Ottoman History Podcast - Shipping and Empire around the Arabian Peninsula

Episode Date: October 1, 2022

with Laleh Khalili hosted by Matthew Ghazarian | How did massive, modern shipping ports emerge from the sands of the Arabian Peninsula, and what they teach us about our present forms of global exchange? Combining historical research with site visits that included multiple voyages around the Arabian Peninsula, our guest Laleh Khalili sheds light on these questions in this two-part series on shipping and empire around the Arabian Peninsula. Through her investigation of the entangled realms of commerce, technology, and empire in the Indian Ocean world, Khalili shows how changes in any of one of them sparked associated changes in the others. In this first part, we focus on the period from the 16th century Ottoman entry into the region until decolonization in the 20th century, covering topics including the Hajj, disease, steam engines, ship laborers, Anglo-Ottoman rivalries, and the retreat of the British Empire after the Second World War. « Click for More »

Hello, this is Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Matt Gazarian. Today, we begin with the first part of a two-episode series on shipping and empire in the Indian Ocean with our guest Laleh Khalili, and I'm a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. I'm Alej Halili and I'm a professor of international politics at Queen Mary University of London. Dr. Halili is the author of Sinus of War and Trade, Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, out from Verso in 2020. In this first installment, we'll discuss shipping an empire around the Arabian Peninsula from the arrival of Ottoman rule until decolonization in the mid-20th century. We'll discuss how the spread of imperial forces and new forms of commerce went hand in hand. Empire facilitates the flourishing of the business of those merchants that were allied to the empire. But also there was a kind of a reciprocal

relationship between local mercantile capital and the empire. And we'll also discuss how it was not only the needs of empire that dictated technological development, but also how the needs of new technology dictated the course of empire. The process of technological change entails imperial expansion. And the process of imperial expansion entails technological change. So you've got technology, you've got empire, you've got the geography of refueling, and then of course you've got technology, you've got empire, you've got the geography of refueling, and then of course you've got the labor aboard the ships. We'll leave off with how the era of mid-20th century decolonization set the stage for the rise of mega ports in the Arabian Peninsula, where places like Dubai have grown into some

of the largest trading ports in the world. We started by discussing Professor Khalili's fieldwork, which involved two separate ships aboard cargo vessels bound for ports on the Arabian Peninsula. I mean, it is pretty extraordinary to be on this container ship. You get to move through seas and you get a sense of the difference in the topographies and the layouts of the ports. And of course, the climate, let's say in the Mediterranean versus the Red Sea versus, you know, the Gulf of Aden and onwards to the Gulf. This is all extraordinary. These trips included passage through the Suez Canal.

The Suez Canal has been massively securitized and it's much harder to get to it. And so to be actually able to travel through the canal twice was perhaps one of the highlights of my research life. Along the way, she had the opportunity to speak with seafarers about their experiences aboard trading vessels. research life. Along the way, she had the opportunity to speak with seafarers about their experiences aboard trading vessels. Conversations with those seafarers was absolutely one of the things that really distinguished those trips from anything else. And what was exciting about that was that, of course, the captain on the ship, on both the ships, they had been seafarers for more than 20 years, one of them, in fact, for more than 30 years. And so, in a sense, they had lived through traveling through those time zones, through those ports for decades.

And they had seen the transformations in ways that I wouldn't have otherwise been able to sort of grab onto. Then our conversation shifted towards history. Before asking about the transformations of the 19th century, I wanted to get a sense for what the Indian Ocean trade looked like before the advent of steam power. Of course, there was a very active and alive and vibrant trans-Indian Ocean set of trades between the coast of East Africa, Asia, and around the Arabian Peninsula, going all the way up to the Gulf, to Basra, and long before that, the port of Seraf, in what is close to Bandar Abbas in Iran today. And what moved between these ports were, of course, a whole series of agricultural goods, everything from timber and dates to pastoral goods like

sheep's hides, actually even other kinds of hides and leather that transported from different locations to different points. And, of course, important ores and fabrics, textiles, so silk and cotton, but also gold and various other kinds of metals that were needed for trade in that period of time. Since at least the 16th century with the Ottoman conquest of the Arabian Peninsula, the Ottomans had also been involved in the Indian Ocean world through their control of key Red Sea ports like Jeddah. I think that Jeddah was incredibly important, not only because it was a significant port in the Red Sea, but also because Jeddah was the port of Mecca. So it was this incredibly significant node of pilgrimage, particularly for the Ottomans, but also

eventually as the British ended up gaining a foothold on the Arabian Peninsula, also for the British. In the latter part of the 19th century, Jeddah's importance only grew with the arrival of more Hajj pilgrims, whose growing numbers raised the stakes of this port as a site of contested Ottoman and British power. In a previous episode of Ottoman History Podcast, my colleague Sam Dolby spoke with Michael Christopher Lowe about this increase in Hodge pilgrims. According to Lowe, there were, in the mid-19th century, maybe 50,000 total Hodge pilgrims, maybe 5,000 to 10,000 of them coming from South Asia. But by the end of the 19th century and into World War I, Hajj seasons had grown to four or even six times that amount, going to 200 or even 300,000 pilgrims per Hajj season.

