With ‘King Coal’ depots came inland trade. As historian On Barak writes, ‘railways, tramways, telegraphs, and water pumps [all] facilitated the movement and operation of policemen, judges, inoculation officials, and irrigation inspectors’ deep into Aden and the hinterland.43 Gujarati and other Indian capitalists made Aden their base of trade,44 as did European traders in coffee, salt, hides, and other regional products. Many famous London trading houses had offices in Aden, including Cory Brothers, who by the end of the nineteenth century were the most important coal traders in the London docks. The best-known shipping companies of Aden in the early half of the twentieth century were owned by Antonin Besse and Cowasjee Dinshaw. The French-born Besse was a ruthless businessman who treated his workers poorly and had a monopoly on Shell products in Yemen. His donations went on to found St Antony’s College of Oxford. Cowasjee Dinshaw & Bros. shipping company astutely contracted with British India Steamship Navigation from early on and secured contracts with the (British) Indian Navy, thus accumulating enough capital to guarantee expansion throughout the western Indian Ocean.45 The company’s extensive network of branches in East Africa and on the Red Sea coast (including Hodeidah and Jeddah), its ownership of a fleet of steamers trading to East Africa, and a ‘floating dock capable of accommodating ships of 1,400 tons’ in the early twentieth century aided it in becoming a significant shipping agent for larger firms, including British P&O (Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company); an employer of vast numbers of dockers (about which more in later chapters); and an influential player in the politics of Aden.46
Colonial Aden was so significant an outpost that many well-known writers and poets earning a living as functionaries or merchants passed through there. The great French poet Arthur Rimbaud lived and worked as a coffee trader (or gun runner) in Aden in 1880 before shifting his trading business to Abyssinia. Some decades later, in the 1930s, another Frenchman, the communist Paul Nizan, ran away to Aden from Paris in a rebellion against the stultifying conservatism of France. In Aden, he became the tutor to Besse’s son, and many of the scenes in his Aden Arabie are thought to take place in the offices of the French-born millionaire. By the time Nizan arrived in Aden, coal was being slowly replaced by petroleum products as ships’ fuel, and the port city once known as the world’s coaling station was now one of the most important oil-bunkering ports in the world. Nizan described oil throbbing through the veins of the port:
In the great, open port between Steamer Point and Maala, there is tremendous activity. The liners of the P. and O. and the Messageries Maritimes clear a path for themselves through a tangle of peeling freighters, tankers, motor boats, and Arab [dhows] … The oil flows through big, jointed pipes that run just below the surface of the water, like sea serpents – the only authentic ones. The oil feeds the ships’ tanks.
Not so long ago, Aden was a coaling station. Oil brought with it offices, docks, the black tanks of the Anglo-Persian and Asiatic Petroleum, and intrigues that rouse the emotions of the little potentates who have become sellers of oil and buyers of gasoline for automobiles. A little war for concessions is spreading all around.47
After India’s independence, Aden’s significance as a trade hub, a bunkering port, and a strategic outpost for the British increased still further. Its location bolstered Britain’s waning supremacy over trade routes that brought oil and commodities to the war-wrecked metropole. In 1954, a former diplomat’s description of Aden saw it as handling
more trade than any other city in Arabia. By virtue of a good harbour, the business acumen of its merchants, and the fact that it is a free port, Aden controls an extensive market, embracing the territories of Aden Protectorates, Yemen, Ethiopia, and the Somaliland. Furthermore, it is a worldwide entrepôt centre on the routes to South Africa and Singapore.48
But the same free-port status that made it such a good transhipment port also prevented it from developing domestic industries; much of the profit from merchant trade was repatriated to the home countries of these merchants.49
Events in the region only underlined the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of Aden. When Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (British Petroleum) in 1951, the company lost access to its largest refinery in the world in Abadan. It constructed a replacement refinery in Aden which refined Kuwaiti petroleum into marine fuel oils. The Aden Port Trust was happy to welcome the new refinery. It provided a vast tract of land to the company and promised that the ‘cost of reclaiming the land would be borne by the Port Trust and rent charged at 6 per cent per annum on the cost of area required’.50 The reclaimed land was built on ‘dredging spoils’ and the company dictated how much water frontage it needed.
The coming of the refinery to Aden further consolidated Aden’s position as a petroleum bunkering port. Constant improvement ensured that the port’s infrastructure kept up with the enlarging ships and their expanding numbers. In 1956, just before the closure of the Suez Canal in the tripartite war against Egypt, it was decided that the traffic in the harbour necessitated further expansion of the port. This massive project of engineering entailed the construction of two colossal quay walls built from concrete and connected to the Ma’alla wharf, as well as ‘excavation and dumping into the sea of over half a million tons of rock to form retaining embankments’ to hold the prodigious volumes of dredged materials from the harbour.51
All this construction required far more skilled labour than past forms of building and assembly, giving workers more leverage than ever before, which foreshadowed the coming anticolonial struggles.52 The strikes and political mobilisation that began in the 1950s had intensified by the 1967 War. The closures of the Suez Canal in 1956 and 1967 were felt swiftly and deeply in Aden, sharpening the struggle against the British. By the end of 1967, the British had abandoned Aden and the southern Yemeni hinterland. The formation of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) was accompanied by a catastrophic economic collapse in which over 80,000 workers migrated to the Gulf and to East Africa, another 20,000 Adenese became unemployed, and the port economy was shattered.53 In the space of a year, port traffic reduced to only one-fifth of its previous volume, with Dubai’s Port Rashid picking up much of Aden’s trade and bunkering business.54
The reopening of the Suez Canal in 1975 provided some relief as the bunkering business picked up again. To acknowledge this upturn, the World Bank lent Yemen US$16.8 million that year to improve the port in Aden. Over the course of the next two decades, Aden regained some of its former business, but it was surpassed in size and significance by the ports of the Gulf. The next chapter in the development of the port brought regional capital into Aden. In 2008, Yemen signed a contract with Dubai Ports World which stipulated DP World’s investment of US$220 million to improve the port and increase port capacity and throughput. When, in 2012, it became clear that DP World had not increased capacity or throughput (and had likely diverted traffic away from Aden to Jabal Ali), the Yemeni government paid the company off to cancel its concession.
United Arab Emirates returned to Yemeni ports in 2015, when a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE attacked Yemen. The very first act of the coalition was to shut down the ports of Aden and Hodeidah and halt all commercial activity. Port facilities throughout the country were laid to waste through repeated bombardment. The naval blockade and the destruction of the ports, particularly Hodeidah in 2017, led to starvation, a cholera epidemic, and a catastrophic shortage of medicine. The coalition prevented aid