and the port city once known as the world’s coaling station was now one of the most important oil-bunkering ports in the world. Nizan described oil throbbing through the veins of the port:
In the great, open port between Steamer Point and Maala, there is tremendous activity. The liners of the P. and O. and the Messageries Maritimes clear a path for themselves through a tangle of peeling freighters, tankers, motor boats, and Arab [dhows] … The oil flows through big, jointed pipes that run just below the surface of the water, like sea serpents – the only authentic ones. The oil feeds the ships’ tanks.
Not so long ago, Aden was a coaling station. Oil brought with it offices, docks, the black tanks of the Anglo-Persian and Asiatic Petroleum, and intrigues that rouse the emotions of the little potentates who have become sellers of oil and buyers of gasoline for automobiles. A little war for concessions is spreading all around.47
After India’s independence, Aden’s significance as a trade hub, a bunkering port, and a strategic outpost for the British increased still further. Its location bolstered Britain’s waning supremacy over trade routes that brought oil and commodities to the war-wrecked metropole. In 1954, a former diplomat’s description of Aden saw it as handling
more trade than any other city in Arabia. By virtue of a good harbour, the business acumen of its merchants, and the fact that it is a free port, Aden controls an extensive market, embracing the territories of Aden Protectorates, Yemen, Ethiopia, and the Somaliland. Furthermore, it is a worldwide entrepôt centre on the routes to South Africa and Singapore.48
But the same free-port status that made it such a good transhipment port also prevented it from developing domestic industries; much of the profit from merchant trade was repatriated to the home countries of these merchants.49
Events in the region only underlined the geopolitical and geoeconomic significance of Aden. When Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (British Petroleum) in 1951, the company lost access to its largest refinery in the world in Abadan. It constructed a replacement refinery in Aden which refined Kuwaiti petroleum into marine fuel oils. The Aden Port Trust was happy to welcome the new refinery. It provided a vast tract of land to the company and promised that the ‘cost of reclaiming the land would be borne by the Port Trust and rent charged at 6 per cent per annum on the cost of area required’.50 The reclaimed land was built on ‘dredging spoils’ and the company dictated how much water frontage it needed.
The coming of the refinery to Aden further consolidated Aden’s position as a petroleum bunkering port. Constant improvement ensured that the port’s infrastructure kept up with the enlarging ships and their expanding numbers. In 1956, just before the closure of the Suez Canal in the tripartite war against Egypt, it was decided that the traffic in the harbour necessitated further expansion of the port. This massive project of engineering entailed the construction of two colossal quay walls built from concrete and connected to the Ma’alla wharf, as well as ‘excavation and dumping into the sea of over half a million tons of rock to form retaining embankments’ to hold the prodigious volumes of dredged materials from the harbour.51
All this construction required far more skilled labour than past forms of building and assembly, giving workers more leverage than ever before, which foreshadowed the coming anticolonial struggles.52 The strikes and political mobilisation that began in the 1950s had intensified by the 1967 War. The closures of the Suez Canal in 1956 and 1967 were felt swiftly and deeply in Aden, sharpening the struggle against the British. By the end of 1967, the British had abandoned Aden and the southern Yemeni hinterland. The formation of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) was accompanied by a catastrophic economic collapse in which over 80,000 workers migrated to the Gulf and to East Africa, another 20,000 Adenese became unemployed, and the port economy was shattered.53 In the space of a year, port traffic reduced to only one-fifth of its previous volume, with Dubai’s Port Rashid picking up much of Aden’s trade and bunkering business.54
The reopening of the Suez Canal in 1975 provided some relief as the bunkering business picked up again. To acknowledge this upturn, the World Bank lent Yemen US$16.8 million that year to improve the port in Aden. Over the course of the next two decades, Aden regained some of its former business, but it was surpassed in size and significance by the ports of the Gulf. The next chapter in the development of the port brought regional capital into Aden. In 2008, Yemen signed a contract with Dubai Ports World which stipulated DP World’s investment of US$220 million to improve the port and increase port capacity and throughput. When, in 2012, it became clear that DP World had not increased capacity or throughput (and had likely diverted traffic away from Aden to Jabal Ali), the Yemeni government paid the company off to cancel its concession.
United Arab Emirates returned to Yemeni ports in 2015, when a coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE attacked Yemen. The very first act of the coalition was to shut down the ports of Aden and Hodeidah and halt all commercial activity. Port facilities throughout the country were laid to waste through repeated bombardment. The naval blockade and the destruction of the ports, particularly Hodeidah in 2017, led to starvation, a cholera epidemic, and a catastrophic shortage of medicine. The coalition prevented aid cargoes from arriving in ports, even if ports had been functioning to take delivery of food and medicine. Oblivious to the devastation and heedless of having been kicked out of Aden a scant three years before, the CEO of DP World offered to restore the port: ‘We are exploring areas where we can help our near neighbours in their efforts to restore critical marine and trade infrastructure at Aden and look forward to developing our discussions in the immediate future.’55 A coercive conquest was once again presented as a project of development.
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
