, and for wanting this book in the first place. Thanks are due to Eseld Imms for the amazing maps she has created for this book and for the website named after it. I am so impressed with the care and scrupulousness of my amazing copyeditor, Sarah Grey, and the rest of the wonderful Verso staff – especially Duncan Ranslem – for their efficiency and professionalism (and sense of humour).
Also thanks to the archivists at American University of Beirut, the British Petroleum archives, Durham University Archives, Georgetown University Archives, Imperial War Museum, the India Office Records, Liverpool Maritime Museum, London Metropolitan Archives, National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the UK and US National Archives, the Trades Union Congress Archives at Warwick University; and the librarians and archivists at the American University of Beirut and the British Library. I could not quite believe it when the Economic and Social Research Council of Britain decided to fund this project and the delightful and enlightening fieldtrips, container ship journeys, and archival visits it entailed (ES/L002833/1). For that, I thank them. My immense gratitude to colleagues at my former employer, SOAS University of London, and especially Charles Tripp, for their generosity in allowing me such a long time away from the quotidian business of the Department. I have been generously invited to give talks at many places and hosted by many brilliant colleagues and friends. Your questioning, prodding, suggestions, criticisms, and conversations over wine or coffee or meals have sharpened my arguments here. I hope you recognise your intellectual contributions.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the people who make my extra-academic life a feast and therefore hospitable to teaching, research and writing, which, no matter how pleasurable, are after all work. Love and gratitude to Clare, Catherine and Neve, Katharine (and the B&M posse) in London, Kris in Washington, DC and Bret in Atlanta, Lisa Hajjar, Sonya Knox and the whole of the Beirut gang (in Lebanon and in exile), and last and definitely not least the original NYC gang – Leslie and Akiva, Jessica and Colin, Geoff and Alex, Jason and Nikki, Tanisha, and Heather – for the habits of friendship, conviviality, and commensality all through the decades. May and Pablo only get more hilarious, creative, brilliant, engaged and engaging, and a joy to be around the older they get. They have nothing to do with this project and that is just as it should be. And thank you Al, my ‘F1’, for your immense love and affection, magical companionship and fabulous storytelling, restorative breakfasts and salades niçoise, goofy jokes and terrible singing, and especially for the ridiculous amounts of fun we have.
Shipping statistics illuminate the contours of an astonishing story about contemporary capitalism and trade. Ninety per cent of the world’s goods travel by ship. Crude oil, carried in tankers, constitutes nearly 30 per cent of all maritime cargo; almost 60 per cent of world trade in oil is transported by sea. While containerised cargo accounts for some 23 per cent of all dry cargo by volume, it constitutes 70 per cent of all world cargo by value. But despite the aesthetic and political prominence of container shipping, 44 per cent of all dry-cargo shipping by volume is still bulk commodities (coal, grain, iron ore, bauxite, and phosphate rock).1 But these numbers do not give a sense of the scale of the ports exporting or receiving these cargoes. Nor do they give a sense of the tremendous transformations in maritime transportation that have remade the seas and the shores and the port cities. Today, working cargo harbours are no longer central to the lives of port cities. They are often far away, behind layers of barbed wire and security – invisible, even forgotten. As ports and ships become ever more distended, they have also aspired to automation, with fewer and fewer seafarers and stevedores.
On the map of global trade, China is now the factory of the world. A parade of ships full of raw commodities – iron ore, coal, oil – arrive in its ports, and fleets of container ships leave with manufactured goods in all directions. The oil that fuels China’s manufacturing comes primarily from the Arabian Peninsula. Much of the material shipped from China is transhipped through the ports of the Arabian Peninsula, Dubai’s Jabal Ali foremost among them. China’s ‘maritime silk road’ flanks the Peninsula on all sides. The Peninsula has long been a node of trade between Europe and Asia, and in the nineteenth century it became an irreplaceable British command post and anchorage on the route to India. But the transformations that the internationalisation of capital and the commodification of oil have wrought, including creating titanic maritime infrastructures, are something else altogether. This book is the story of these maritime infrastructures and how they work, then and now.
Cities of Salt is a magisterial novel about the coming of oil to Arabia. No other Arabic-language text chronicles the cataclysm of capital on the coasts of Arabia in such coruscating detail as Abdulrahman Munif – himself a petroleum engineer – did. In a scene recounted from the viewpoint of sceptical Arab observers standing on the shore of Qatif in Eastern Arabia, he describes the arrival of the petroleum-extraction equipment:
The traffic of ships never slowed or stopped. Some were small and others were as huge as mountains, and from these ships came endless new things – no one could imagine what they were or what they were for. With the cargoes that mounted and piled up came men from no one knew where, to do God only knew what. All day they unloaded the heavy cargoes, tied them with strong ropes and hoisted them higher than the ships themselves. Who was pulling them up? How were they raised? Everyone was possessed by numb fear as they watched the huge crates rising in the sky, with no one pulling them up. Even the man on the deck of the ship who pushed the tremendous crates with one hand, moving them from one side to the other, seemed to the watchers on shore more a demon than a man.2
In writing this story of demonic upheavals, Munif was supremely alive to what was needed to make oil companies sovereigns in Arabia. Not only did lives have to be undone and redone, but spaces and places had to be redrawn. Munif records the banal details that most accounts elide: new, large ports were needed to facilitate unearthing petroleum in some places and turning the wheels of commerce in others. Between 1933, when oil was discovered in Bahrain, and the late 1960s, when it was feverishly exploited in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman, the shores of the Arabian Peninsula were monumentally reshaped. This redrawing of maps and the rapid construction of harbours epitomise the stupendous changes in global capital. New ports, new harbours, new coastal conurbations, new industrial megalopolises, new oil terminals and breakwaters and jetties and piers arose out of the mudflats of the Gulf, the jagged coral-reef coasts of the Red Sea. The pearling, fishing, and dhow trades, for which many of the Peninsula havens had long been known, were overshadowed by ports hosting cargo boats, very large crude carriers (VLCCs), and roll-on/roll-off (ro/ro) ships carrying thousands of automobiles. Harbours and warehouses shifted out of city centres to far-flung suburbs. So much of the machinery of capital has been made inaccessible, invisible, hidden behind the veils of security and bureaucracy and distance.
This book is the story of what the making of these new ports and shipping infrastructures has meant for the Peninsula, the region, and the world beyond. Reflected ‘in the murky mirrors of distant waters’3 is that maritime transportation is not simply an enabling adjunct of trade but is central to the very fabric of global capitalism. Maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport are the clearest distillation of how global capitalism operates today. The maritime transport enterprise displays this tendency through its engineering of the lived