The increasing arrivals of pilgrims, many of them from British India, only increased interactions between London and Istanbul over how to administer the Arabian Peninsula and its waterways. And then the contestations between the Ottomans and the British on the coast of the Red Sea. What you end up finding is that the Ottomans held the port. The British also dictated actually certain significant elements about the trade into the port. Because one of the things that the British were really interested in was the use of quarantines, not only in order to sort of ensure public health, they were worried about, for example, cholera spreading among the pilgrims during the hajj. But also because quarantines, like so many other kinds of public health measures were actually used as a modality

of control by the British. So at the same time, the Indian Ocean was a space of contestation between the Ottomans and the British. It was also a testing ground for new forms of public health and new forms of surveillance. That kind of a convergence of public health reasons and surveillance and coercion at the ports of the world where quarantine is used as an excuse to increase the state control and surveillance at the borders. Who can come in and who can't come in, what cargo can come in and what cargo can't come in. And at some stage, we'll also, of course, talk about the effects of quarantining on supply chains in our contemporary time. of quarantining on supply chains in our contemporary time. But certainly this was something that you saw even at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century in and around Jeddah. So as steam power facilitated an increase in Hajj pilgrims, it drove the emergence of new kinds of imperial contestation and control. I asked about the other changes that came with the advent of steam power. So that shift was at once a technological one and a political change. Obviously,

no technological change is ever going to be possible with a set of political or social underlying factors. The switch to steam was entirely bound up with British imperial expansion. I mean, one of the first bodies of ships that switched from sailing ships to steamships were the East India Company's ships. And then shortly thereafter, actually, the States also switches from sail to steam. And that sets the stage for the expansion of the British Empire, for the transformation of the British Empire as well, where it was reliant on the company state, if you will, or the sort of the corporate sovereign of the East India Company, becomes much more directly embedded in empire. And now why is that? Part of the reason for that is because if you are looking to float a ship using steam, you're going to have to have the fuel constantly replenished in order

for the ship to be able to operate over long distances. And of course, the fuel at that stage was coal. And as on Barrick, for example, is written about the age of coal, what we see is that the switch to coal from sail necessitated for the British Empire setting up coaling stations. And of course, that then translates into these strategic nodes throughout the route from England to the empire, to India in particular, where these coaling stations end up becoming nodes of empire. They become imperial way stations. And so some of the most important on these are, of course, Aden, but also Colombo in Sri Lanka, but also lots of island city-states. So, Santal Singapore. So you find that a lot of these places that end up becoming embedded in the empire as these kinds of archipelagic or insular expansions of the

empire tend to be coaling stations. So that's one of the things that's really important. The shift to coal drove the oceanic expansion of empire because that shift required coaling stations placed wherever the British Admiralty or British commercial interests saw fit. It is a kind of a self-perpetuating or self-reproducing process because the more that you are dependent on a steamship, the more it drives technologies, geographies, and routes that are going to be steam dependent. So to give you an example, when you have a steamship, the steamship is going to have a much easier time going through the Suez Canal. Why? Because the Suez Canal is known for transversal winds, so winds that blow across the canal, so at 90 degree angle to the canal.

And so if you've got a sailing ship, that sailing ship is not going to be able to go down the canal when a transversal wind is blowing it towards the side of the canal. And so you actually need a ship to operate under steam in order to be able to go down the canal. But then once you have more steamships coming through the canal, you need to have coaling stations at the two ends of the canal in order to ensure that. And then how are you going to carry the coal to the coaling stations? You're probably going to have to have new technologies and those steamships that are using the coal to become also carriers

for the coal, because some of those coaling stations, of course, didn't have access to indigenous supplies of coal. And so much of this coal was actually being mined in different locations and being transported to these coaling stations, which again perpetuated. It was like a self-perpetuating machine. So it's fascinating to see this kind of a process of technological change. But then when you actually come out of it, the process of technological change of technological change. But then when you actually come out of it, the process of technological change entails imperial expansion. And the process of imperial expansion

entails technological change. Aden and the Suez Canal are perhaps the best examples of this kind of a mutual reconstitution of technology and empire in that period. So it wasn't just that the expansion of empire demanded a new fleet of steamships and a new canal, but also that the steamships and the canal demanded that empire keep expanding. This shift from sail to steam also transformed labor regimes aboard ships.

