them being such kickass women. Rafeef in particular has been a marvellous colleague and sounding board and friend throughout. I am grateful to Fahad Bishara, Rosie Bsheer, John Chalcraft, Neve Gordon, Toby Craig Jones, Johan Mathew, Catherine Rottenberg, and Al Withrow for reading the whole manuscript or substantial portions thereof and for giving exact and exacting, lucid, constructive feedback. John Gall made me re-write the introduction to appeal to an audience beyond academia. I am humbled by their patience, their generosity and their friendship.
In the glorious three years I set aside to be a student in a field I initially knew so little about, I visited a great many places and was aided by a great many people. Foremost among them were the officers and crew of the two CMA CGM container ships on which I travelled, Corte Real in February 2015 and Callisto in August 2016. The seafarers were, to a person, open, thoughtful, astute, patient, and immensely helpful in answering all my random questions and explaining the details of shipping work. Their insights about the ports we visited, about work aboard ships, about their lives and feelings at sea and at home, all flow through the veins of this book, even if I have not named them here, even in places where the subject or the time period seemingly doesn’t have anything to do with them. I also want to thank Horatio Clare, whose Financial Times piece published in advance of his beautiful Down to the Sea in Ships, made me realise I could travel on freighters as a passenger.
On shore, numerous lovely people gave of their time for interviews or port tours or introduced me to people they knew far away from London. Some of these interviews and visits were foundational or transformative for my thinking and this project. I especially want to thank Jairus Banaji (for perspicacious conversations and very useful introductions in Mumbai); Fahad Bishara (for sharing his Arabic language sources and scanning books and chapters and sending them along with the kind of generosity with one’s precious research materials I have rarely seen in the academy, and also for his stern corrections of immensely embarrassing errors in the first draft of the manuscript); Captain Roy Facey (who taught me many things about Aden and about the business of shipping); Lamya Harub (for introducing me to so many crucial people in Oman); Antony Joseph (of the Forward Seamen’s Union of India for an unforgettable introduction to and hospitality in Kerala); Simeon Kerr (for imparting his incisive insights in Dubai); Ryan Kim (for enlightening conversations about migrants’ rights in Manila); Bilal Malkawi (of ITF Middle East, for sharing his ideas and stories); Munzir Naqvi (for being such a great tour guide in Mumbai); Keith Nutall (then of Gulftainer, for a foundational visit to the port of Khor Fakkan); Vicente Rafael (for brilliant introductions in Manila); and Maria Rashid (for setting up such a productive interview for me in Karachi). Thank you to Sebastian Budgen for his terse emails, endless (and endlessly useful) references, and for wanting this book in the first place. Thanks are due to Eseld Imms for the amazing maps she has created for this book and for the website named after it. I am so impressed with the care and scrupulousness of my amazing copyeditor, Sarah Grey, and the rest of the wonderful Verso staff – especially Duncan Ranslem – for their efficiency and professionalism (and sense of humour).
Also thanks to the archivists at American University of Beirut, the British Petroleum archives, Durham University Archives, Georgetown University Archives, Imperial War Museum, the India Office Records, Liverpool Maritime Museum, London Metropolitan Archives, National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, the UK and US National Archives, the Trades Union Congress Archives at Warwick University; and the librarians and archivists at the American University of Beirut and the British Library. I could not quite believe it when the Economic and Social Research Council of Britain decided to fund this project and the delightful and enlightening fieldtrips, container ship journeys, and archival visits it entailed (ES/L002833/1). For that, I thank them. My immense gratitude to colleagues at my former employer, SOAS University of London, and especially Charles Tripp, for their generosity in allowing me such a long time away from the quotidian business of the Department. I have been generously invited to give talks at many places and hosted by many brilliant colleagues and friends. Your questioning, prodding, suggestions, criticisms, and conversations over wine or coffee or meals have sharpened my arguments here. I hope you recognise your intellectual contributions.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the people who make my extra-academic life a feast and therefore hospitable to teaching, research and writing, which, no matter how pleasurable, are after all work. Love and gratitude to Clare, Catherine and Neve, Katharine (and the B&M posse) in London, Kris in Washington, DC and Bret in Atlanta, Lisa Hajjar, Sonya Knox and the whole of the Beirut gang (in Lebanon and in exile), and last and definitely not least the original NYC gang – Leslie and Akiva, Jessica and Colin, Geoff and Alex, Jason and Nikki, Tanisha, and Heather – for the habits of friendship, conviviality, and commensality all through the decades. May and Pablo only get more hilarious, creative, brilliant, engaged and engaging, and a joy to be around the older they get. They have nothing to do with this project and that is just as it should be. And thank you Al, my ‘F1’, for your immense love and affection, magical companionship and fabulous storytelling, restorative breakfasts and salades niçoise, goofy jokes and terrible singing, and especially for the ridiculous amounts of fun we have.
Shipping statistics illuminate the contours of an astonishing story about contemporary capitalism and trade. Ninety per cent of the world’s goods travel by ship. Crude oil, carried in tankers, constitutes nearly 30 per cent of all maritime cargo; almost 60 per cent of world trade in oil is transported by sea. While containerised cargo accounts for some 23 per cent of all dry cargo by volume, it constitutes 70 per cent of all world cargo by value. But despite the aesthetic and political prominence of container shipping, 44 per cent of all dry-cargo shipping by volume is still bulk commodities (coal, grain, iron ore, bauxite, and phosphate rock).1 But these numbers do not give a sense of the scale of the ports exporting or receiving these cargoes. Nor do they give a sense of the tremendous transformations in maritime transportation that have remade the seas and the shores and the port cities. Today, working cargo harbours are no longer central to the lives of port cities. They are often far away, behind layers of barbed wire and security – invisible, even forgotten. As ports and ships become ever more distended, they have also aspired to automation, with fewer and fewer seafarers and stevedores.
On the map of global trade, China is now the factory of the world. A parade of ships full of raw commodities – iron ore, coal, oil – arrive in its ports, and fleets of container ships leave with manufactured goods in all directions. The oil that fuels China’s manufacturing comes primarily from the Arabian Peninsula. Much of the material shipped from China is transhipped through the ports of the Arabian Peninsula, Dubai’s Jabal Ali foremost among them. China’s ‘maritime silk road’ flanks the Peninsula on all sides. The Peninsula has long been a node of trade between Europe and Asia, and in the nineteenth century it became an irreplaceable British command post and anchorage on the route to India. But the transformations that the internationalisation of capital and the commodification of oil have wrought, including creating titanic maritime infrastructures, are something else altogether. This book is the story of these maritime infrastructures and how they work, then and now.
Cities of Salt is a magisterial novel about the coming of oil to Arabia. No other Arabic-language text chronicles the cataclysm of capital on the coasts of Arabia in such coruscating detail as Abdulrahman Munif – himself a petroleum engineer – did. In a scene recounted from the viewpoint of sceptical Arab observers standing on the shore of Qatif in Eastern Arabia, he describes the arrival of the petroleum-extraction equipment:
The traffic of ships never slowed or stopped. Some were small and others were as huge as mountains, and from these ships came endless new things – no one could imagine what they were or what they were for. With the cargoes that mounted and piled up came men from no one knew where, to do God only knew what. All day they unloaded the heavy cargoes, tied them with strong ropes and hoisted them higher than the ships themselves. Who was pulling them up? How were they raised? Everyone was possessed by numb fear as they watched
