Abdo Khal, Throwing Sparks
Curzon’s ‘Prancing in the Persian Puddle’ 1
In the left side of this photograph from the India Office Records, a tall man wearing a heavy striped robe and kufiya is standing next to his horse. On the far right, a canopied raft carries a blurry load of berobed and kufiya-wearing Arab men. But the gaze inevitably lands at the centre of the photograph, where three men – one half-naked with sun-darkened skin and two clothed in white robes – carry two other men in full British imperial regalia and pith helmets across the wet sand. Another pith-helmeted colonial officer seems to be directing the raft on the right, his back to the camera. The robed man on the left is thought to be Shaikh Mubarak al Sabah, the ruler of Kuwait. One of the men carried on the back of the Arab porters is the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon of Kedleston.
In November 1903, Curzon arrived on a viceregal tour of the Persian Gulf so that he could claim the much-contested body of water and its littorals for Britain. The tour took in Muscat, Bandar Abbas, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Sharjah. Curzon’s authorised biographer Earl Ronaldshay wrote,
Lord Curzon arriving in Kuwait2
The presence of the ships gave to the prestige of the Viceroy the spectacular reinforcement which appealed so directly to the oriental mind. ‘The small harbour’, he wrote when describing his visit to Muscat, ‘with our big white ship and the Lawrence in the foreground, and behind them the dark hulls of no less than six British men-o-war, presented a spectacle such as the Muscatis never before have witnessed’.3
Curzon landed at Shuwaikh, a small anchorage about three miles from Kuwait City (and today a thriving cargo port), rather than at the burgeoning dhow harbour at the centre of the town. Curzon was to ride into town, so that he could enact ‘a ceremonial entry … with becoming display’.4 The becoming display, however, was belied by Curzon’s arrival on the shore in Kuwait. This was ‘less dignified than he could have wished, for, the water being shallow, he was faced with the alternative of being carried ashore, or of arriving on the back of a donkey without bridle or stirrup’.5 Charles Belgrave, the much-hated, domineering British colonial adviser imposed on the ruler of Bahrain, described such ceremonial arrivals in Bahrain thus:
Even when the pier was built official arrivals were not very dignified proceedings. When the tide was low, distinguished visitors, with their swords swinging round their legs, had to leap, nervously, from a bobbing skiff on the slippery pier steps, watched by the anxious reception committee waiting above them … Now [in 1960], most people travel by air and visitors arriving by ship can come alongside in launches, for the pier extends a quarter of a mile into the sea. But until the deep-water pier, which is under construction, is built, steamers still anchor about three miles from the shore.6
Long before the modern dredging projects that created those deepwater piers, a Times reporter reflected on Curzon’s visit to the Gulf, lamented the condition of the infrastructure there, and claimed that with ‘a moderate expenditure of money and engineering skill’ Britain could ‘improve the existing harbours and perhaps open up new ones’ to encourage commerce.7 But, of course, at that stage, long before the discovery of petroleum around the Gulf, the British were not interested in investing in infrastructures that could have given the Gulf emirates a modicum of independence or financial autonomy. The excuse often given was the inhospitable geography.
Not only Kuwait and Bahrain but all the other port cities on the shores of the Gulf sit on a coast known for its mudflats, sabkhas (salt flats), mangroves, and shallow waters. Before the age of oil, some had harbours in town centres, where wooden dhows berthed while loading and unloading or preparing for their pearling trips to sea. Some of those dhow harbours still survive. The aesthetically pleasing dhow harbour of Kuwait City hosts a mix of museum pieces and working fishing and cargo vessels. The functioning dhow harbours of Dubai, Sharjah, and other Gulf cities house metal-hulled dhows, plying their trade – licit and illicit – to Iran and other ports of the Peninsula, South Asia, and East Africa. It is a mistake to imagine these dhows as remnants or residues of ‘traditional’ trade; their business has flourished alongside, in the interstices of, and because of the more global, large-scale, and mechanised trade of container ships and modern bulk carriers. The dhows serve regional ports efficiently, and the flexibility and eclecticism of their cargo makes them ideal for smaller volumes of trade and nearer distances.
But although the dhow harbours survive – many in their original historical locales – many more ports, gargantuan and mechanised, have sprung up along these shallow, muddy, ecologically rich coasts. The ever-expanding number of competing ports raises the question: why go through the vast expenditure, investment and effort of creating so many deepwater harbours in these shallow seas? What was the impetus behind the upsurge of oceangoing ports on the Peninsula in the middle of the twentieth century?
The response to these questions lies in part in the importance of technological transformations – innovations in dredging and land reclamation – in the construction of harbours and ports of the Arabian Peninsula. Still more important are the political calculations that went into dredging some harbours and not others, and the colonial and nationalist policies that led to the development of some ports and the gradual waning of others. In this story, Dammam and Dubai matter a great deal. Created to serve the cargo needs of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), Dammam has become one of the most important ports on the Arabian Peninsula. The decision to expand the harbour on the Dubai Creek in the 1950s was crucial for providing the emirate the funding to construct Port Rashid and Jabal Ali. The decline of the port of Aden demonstrates that despite natural advantages, a deep harbour, and a strategically fortuitous location, a port can be made to wither and fade away. In all these harbours, geopolitical and political decisions – rather than geographic advantage or ‘neutral’ economic calculations – created the conditions for the work of commerce and maritime transport. All these transformations ripple globally. The construction of new harbours requires landscapes to be dramatically reshaped not only where harbours are being built, but also in distant locales where the raw materials of construction are extracted.
Since the completion of the deep-water pier on the mainland at Dammam much trade has by-passed Bahrein. Most of the cotton goods, foodstuffs, lumber, hardware, and other products destined for eastern Arabia now land at this pier, instead of being unloaded at Bahrein and repacked for shipment to the coast by small dhows.
Richard Sanger, Arabian Peninsula
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Arabia was an assemblage of different forms of rule, with the Ottoman Empire holding sway on the Red Sea coast, tribal leaders in the interior, and the Sharif of Mecca ruling Hijaz. The end of the Ottoman rule and the interference of British government agents like T.E. Lawrence (‘of Arabia’) precipitated a power struggle that ended with Abdulaziz ibn Saud of Najd declaring himself the king of Hijaz in 1926. He was immediately recognised by the Soviet Union. The Kingdom of Hijaz and Najd changed its name to Saudi Arabia in 1932. Ibn Saud’s hold over much of the Arabian Peninsula was consolidated in the coming decades and