Steamships required a different kind of labor than sailing ships as well. So you have stokers who are essentially working down in the engine and putting coal inside the engine, and you have trimmers who are bringing the coal from the coal storage within the ship to the stokehold. And so I think that this becomes completely and totally interwoven with geographically determinist, often quite racist, expressions of what kind of people could work in those stokeholds. And so the literature is full of this.

The contemporaneous literature is full of this, where steamships, for example, the people that were operating them were expecting that the people who were going to be working in the stokeholds were going to be people from the colonized areas in the tropics. were going to be people from the colonized areas in the tropics, because supposedly the people that are working in the tropics have a better constitution for working in those stokeholds. And so you see an expansion of recruiting for those positions on steamships from places like Somalia and Aden, where of course, it's also conveniently on the route towards the empire. And so you see also that transformation happening in the labor regimes aboard the ships as well. So you've got technology, you've got empire, you've got the geography of refueling, and then of course you've got the labor aboard the ships. Although the spread of new shipping practices brought new systems of discrimination and control,

empires just as often latched on to pre-existing versions of those systems. Empires just as often latched on to pre-existing versions of those systems. So perhaps the single most important transformation that happens is this extractive process that was already underway because empire ends up expanding. And it ends up in some way sw expansion onto existing modalities of exchange. And those existing modalities of exchange not only entail different kinds of goods that were being transported across the waters, but also, for example, court systems, security systems, forms of exchange of currencies or promises of exchange. And of course, as for example, Fahad Bishara has shown in his exquisite magisterial book, very important in this was forms of enforcement of contracts. And so the empire benefited from these pre-existing relations of trade. The arrival and commingling of imperial systems with pre-existing systems of

trade and exchange meant that some ports actually saw increased activity while others were sidelined according to imperial and commercial interest. Some ports are promoted. There is a lot of imperial investment in those ports. There's a lot of imperial attention to those ports, some of it quite negative because often that kind of exchange comes hand in hand with forms of coercion. And some ports are then sort of driven down and become less and less important. So for example, because of British access to Basra, Basra becomes much more important than Siraf. Aden, which had been important, let's say, at the beginning of the second millennium AD, then, which had been important, let's say, at the beginning of the second millennium AD,

had retreated a bit as being as an important port. But then from the 19th century onwards, it becomes the fourth most important fueling port in the world. And so in a way, you can see the effects of empire in these places. But again, as Indian Ocean historians have shown, a lot of that imperial expansion, a lot of that recreation of these ports as nodes of imperial trade depended on pre-existing socioeconomic and political relations that shaped these ports over the course of millennia before that. To get a better sense of these pre-existing relationships, we spoke a bit about the local and regional traders who stood to gain from the spread of commercial empires around the Arabian Peninsula. One of the things that becomes very clear is the extent to which both local and regional

commercial capital actually also benefited from the empire. So the empire facilitates the flourishing of the business of those merchants that were allied to the empire. And these forms of local alliance, some of these merchants, for example, came from Bombay. Many of them were Parsis, for example. Some were Gujaratis. There was an entire thriving community of Indian Ocean merchants who operated within the domain, within the milieu of the empire, and who benefited from it, and who often actually defended the empire. So there was a kind of a reciprocal relationship between local merchant, mercantile capital, and the empire. Dr. Khalili drew a parallel between this alliance of local power and commercial empires in the 19th century to the 20th century development of megaports and

other parts of the Arabian Peninsula. And one sees elements of this persisting. I mean, that is exactly how empires operate. And if we look at the modernized, mechanized ports of the UAE or Qatar or Oman, very similar kinds of relationships persist. I mean, capital is still emanating from a lot of different places. And obviously, there's a lot more local capital that is being invested in these big mechanized ports. But there's also the Europeans and now, of course, the Americans also benefit. You know, we are still living in this kind of a metropolitan set of exchanges.

And you can see that still persisting in a lot of the Arabian Peninsula. So you see empire stepping in and not completely remaking things, but latching onto and salvaging whatever is useful for it in pre-existing networks of trade or networks of power. kind of part of the machinery of the empire, were pre-existing relationships. I mean, it's also important to note that alongside all of this, there is an entire set of vibrant economies that sometimes come parallel to this, sometimes actually intersect with these sets of imperial exchanges, and sometimes completely work in completely parallel tracks, never once joining. And those

relationships persist. But I do think more often than not, that that intersection happens. And that intersection happens even up to today, if I can sort of jump a little bit historically and chronologically, one of the things that, for example, Jatin Dua has shown in his amazing work on the Red Sea exchanges, and also on Djibouti in particular, is the extent to which this kind of a modern, major, massive, containerized set of trades that we come to associate with modern forms of trade, it coexists extremely harmoniously, though of course also exploitatively, with the Do trade. A Do is a smaller trading vessel traditionally powered by sales. A dough is a smaller trading vessel traditionally powered by sales. Which we tend to associate with, let's say, more regional, more local forms of exchange.

