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 islands marked as incomplete while recognisable in their duplication of the contours of other Palm islands further up the coast. Unfinished terminals and breakwaters also appear on the map. The port, heaving with activity and exhaling haze and pollution, is constantly metamorphosing, expanding, convulsing with production and trade.
The material needed for all this construction and manufacture had to come from somewhere, especially as the pace of commerce, town planning, and the fashioning of infrastructures gathered in the 1960s and 1970s, raising the demand for cement and sand, aggregate and stone. The UAE did not acquire a cement factory until 1975.34 Most of the cement was imported from Japan and other sources. Even the sand and stone required for the construction of harbours in Abu Dhabi and Dubai had to come from somewhere. Ghalilah and Khor Khwair in the poorer northern emirate of Ras al-Khaimah became the source for aggregate for construction in 1963 and thereafter.35 The first jetties in Ras al-Khaimah were built at the behest of Abu Dhabi in 1966, to facilitate the extraction of aggregate for the construction of Abu Dhabi’s Port Zayed. The proximity of Ras al-Khaimah’s quarries in the mountains to the new jetty on the shore and the quality of the mountain rocks, rich in silicate and limestone, made the emirate an ideal source for construction material. Precisely because these construction materials were so precious and so necessary for the expansion of the UAE’s infrastructures, extracting them was not without conflict. Local groups clashed with one another and with the ruler over rights of access and profits from their richer southern neighbour’s exploitation of these coveted commodities.36
The building of harbours and ports in the UAE has grown apace. Today, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Fujairah, and Ras al-Khaimah all have major oceangoing ports as well as a number of smaller harbours and oil terminals on and offshore. In 2012, Abu Dhabi inaugurated Port Khalifa, a mere seventy kilometres south of Dubai’s Jabal Ali. Port Khalifa replaces Port Zayed, which is centrally located within the city of Abu Dhabi, and will soon be ‘redeveloped’. Abu Dhabi has clearly followed the precedent set by Jabal Ali: a vast free zone (Khalifa Industrial Zone Abu Dhabi, or Kizad) benefitting from proximity to an oceangoing port with deep channels. Whether Khalifa will ever be as significant a cargo port as Jabal Ali has to do not only with economic calculations and incentives but also the push and pull between the rival emirates. Khalifa itself is built on land reclaimed from the sea and sits astride forty million cubic metres of materials dredged from the access channels and harbour area. Although its construction included a breakwater meant to protect a rare coral reef near the site, an environmental impact assessment by Halcrow produced at the start of the project indicated that there was very little environmental data available as a baseline. Nor had there been
