Sharjah’s fate – at least for the following decade – was determined not only by British reluctance to dredge its creek but also by the winds blowing from the deserts of Iran across the waters. In 1960, one particularly stormy shamal – which lasted several days and caused drastic changes in currents, tides, and temperatures – blustered so unrelentingly that it shifted a sandbar to the mouth of the Sharjah Creek and sealed it shut. ‘Overnight the tidal creek became a saltwater lake.’27 With the enclosure of the Sharjah Creek just as Dubai Creek was being deepened, the merchant families of Sharjah relocated their businesses down the coast to Dubai. The British rancour against Shaikh Saqr of Sharjah arose because they deemed his closer relations with the Arab League and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser threatening to their interests on the Peninsula. Enclosing Sharjah Creek and dredging Dubai Creek was meant as a punishment for one and reward for the other. The transformation of Sharjah Creek into a deepwater port had to wait until the British began planning to leave the Gulf.
Delicate aluminium girders
Project phantom aerial masts
Swaying crane and derrick
Above the sea’s just surging deck.
Stephen Spender, ‘Air Raid Across the Bay at Plymouth’
Dubai’s next maritime transport project was an even larger mechanised port to relieve the congestion of the now-deepened creek harbour. Halcrow was again involved in the surveys for what eventually became Port Rashid at the entrance to the creek. The British projections for Dubai trade formed the basis for the 1967 port plans, even as Shaikh Rashid (and his Scottish economic adviser, Bill Duff) argued for four times as many berths as Halcrow allowed. When Port Rashid was inaugurated in 1971, it was already congested and had to be expanded to thirty-seven berths by the end of that decade.28 The congestion of the port had everything to do with the independence of Aden from British colonial yoke. Dubai benefitted from revolution and war in Southern Arabia as shipping and bunkering businesses moved their base there from Aden. By the late 1970s, Port Rashid was the largest port in the Gulf, and typical of the ports of its time: still close to the commercial centre of the city, capable of serving large container ships, and later complemented with a drydock suitable for repairing crude carriers, liquefied natural gas (LNG) vessels, and dredgers. Shaikh Rashid had appointed the British shipping firm Gray McKenzie to manage the port, consolidating the old and powerful colonial company’s reach into new Dubai’s commercial life. The old Creek harbour was in turn transformed into a dhow port.
Even before the expansion of Port Rashid, however, Shaikh Rashid (or his advisers) planned for a much larger port about forty-five kilometres south of Port Rashid, very close to the border with Abu Dhabi. This border area had been contested for some time between the two emirates, with the dispute only settled in 1968. Rashid’s placement of the new port there was not only an act of commercial foresight but of sovereign prerogative. The lore behind the genesis of Jabal Ali has Shaikh Rashid, a kind of hagiographic archetype of the wise and visionary ruler, standing astride a dune on the windswept and beautiful sand flats of Jabal Ali, striking his staff on the ground in 1976 and declaring that a new port would be built there. And it was. The construction of Jabal Ali consolidated Rashid’s claim over the contested borderland. It was also intended to send a message to Saudi Arabia, which had just begun an ambitious maritime construction project in Jubail and Yanbu, also planned by Halcrow.29
Notwithstanding the Orientalist fantasy of a visionary shaikh calling infrastructures into being, there is something extravagantly modernist about making the largest artificial harbour in the world – as in Jabal Ali – without regard to the obvious unsuitability of the site, both geologically and geopolitically. It is wildly optimistic to ignore natural topographies in trying to make harbours conform to the demands of ever larger ships, especially on the shores of a sea that is so shallow and so prone to capricious undersea currents that continually shape and reshape the seabed and affect its depth. Jabal Ali was constructed in record time, and with it a free zone whose enterprise was crucial for the early growth in trade and custom at the port. A vast amount of sand and stone had to be dredged, which was then used to reclaim the port’s built-up area. Shaikh Rashid gave the management contract for Jabal Ali to the US-based SeaLand company, which was originally founded by Malcom McLean, the inventor of the twenty-foot shipping container.30 Both SeaLand and Gray McKenzie, however, gave way to the Dubai Port Authority, which took over managing Jabal Ali and Port Rashid in 1991. Dubai Port Authority merged with Dubai Ports International in 2005, forming Dubai Ports World.31 Today, Jabal Ali is the busiest container port in the Middle East and is always included in top-ten lists of the world’s container terminals.32 It is typical of today’s container ports: vast, distant from the town centre, and thoroughly and entirely secured.
| Port | 2016 Rank | 2016 Volume (million Twenty-foot Equivalent Units or TEUs) | 2017 Rank | 2017 Volume (million TEUs) |
| Shanghai, China | 1 | 37.13 | 1 | 40.23 |
| Singapore | 2 | 30.90 | 2 | 33.67 |
| Shenzhen, China | 3 | 23.97 | 3 | 25.21 |
| Ningbo-Zhoushan, China | 4 | 21.60 | 4 | 24.61 |
| Busan, South Korea | 5 | 19.85 | 6 | 20.49 |
| Hong Kong, S.A.R., China | 6 | 19.81 | 5 | 20.77 |
| Guangzhou Harbour, China | 7 | 18.85 | 7 | 20.35 |
| Qingdao, China | 8 | 18.01 | 8 | 18.31 |
| Jabal Ali, Dubai, UAE | 9 | 14.77 | 9 | 15.37 |
| Tianjin, China | 10 | 14.49 | 10 | 15.07 |
| Port Klang, Malaysia | 11 | 13.20 | 12 | 11.98 |
| Rotterdam, Netherlands | 12 | 12.38 | 11 | 13.73 |
| Khor Fakkan, UAE | 37 | 4.33 | 43 (combined with all other Sharjah ports) | 3.8 |
| 78 (ranked alone) | 2.32 | |||
| Jeddah, Saudi Arabia | 40 | 3.96 | 36 | 4.15 |
| Salalah, Oman | 46 | 3.32 | 39 | 3.94 |
| Port Said East, Egypt | 50 | 3.04 | 56 | 2.97 |
| Dammam, Saudi Arabia | 86 | 1.78 | 97 | 1.58 |
| King Abdullah, Saudi Arabia | 100 | 1.40 | 89 | 1.69 |
Table 2.1 – World’s top container ports33
During my research, I desperately wanted to visit Jabal Ali port, but had immense trouble getting an entry permission. Most port workers from whom I requested interviews offered to meet me outside its perimeter. I managed to visit the port eventually by travelling there twice, aboard two different container ships. The second time, arriving at midnight, the sea near Jabal Ali coruscated with the reflection of innumerable ships’ lights as they awaited the call to enter the channel towards the port. When we were finally given permission to enter the channel, we were at the head of a small convoy of ships all traversing along the slightly bent route of the channel, towards the port, in the hot early-morning haze of August 2016. I was struck by the sheer scale of the port and the engineering that had made it possible: a channel deep enough to accommodate the very largest container ships, so much land reclamation, so many security fences, and beyond them the endless Jabal Ali Free Zone stretching to the murky horizon. The Admiralty Charts that mapped our approach also showed this vast port, all of it reclaimed and dredged, the roadstead wholly engineered. On the chart itself, the waters were shallow, the shorelines drawn straight as if with a ruler, the Palm Jabal Ali’s artificial