What I Am Reading: "Sinews of War and Trade" by Laleh Khalili

I found this book from a review in The Baffler, and wanted to pursue background interest in maritime history and policy issues. That being said, the book is specifically about the Arabian Peninsula. I was not an IR major at GW, and someone with a greater knowledge of the recent history of the Middle East may have gotten more out of this than I did. That being said: if that sounds like you, you should definitely put this on your reading list.

Khalili is a professor at Queen Mary University. She begins the book by noting that it will not be comprehensive, but will focus on telling stories about shipping on (well, around) the peninsula, and its effects on the region's history, geography, society, and so on. This includes stories about trade routes and empire, colonial-era and Cold War legal regimes, land-based transportation infrastructure, sociologies springing from ports, and changes brought by war. It references commentary from other books, fiction or nonfiction; the author has a tic for describing these as "magisterial." One of the most-cited is Cities of Salt by Abdulrahman Munif, a novel about development resulting from the discovery of oil.

Shipping, of course, predated the petro-economy, and its pre-oil history leaves many remnants today. One of these is the still-used network of trade routes dating from the earlier days of steam, or even the days of sail. Elsewhere, this book has a lot to say about the creation (often from whole cloth) of new ports; but the routes to old ports can still hold sway, and ships take routes that may have originally been laid down by experimenting steamships, or by pilgrimage routes to Mecca, or into ports originally created as part of what Daniel Immerwahr would have cited as a "pointillist empire" of bases, in this case for coal refueling, simply because those are where the infrastructure and markets have been built. Navigation charts were jealously guarded by the mercantile empires that relied on them for profits. These routes are also reproduced in our more modern infrastructure; as telegraph cables followed trade routes into, naturally, the business centers, subsequent internet cables followed these routes as well. In the modern day, trade routes can fluctuate or manifest based on changes in fuel cost calculations (and laws around which bunker ships can use), freight rates, and port administration regimes.

The ports themselves were shaped as well, of course, by imperial investment and reshaping. On a broad scale, some ports (such as Dubai) found more favor from imperial and post-imperial officials than others (such as Aden), and developed or stagnated accordingly. On a more narrow scale, as noted, ports are often being created and constantly being expanded; in some cases this involves considerable geoengineering as land is reclaimed from the sea or the sea floor is dredged, in both cases at considerable environmental cost. New ports are moving out of vibrant city centers and into isolated enclaves; this obviously has an effect on the old city, and it also has an effect on the workers, as will be discussed below.

The book has a chapter on colonial-era legal regimes, and how they have shaped maritime law so that, even though the empires are officially gone, the same forces are still benefitting from the framework that is still in place. For example, much of the modern international arbitration framework came into being at the same time, in the middle of the century, as decolonization policies; in many cases they have ruled in favor of protecting European investor properties over the rights of natives or their governments. Another example is how peninsular leaders and rulers, often acting on the advice of their corporate partners (such as Aramco, oft-discussed in the book) or British diplomatic advisors, all asserted their rights over undersea oil extraction at right around the same time, as precedent was formed and advice was quickly disseminated. International arbitration has proven especially beneficial to undersea extractors, though Khalili also cites a few cases where Arab leaders received favorable rulings in giving their undersea rights to a new company, and not to their existing petrochemical contractors. Despite these exceptions, the triumph of private companies is not surprising, as laws of the sea, dating back to their intellectual progenitor Hugo Grotius, have always tended and been intended to favor private property owners over the state.

Another geographic facet of ports are how they interact with their hinterlands: in the imperial days, all roadways and railways went to the sea, to facilitate the projection of power inland and the extraction of resources overseas. As Arabian countries gained their independence, their rail/road networks were added to, often under contract, by oil companies, but always at the service of the companies' own interests (including to create new petroleum customers). Connections between internal areas especially needed work, as they were not prioritized by imperial builders - there was after all no sense in building infrastructure for their colonial subjects' benefits.

After these chapters on geographies, and how shipping and empire have reshaped the land, the sea, and the cities, the book moves into a focus on people. First come some of the larger names: the businessmen and tycoons who made a fortune in their respective countries as they gradually or rapidly wrested capitalist control from the Europeans and started or expanded their business empires. Many of these came from old merchant families in their respective countries, and of course in many monarchies the rulers and their families have had a thumb in the pie as well. A number of the world's shipping companies, as well as their related insurance and financial companies, come out of the Peninsula these days. The book has some interesting financial notes on how much more difficult it became to get in on the shipping business when financiers shifted their models from charter financing, where a ship was funded by its contract to work a certain route once it was built, to being financed as an asset, so that the physical item itself could be seized by creditors if it were in arrears.