But the dough trade depends on the containerized trade. And the containerized trade also actually benefits from the way that these forms of smaller, more regional forms of exchange that the Doe trade facilitates actually allows for expansion of the larger secondary or tertiary markets for the goods that the container ships deliver. Does also continue to operate in the Indian Ocean world today. I mean, a lot of them are now motorized. So they all have also engines that I think run on diesel. And so you find that these those have the shape of the old bakalas and other kinds of ships that were constructed, and they are still constructed. But many of them switched from wood to metal hulls and switched from sailing

vessels to operating under engine. And in fact, if people travel to any of the major ports in the Gulf or along the coast of the Arabian Peninsula or along the coast of South Asia or indeed East Africa. You'll find localized ports where these does are actually thriving. And whenever they arrive, you know, there's a huge amount of local trade that happens in those areas and the parts of the harbor where they are allowed to engage in exchange. The persistence of the Doe trade shows how there were still some continuities through this era of new maritime powers and new forms of exchange. Coming to the era of decolonization, we discussed anti-colonial struggles and how they triggered shifts in resource allocations and distributions of businesses across the region. The shift that happens comes in the moment of decolonization in the mid-20th century.

And I think after the extraordinary anti-colonial struggle of the people in Aden, and the end of 1967, once the British withdraw from Aden, or forced to withdraw from Aden, you see that the business, for example, of shipping of British maritime capital, of insurance companies, of banking around finance, all of this stuff ends up shifting from Aden to Dubai, but also to Bahrain in particular, and to some extent to Kuwait. But what you also see within the Gulf itself is also the competition and contestation between the different Emirates in trying to either maintain a degree of independence and autonomy from the British, or to operate within the sort of the orbit of the British in such a way as to protect the

ruling families of these places. And the most striking example of this, which I write about, but Todd Rice has also written about it in his book about Dubai, is the competition between the emirs of Sharjah and Dubai. The emir of Sharjah in the 1950s and 1960s was drawing much closer to the Arab nationalist movement, which of course concerned the British, who were very affronted by the Arab nationalism of that period, not least because of the nationalization of the Suez Canal. So the emir of Sharjah drawing near to Nasser was an affront to the British. And so the British, because they controlled the investment in and engineering works in these ports, are actually punishing Sharjah by, for example, allowing its harbor to be silted up for not funding or trying to find funding for engineering works, which would

allow these harbors to continue serving ships that were getting bigger and bigger and bigger as time was going on. And instead, putting focus, for example, on Dubai, because the Emir of Dubai was much more comfortable being a client of the British. Alongside all of that, there's also a lot of machination that is going on that the British are involved in, in devising, for example, laws and regulations around not only the construction of the ports, but who gets to come into the ports, which ships get to come into the ports, and around labor on the docks. And I think that all of those kinds of contentious and contested relationships at all levels is what shapes the emergence of some ports in that period. And of course,

some of the ports that emerge in that period as incredibly important and significant ports remain so, others recede a bit. So Bahrain was enormously important to the way that the British operated, in particular in the 1940s and 50s. It becomes much less important than Dubai, for example, in the 60s and 70s. So you do see these transformations happening. And there's a lot of both strategic and economic thinking that goes into devising ways that exchange operated through these ports. Laleh Khalili, thank you very much for joining us on the podcast today. It's been really enjoyable, Matthew. Thank you. In this first installment of our two-part series,

we discussed two major forces that shaped the history of trade around the Arabian Peninsula from the early modern period into the 20th century. One of them was political, Anglo-Ottoman rivalries, and the other technological, the impact of new shipping technologies like steam. discussed how these political and technological transformations brought about new kinds of exchange, labor relations, and by the mid-20th century, new shipping centers that arose from the ashes of colonial empires. In the second installment of this series on empire and shipping in the Middle East, we'll discuss ecology, war, and COVID's impact on logistics in this region and beyond. For more information, check out Laleh Halili's book, Sinus of War and Trade, out from Verso in 2020. You can also visit us at ottomanhistorypodcast.com,

where you can find more information, a select bibliography, and related episodes. Until next time, take care.