While Dammam and Ras Tanura had been conjured out of the magic of petroleum, Dubai had traded on its amicable imperial relations with its British protector to surpass its northern rival Sharjah and transform its peripheral coastal position into a central vertex of trade. Aden had a different trajectory. Intimately enmeshed in colonial histories of coercion and commerce, the fate of Aden as a major bunkering port and later as a plaything of regional capital and militaries shows how the modalities of capital accumulation and colonialism sideline some places of trade while valorising others. The decline of Aden is as much about the depredations of regional capital as it is about the end of colonialism.
Making and Remaking the Land and the Sea
Jeddah woke to hundreds of workers walling off its shoreline. The sea was parcelled off and no one batted an eyelid as city councillors and their retinue of bureaucrats, lawyers, brokers and developers all got their share. Nothing was left for the rest of the population.
The fishermen were the first to suffer from this de facto exclusion from their time-honoured fishing ground … When they first brought in the tonnes of earth from nearby wadis to reclaim the sea, Hamed Abu Gulumbo looked around for his favourite place on the shorefront and found it gone.
Abdo Khal, Throwing Sparks
The mechanised ports I have written about are undoubtedly seductive, in the way the vastness of engineering and technological modernity, the symmetry of metal and concrete, and the effusion of colour, movement, and sound can be seductive. Container cranes are balletic, large ships awesome. Even the vision of ships at anchor, whether shimmering in the distant haze or on a ship’s Automatic Identification System (AIS) screen, gives a sense of worldly transactions, of the hidden movements of money and commodities that make capitalist accumulation and the production and consumption of goods possible.
As far back as 1925, Walter Benjamin was titillated by the sensory profusion of cargo ports. Visiting Genoa on a freighter, he described ‘the sounds of unloading freighters all around me as the modernised “music of the world”’.56 In ports distant from city centres, this music of the world is still played by an orchestra of gantry cranes, containers clanging against one another, and trucks rattling over rails. But the audience for such music is far smaller than it would have been in harbours at the centre of the town. City-centre harbours of the Peninsula are today either sites for hotels and cafés, densely occupied dhow harbours, or ports of transit for cruise-ships, those gleaming white maritime cities carrying thousands of bodies and tonnes of pollution.57
So many of the modern ports of the Arabian Peninsula, particularly those on the shores of the Persian Gulf, have had to be built by machines and people in impossible settings. What makes the ports of the Arabian Peninsula so distinct is the preponderance of petroleum and chemical tankers, offshore loading and unloading platforms, and the importance of bunkering to the economies – at least, of the UAE.58 Of the 97.2 million barrels per day of crude oil and petroleum products, 19 per cent passes through the Hormuz Straits, 16 per cent through the Malacca Straits, and another 5 per cent through the Bab al Mandab.59 Most of these tankers take on their cargo at the buoys, loading islands, and VLCC and ULCC terminals of the Peninsula. Some fill their load in the Gulf, then top up their cargo in the deeper terminals outside Hormuz.60 Fujairah in particular serves this function, especially for ships loading the same grade of Abu Dhabi crude, because Abu Dhabi has a pipeline carrying its crude to Fujairah, bypassing Hormuz.
This massive trade in petrochemicals and crude oil has its own environmental problems. A quarter of all oil spills enters a marine environment as a result of tanker transport.61 Accidental leaks at loading or unloading, ship groundings, and ship collisions can cause oil spills.62 On many coasts around the Gulf and the Arabian Sea, lumps of tar buried in the sand attest to leakages and spillages of oil. But tankers are not the only source of maritime pollution. Container and bulk ships discharging ballast water – in unregulated or lightly regulated ports – similarly release pollutants, though today ballast and oil/fuel tanks are supposed to be discrete and separated. Invasive species carried from other seas are another unwanted gift of illicitly released ballast water. Oily bilge water, if discharged illegally, is still another source of pollution. When travelling on the sea, in less regulated and monitored spaces, slicks of green, oily discharge floats on the surface of the sea for miles, refracting the sun through a yellowish prism.
Loading lubricating oils sold at bunkering ports, as well as discharging and disposing of sludge (waste product from the purification of ship’s fuel), can also release contaminants into the sea. Extraordinarily, trade in tanker sludge is a big business. In 2008, a company in Fujairah could charge US$2 per tonne to take a ship’s sludge and process it. But if the quantity of extract-able oil in the slop was high, then the company actually paid the ship US$2 per tonne for the waste material.63 If Mary Douglas is right that dirt is matter out of place, then pollution that has not yet entered the marine environment so often enters the circuits of exchange to produce profit.
But long before ships arrive at harbour to load or unload their cargo, ports need to be built. As the story I have told thus far shows, to make the improbable ports on flat shores, channels and harbours have had to be dredged, land reclaimed, and landside structures built. Armies of construction workers and engineers, and later port workers, have to be mustered. These massive projects of engineering and construction presume an epic and infinite ability to provide technological solutions to problems of geology, geography, and morphology.64 The earth and the sea are assumed to be malleable.
Khor Fakkan port sits on a beautiful bit of land, backed by high mountains and facing the Gulf of Oman. A rocky hill stands tall on a promontory jutting out to sea at the southernmost edge of the town; along with two other rocky atolls nearby, it is a recognisable landmark. The hill also happens to loom tall over the container storage areas of the bustling port, one of the largest and busiest in the Middle East. When I visited the port, in the course of a conversation about expanding port capacity, the container terminal manager – a reserved British man who had spent his entire career in ports in Britain and the Middle East – pointed dismissively to the hill and said that he could ‘move that mountain’ if he needed more space to store the containers. For him, shaping the land, reclaiming it or flattening it or whittling away at it, was no matter.
This hunger for ever-expanding tracts of land to store containers, imported vehicles, and warehouses or to have longer and more numerous ship berths and gantry cranes has pushed ports the world over out of city centres. The further the ports are from the hubbub of cities, the more they are rendered conveniently invisible and unreachable to most. This inaccessibility shapes not only landscapes but labour regimes and living and working conditions for those who work there (about which more in later chapters). These global ports also necessitate a transformation of the seascape and the seabeds for ever-deeper approach channels to facilitate the movement of ever-more-gargantuan freighters and tankers. This is most astonishingly clear when steaming through the access channel to the container terminals at Jabal Ali. Carved out of a shallow seabed, the approach channel is a narrow conduit to land which ships