Stegner describes the momentary silence of the oil terminals:
At Ras Tanura the crude oil tank farm stood idle, the pumps were still, the port facilities were unused … No crude coursed through the pipeline from Dammam, no tanker followed the course of the D.G. Scofield to the moorings … Any tankers plying the Gulf, and any naval vessels in need of refuelling, were headed for Bahrain or Abadan, where they could obtain refined products.11
By 1944, production had begun again. In that year, 60,000 tonnes of equipment arrived at the rudimentary Al-Khobar pier and the Ras Tanura cargo wharves, intended for repairing the oil fields left idle during the war. Ras Tanura’s harbour was so busy with tankers loading crude, as well as with unloading nearly 260,000 tonnes of cargo in one year, that plans were made in 1946 to relieve the pressure on the oil terminal by building a new port exclusively to receive cargo.12 Only five years later, Dammam had been transformed from a small village into a major port, connected to Riyadh by a newly built railway.
In the 1950s, Aramco’s maritime operations required an outpost at Jeddah on the Red Sea, where both crude and bunkering fuel were sold to its customers. Archival records show bout after bout of expansion of piers at Dammam, Ras Tanura, and Jeddah, including a major dredging programme in 1967 to address the silting of all three harbours and deepen the draughts to accommodate VLCCs and ULCCs. The Aramco report for 1970 described the process of deepening as drilling holes into ‘rocky knolls’ in the seabed and dredging away a vast section of the seabed to a depth of nearly thirty metres. The new oil terminal of Ju’ayma was built in 1974 on the Gulf coast and is today the largest crude-loading port of Saudi Arabia. The late 1970s saw nothing but the expansion of tank farms and the addition of new berths and offshore technologies, including sea islands to facilitate loading ULCCs at some distance from the shore.13
The effect of such traffic in both crude and cargo was not only to expand ports and offshore loading islands and buoys in Saudi Arabia, but also to expand Aramco’s procurement and distribution activities in the US and Europe. Trucking fleets, pipelines, and barge ports were all mustered. The network of trade in petroleum, refined products, and goods and equipment needed for the oil business extended worldwide.14 Only the Tanker Wars of the 1980s between Iran and Iraq brought a temporary abatement in the business both of Ras Tanura and Dammam. Both ports continue to be – along with others on the Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia – operated by Aramco and, as such, are far less transparent to outside scrutiny than ports managed by cargo port authorities.
As in Bahrain before Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait after, the development of these new harbours was facilitated through the work of petroleum corporations that did not originally specialise in harbour construction, transport engineering, or infrastructure management. The early financing for these ports and harbours came not from the public purse or through fiscal allocations, but from investments by foreign petroleum companies. The private ownership structures of these cargo ports limited the extent to which local merchants and traders could access them; such shared use was only secured through negotiation or force.
Of course, this was a pattern familiar from the corporate sovereigns of the colonial era, foremost among them the myriad East India Companies. In the Gulf, British and American petroleum companies forged a vertical integration of infrastructure construction and commodity extraction that facilitated the emergence of this new and rapacious form of commodity capitalism. They did so for a long time with total carte blanche, their ‘developmental’ programmes blurring into the work of states, their officers and officials playing musical chairs in the consultancies or diplomatic corps of their home countries. The histories of Mina Ahmadi and Shuwaikh in Kuwait, Dammam and Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia, and others in the upper Gulf are intimately tied to the history of extraction of oil there.
Creeks and Harbours of the Trucial Coast
Most of the Dubai shore line is a flat and barren waste traversed by small creeks and with little vegetation beyond coarse grass, clumps of mangroves, and an occasional small garden or palm grove around a well. In fact, this stretch of coast is so flat that the little hill of Jebel Ali is the chief landmark. A long reef running parallel to the shore has been the graveyard of many vessels, including the British East India Company’s sloop Elphinstone which struck there in 1837.
Richard Sanger, Arabian Peninsula
Dubai’s history differs from that of the ports of the upper Gulf. Although some petroleum was discovered there in the early 1960s, it was never considered to be enough for commercial exploitation; and in any case the port was already being developed as a hub of trade. The city of Dubai, like the other coastal emirates that formed the UAE in the early 1970s, was situated on sand spits with protected lagoons or creeks that allowed for safe anchorage, but which could not accommodate ships with deep draughts. These creeks and lagoons were also vulnerable to silting.15 The emirates were distinct in governance and economic specialisation, and if they had any relationship with one another, it was via maritime connections and trade.16 Dubai was a special case among them, as it had already been designated a free port in 1904.17 This and its tax-free, customs-free entrepôt status distinguished Dubai from other emirates on the coast. Further, its location and overseas ties (especially to Iran and India) developed through trade and smuggling proved durable and influential, shaping the patterns of commerce and parameters of rule. But what also differentiated Dubai from the other emirates was its ruling family’s always friendly relations with the British. By contrast, though Sharjah had provided an air outpost for Imperial Airways (a precursor to British Airways) since 1932 and an airbase for the Royal Air Force during World War II, its rulers were considered to have historically had ‘a general attitude of obstruction and opposition’ to Britain in ways the Al Maktum of Dubai had not.18
In the 1950s, as anticolonial movements unravelled the empire and nationalist sentiments roiled the tricontinents, the British began to consider a programme of economic development as a bulwark against the possibility of revolution. Given that the Gulf region was no longer simply a transit or trade outpost but the hub of oil production in the Eastern Hemisphere, colonial officials began to look to infrastructure projects that could encourage commerce and industry in the places where the British still held sway. There was also pressure from local rulers for means to enrich their purse and give their treasuries leverage over an increasingly vocal merchant class. As part of this push for development, in the early 1950s, the British political officers commissioned a British engineering firm, Halcrow, to conduct a study of the Sharjah and Dubai Creeks to gauge their suitability to house a new harbour. Halcrow issued two reports, one for each emirate. The reports, at around twenty pages each, briefly described the economic significance of the two harbours and the prevailing marine conditions that could affect their design (tides, winds, currents, and the like), and considered the difficulties and costs of their engineering and construction.
Halcrow’s report on Dubai described its commerce as ‘entrepôt trade in European and Far Eastern commodities which are imported by oceangoing vessels and distributed over a wide area by local craft’. However, the harbour itself was silting, and the
ships anchor about a mile offshore and transfer cargo to lighters having a loaded draught of five feet, which are consequently able to enter the harbour only during periods of relative high tide. Storms are liable to arise suddenly and the risk of damage to lighters and cargoes is reflected in the high insurance rates operating.19
