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 was aided by the discovery of oil in the eastern provinces in 1938.
When oil was discovered and exploited in Bahrain, then in Saudi Arabia, and – after the Second World War – in rapid succession in other Gulf countries, new ports were needed not only to export crude oil via tankers but also to import heavy goods, equipment, and cement for building oil-extraction facilities, labour camps, and new urban conurbations to serve the oil fields. Saudi Arabia’s Dammam was such a port.
In a striking scene in his magnificent petro-novel about Saudi Arabia, Cities of Salt, Abdulrahman Munif writes about the arrival of the cargo ships that brought with them the tools and equipment required for drilling oil. As more and more ships came to Saudi Arabia, more and more infrastructure was required to cope with the arriving cargo. The volume of goods was now far too large for offshore lighterage (offloading cargo onto barges whose shallower draughts were better accommodated by the coastal shoals). Munif tells the story of how the port area was built.
The ships docked one after the other, and no sooner were the huge crates mounted up in ever higher hills with every new ship, than another large plot of land was sealed off behind barbed wire. This land began in the middle of the gulf coastline and stretched northward and eastward as far as the far-off hills … Soon after the arrival of a new group of foreign men in a ship different from the others, a phase of work began that never slowed or stopped. It was like madness or magic. Men raced back and forth with the raging yellow machines that created new hills racing behind them. They filled the sea and levelled the land, they did all this without pausing and without reflection.8
If ships are to berth at the shore, rather than out to sea, harbours have to be dredged. The Gulf coastline, as I have already written, is quite shallow, subject to underwater shamal currents and thus, without interference, it is not amenable to the close berthing of ships with deeper draughts. To make these new ports, the existing rhythm of life and spaces of work on the sea had to be changed. Fishermen were no longer welcome where the large cargo ships and tankers steamed. Seaside villages, if not razed, were overshadowed by the great ports and the refineries disgorging fire and smoke.
Until the Ras Tanura and Al-Khobar piers were built to load crude and bring in imports, shallow barges to and from Bahrain managed all trade with Saudi Arabia’s Gulf coast. In Saudi Arabia, California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC) soon changed its name to Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) was operated by a subsidiary of California Standard Oil Company. The intimacy of the geographies of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, not to mention corporate relations between the two companies, facilitated the collaboration in construction, refining and sale of crude.
The first tanker to take up oil at Ras Tanura was celebrated with a fanfare that indicated the significance of the oil port. DG Scofield was almost 140 metres long and could carry 81,224 barrels of crude and 10,676 barrels of fuel.9 As Robert Vitalis recounts, King Abdulaziz was there to turn the valve to fill the ship, sending off ‘the first tanker full of Saudi crude to pay for all the roads, railways, ministries, prisons, pipelines, and palaces that the new California construction company Bechtel Brothers ultimately built for the Al Saud’.10
During World War II, Aramco was forced to halt production due to shortages of personnel and equipment. In
