Sinews of War and Trade. Laleh Khalili
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of the world into juridical ones, creating new spaces, structures, and infrastructures that aim at (though rarely achieve) frictionless accumulation and circulation of capital; creating fictive commodities, financial fetishes, and ever more innovative forms of speculation; and creating racialised hierarchies of labour.
Think of a port as a bundle of routes and berths, of roads and rails leading away, of free zones and warehouses and the people who make and populate them. The sea routes are evanescent – whether they are ephemeral foam in the wake of a ship or digital fragments flowing through wires. When harbours are built, the material that goes into the concrete comes not only from this land but from the sea and from other places. Sometimes the roads and rail are built long after the ports, as if in an afterthought. Sometimes the free zones are built before the ports, as if in a fond wish. Geographical features near ports and harbours are remade into legal categories to facilitate their exploitation. Commercial rules; the law, in its multilayered, multivalent complexity; and transnational tribunals all reinforce some version of maritime economic and political relations. All are meant to magic into being the intercourse of commerce.
This is a book about the landside labourers who build the ports and work in them: their collective struggles, their migrations, and their gains and losses. It is also about shipboard workers, their racialisation over the centuries, and the work they do today, with eyes trained to gaze far to sea. I write about the colonial continuities of capital, and about finance and insurance and subterfuge and paternalism and pressure that are the hallmarks of these ports; about kings and bureaucrats, advisers and courtiers, and merchants and industrialists, and middlemen and brokers. And, of course, war – and the mutually constitutive relationship between violence and maritime commerce.
But this book is also specifically about the Arabian Peninsula, written from the sea, gazing at the shores. The historical accounts of the Peninsula are often radically bifurcated – a great deal of excellent works tell the story of the Peninsula as a node in historical Indian Ocean trade; many more modern accounts recount the story of a world undone and redone by oil. If maritime trade is spoken of, it is often in the context of the former, not the latter. No matter that the ports in the Peninsula are some of the biggest and highest-volume in the world. Or that there are more of them, and more people working in them, than ever in history. Or that the connections they forge – not just to destinations for petroleum and petroleum products – are global conduits not just for cargo, but for migrants, capital, new financial instruments, management regimes, and legal categories. This book is what Michael Pearson has called an ‘amphibious’ story, ‘moving between the sea and the land’4 in telling the story of maritime transportation infrastructures in the Peninsula.
My interest in the area arose partially because of how the ports of the Peninsula seem to manifestly crystallise the confluence of military/naval interest, capital accumulation, and labour. I was also interested in the region because I have found that so much writing about the Peninsula exceptionalises the area or focusses on tired old scholarly clichés (whether around rentierism or the security role of the Persian Gulf). I have wanted to better understand a region whose fortunes are so tightly tied to not only other Arab countries of the Middle East but to South Asia, East Africa, East Asia, and the metropoles of Europe and North America.
The book draws on my research in several archives, including US and UK national archives, India Office Records, the UK Maritime Museum archives, the papers of Lloyd’s of London at the Liverpool Maritime archives, those of Grey Mackenzie/P&O at the London Metropolitan Archives, the British Petroleum archives, papers related to Aramco and Oman at Georgetown University Archives, and several other university archives in the US and UK where private papers of relevant historical figures are held. Other research materials include back issues of a vast range of newspapers, trade magazines, business journals and the like (some via online databases, others from the dusty shelves of libraries); memoirs, poetry, and novels written by people in the region, in businesses related to the region, or visiting the region; and vast repositories of statistics and reports produced by transnational organisations, think tanks, and management consulting firms, and the region’s governments. I also draw on landside visits to most of the main cargo ports of the region (except for those in Saudi Arabia and Yemen), interviews with a range of businessmen, government officials, workers, activists, and others with stakes in the business throughout the Peninsula, as well as my own travel on two different container ships (some of the largest on the seas today) which afforded me shipboard visits to the ports in the regions (including Jeddah in Saudi Arabia).
This is an untidy book. It is curious about everything and hungry to tell stories. Mike Davis writes about one of the sprawling chapters in his idiosyncratic, absorbing, magisterial City of Quartz that ‘I became so attached to every sacred morsel of facts about picket fences and dog doo-doos that I failed to edit the chapter down to a reasonable length. I soon came to fear that I had made a suicidal mistake. “No one”, I told myself, “will ever read this”.’5
I also became obsessed with everything maritime: ports and ships and the routes that led to them. The strange conjunctures of capitalism and trade and migrant labour and geopolitics and oil and dirt and filth and violence that make the sector are no less fascinating because they are made so invisible.
As sprawling as the book may be, it does not aim to be comprehensive. It does not sketch out reviews of scholarly literature, nor does it mention all possible sources about a given subject (though it cites whatever it quotes or paraphrases and what ideas have influenced its arguments). I have not alluded to a huge swathe of academic scholarship not because I did not read it or because I did not deem it worthy, but because this book wanted to do something else: it wanted to tell stories. Stories about how ports and maritime transport infrastructures have emerged out of the conjuncture of so many histories, struggles, conflicts, and plans (half-formed, implemented, and failed).
The first four chapters of the book are about four factors that constitute a functioning port: routes, harbours, legal infrastructures and zones, and land transport. Chapter 1 looks at how ports anchor sea routes – whether they are mapped on the sea or in the route-pricing indices of maritime exchanges and freight derivative markets. Plans to build harbours are rarely about objective or neutral calculations of cost. Politics and geopolitics matter, as chapter 2 makes clear. But environmental considerations matter a lot less, at least to the planners. The construction of harbours transforms fragile and coastal marine ecosystems, not just where ports are built but in faraway places from which construction materials are extracted. Chapter 3 deals with the legal presences and absences that are the virtual scaffolding of maritime trade. Arbitration courts and the mapping of geophysical features to legal categories all speak to the complex legal apparatuses capitalism needs to facilitate the building of ports. But laws and regulations held in abeyance – as they are in free zones or special economic zones that so often flank ports – are also crucial in creating the pulsating economic macro-organisms that port systems are today. Chapter 4 ties the ports to their hinterlands by drawing out the variegated history of the land transport that carries goods away from or to the port on roads and rail.
The next three chapters are about the people who have played roles in the making and operating of ports. Chapter 5 is about international, regional, and local capitalists and merchants, bankers and insurance companies, and political and technical experts who had a hand in the transformation of maritime trade in the Peninsula. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on landside and shipboard workers: the racialisation of their labour; the legal, migratory, and technical systems that have been used to discipline them; and the ways they have struggled for better workplace conditions and for political causes.
The final chapter of the book is about war and the bounties it has provided for shipping in most of the Peninsula – though not Yemen. Though war stories are woven through