master plan was put forward. Like so many other ports in the region, it displays a gaping chasm between the discourse of preservation and the practice of port-building.
The story of Dubai is emblematic of other port-states of the British Empire. Dubai may be ridiculed as a kind of mirage in the desert and an embodiment of hubris, but neither its headlong rush to capitalisation nor its mercantile history nor even its ignominious story of exploitation of migrant workers and hierarchies of expertise and management are too dissimilar from Singapore or Hong Kong. In its constant scramble for ever-deeper harbours; in its ruthless moulding, whittling, and carving up of sea into land and land into more land; in its stories of colonial control and decision-making; even in the self-serving legends told about its visionary local leaders, Dubai is like so many other nodes in the great matrix of commerce and capital worldwide. As Jabal Ali rises, Port Rashid becomes something else – serving passengers, not cargo, while the commerce seeping from the skin of Jabal Ali’s vast port and free zone keeps the engines of dhows, feeder ships, intermodal transport vehicles, and even air cargo well-lubricated.
With the transformations of Ports Rashid and Zayed in the Emirates and Port Qabus in Muscat into cruise-ship ports, as in other ports throughout the Peninsula and beyond, old ports close to the cities and embedded in the thriving life of the urban quarters begin to disappear or cease functioning in the lively way they had done at their inauguration. In his account of the decline of European ports, Allan Sekula writes:
Harbors are now less havens (as they were for the Dutch) than accelerated turning basins for supertankers and containerships. The old harbour front, its links to a common culture shattered by unemployment, is now reclaimed for a bourgeois reverie on the mercantilist past. Heavy metals accumulate in the silt … The backwater becomes the frontwater. Everyone wants a glimpse of the sea.37
The new cargo ports that replace city-centre ports are vast, securitised, and far from the heart of the city, nearly impossible to access. The transformation of the old ports into places of entertainment, consumption, and tourism resonates with the inception of semi-automated cargo ports. ‘Technology, trade and tourism’ (the motto of Dubai), the far port, the ‘accelerated turning basins’, environmental impact assessments as afterthoughts, and automation are all fundamental to the working of economies of these modern free ports, where ecological degradation and exploitation of labour are obscured in the haze of efficient commercial functioning and the technological sublime of colourful cargo boxes. So much of this history is tinged by colonial decision-making.
Aden has a different story. In 1837, the East India Company’s Court of Directors agreed to convert their ships to steam to escape the directional tyranny of the monsoon winds.38 Captain Stafford Bettesworth Haines set off to survey the coasts of Arabia and first alighted on the island of Soqotra. When, after a scant few months, Soqotra’s harbour and climate proved inhospitable, Haines decided that Aden would be a useful refuelling port for steamships on their way to Suez and overland to Alexandria. A pretext was needed to conquer Aden. The grounding of a Bombay ship that was looted by locals (probably in collusion with its owner, for insurance takings) provided the excuse. Aden was occupied in 1839 by the warships of the British governorate of Bombay under the command of Haines himself, citing ‘outrage against’ women passengers of the stranded ship. Haines was then appointed Political Agent of Aden by the Bombay Presidency of the East India Company, and went on to transform Aden into a coal depot and naval base to serve the Company’s Indian Ocean trade. Beyond using Aden as a strategic refuelling outpost, however, successive governments of Bombay (whether ruled through a corporation or the empire) were not interested in developing the Aden harbour for commerce and even rejected a local proposal to build a new wharf there in the early twentieth century.39
Aden’s crucial strategic value was predicated on it being one of the most important coaling stations in the world, at one point bunkering more ships than any other port besides London, Liverpool, and New York City. To protect their strategic outpost from Yemeni tribes, the British created a buffer zone, a bulwark of ‘British troops, mostly Indian’ around the port city.40 The port itself had always been a multilingual place of work for lighterers and fishermen (prominent among them Somalis) and for traders from the four corners of the world.41
Once the Suez Canal opened in 1869, the strategic position of Aden and its fine, deep natural harbour made it even more important to the British. It was easily the empire’s most indispensable strategic node east of Suez at the time. Like so many other city-states, it had been absorbed by the empire as an outpost in the ocean, in a chain of port cities from Gibraltar to Hong Kong that bolstered British trade in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In his account of visiting the Arabian Peninsula in the 1920s, Ameen Rihani described Aden’s two important commercial sites:
the one for replenishing steam-power, the other for guiding at night; the one consists of black piles rising in squares and pyramids near the water and adding a touch of realism to the inferno of Steamer Point, the other stands aloft, above all the heights, housed in a circular tower, protected with glass, and made articulate with colours. King Coal, the Harbour Light, and the Electric Wire, here is Aden’s trinity of materialism.42
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