Many of the region's business leaders and government advisors come from the mid-Atlantic. All of them have kept Western interests in mind in the course of their work; though historically some, such as Bill Duff, the advisor to Sheikh Rashid of Dubai in the middle of the century, kept their employers' best interests at heart. On the other end of the spectrum there is someone like Charles Belgrave, who worked for the rulers of Bahrain from the '20s to the '50s, and who was eventually ousted by popular protest because he was so high-handed. Meanwhile, the managerial class often came from other Anglophone colonies, former British subjects from India and South Asia, working in the middle of the racialized hierarchy. Khalili says that the average career of a port technocrat starts in Europe, with strict labor laws and the like, and proceeds to the Arabian Peninsula, where fewer restrictions mean more profit. Port work is heavily internationalized at all levels, and often segregated or racialized by nationality.

Such racialized regimes of international and migrant workers are preferred and shaped by shipping and port companies and by governments because such workers are easier to subject to control than their own citizens. Historically, migrant workers from gulf states moved to other gulf states in the middle part of the century in a pattern reflecting the chronology of the discovery of oil. When some countries such as Nasser's Egypt attempted to police the conditions that their workers were made to live in, other, less picky sources of labor were found; and nowadays many laborers at ports and on other projects are from South Asia. Laborers are kept in work camps under strict control or surveillance, underpaid and undersupplied. These camps, like the ports themselves, are increasingly distant from urban centers, isolating the workers. Any protests against these exploitative conditions are met with rapid deportation and denial of backpay, or sometimes harsher measures.

The book covers the wave of unrest that hit the region in the '50s and '60s; strikes were often undertaken by both native and migrant workers for better pay or in solidarity with larger political causes, whether they be governmental reform, pan-Arabism, or whatnot. In some countries such as Saudi Arabia, these labor actions were met with brutal repression, including executions; and the labor movement went underground and switched to sabotage or other forms of direct action. The book covers one of the best-known incidents, the Aramco strike in the '50s where the company, after frantically trying to find some leadership of a strike, eventually capitulated to strikers' demands, enraging the corporate leadership of other oil companies that wanted them to hold firm. Saudi Arabia does not allow labor organizing to this day.

Other countries take a different path, but none are particularly union-friendly. When Clement Attlee was Prime Minister of the UK, he encouraged the growth of labor (labour) unions in British colonies, to box out communism and because of their contributions to civil life in a future independent country. In Bahrain, Aden, and Kuwait, unions were created, though they were siloed within their relevant companies rather than being allowed to form industry-wide. Future British governments came to regret this after these unions became a focus of independence movements; but subsequently many were held too close or made too weak by the state to function independently. Organized labor is not a powerful force in the region today, to the detriment of its many port (and other) laborers.

Workers on ships do not have it good, either. Despite the quoted romanticizing of C.L.R. James, Michel Foucault, and Leon Trotsky, shipboard life and the work it entails are tedious drudgery (B. Traven had it more accurate in The Death Ship). It has only gotten worse in the present day when ships are understaffed and need to laboriously move in and out of as many ports as possible on their efficient runs. Workers from the peninsula have long seen service on British ships; workers from Yemen and other countries were "lascars," sail-era crews from the colonies. They received unequal pay compared to their white counterparts and were not allowed to rise in the ranks, and were not allowed to visit Britain (or their other respective European metropoles) despite being citizens of the colonies. In some exploitative arrangements, lascars were essentially indentured servants. Racist maritime unions proved unhelpful, and lascars were often explicitly excluded from labor laws; many lascars came to be involved in Communist organizing out of necessity. The racialization of shipboard labor continues to this day, as many developing nations are over-represented in crews and underrepresented in officers, and receive different rights and career paths as a result.

The chapter on modern shipboard conditions is more general, covering flags of convenience, automation (starting largely with the tanker business; Aristotle Onassis liked how it reduced the need for stevedores), dual-wage systems, and so on. However, many of the early flags of convenience were flown on Gulf-crewed and owned ships in order to avoid British customs, and an (not sure about the) early legal case affirming shipowner rights to pick their country of origin came from this area in the 19th century.

Finally, the book ends with a chapter on the effects of the region's wars on shipping. When the Suez canal was shut down during the Suez Crisis in 1956, the world's shipping and oil transmission was scrambled, but when it happened a second time a decade later logistics networks were pretty well-prepared. It led to a growth in the size of oil tankers, and to a firm shift in power away from Egypt (and from Lebanon, as fighting sprung up there) to the Peninsula, as companies and banks fled to safer areas, then fled again depending on where fighting came next. The Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq "Tanker War" of the '80s further securitized the industry, and this increased exponentially during the Gulf Wars. The First Gulf War entailed a massive logistical effort, and the continuing War on Terror has brought considerable profit to shippers (and others, of course) in the region.

The region continues to be volatile; in her afterword, Khalili writes that just in the time she was researching and writing the book, Yemen has seen destruction of many of its port facilities by the Saudis and the whole region had seen an influx of Chinese capital. This is definitely a continuing topic of interest, and I hope that the author will continue to write articles on the subject as things change. I have just provided the barest outline here, the book dives into many interesting examples of the topics addressed. I learned a bit about shipping from it; and while I am not a specialist in the Middle East, I do think that those who are would find it to be an interesting sub-topic within the study of the region.