Shipping and Empire around the Arabian Peninsula

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.

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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.

Stream via SoundCloud 

Contributor Bios

	Laleh Khalili is Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London, and the author of Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge 2007), Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford 2013), and Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso 2020).
	Matthew Ghazarian is an Eveillard Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Environmental Science and Policy at Smith College. His research examines the intersections of social, economic, and environmental history in the late Ottoman Empire.

Credits

Episode No. 531
Release Date: 1 October 2022
Sound production by Matthew Ghazarian
Music: "Um Pepino" by Blue Dot Sessions
Images and bibliography courtesy of Laleh Khalili

Further Listening

	Gökçe Günel	405 3/11/19	Status Quo Utopias in the UAE
	Michael Christopher Low	501 4/7/21	Ottoman Mecca and the Indian Ocean Hajj
	Nancy Um	453 3/6/20	Indian Ocean Exchange in Early Modern Yemen
	Fahad Ahmad Bishara	383 10/5/18	Islamic Law and Commerce in the Indian Ocean
	Nidhi Mahajan & Jeffery Dyer	318 6/20/17	Indian Ocean Connections

Images

The port of Jabal Ali in Dubai at dawn

The port of Khor Fakkan at sunset

Select Bibliography

Al-Nakib, Farah. Kuwait Transformed: A History of Oil and Urban Life (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univeristy Press, 2016)

Barak, On. Powering Empire: How Coal Made the Middle East and Sparked Global Carbonization (1826-1876) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020)

Bishara, Fahad. A Sea of Debt: Law and Economic Life in the Western Indian Ocean, 1780-1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)

Dua, Jatin. "Chokepoints: Temporalities of Navigation in the Red Sea."

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963)

Mathew, Johan. Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016)

Reisz, Todd. Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020)

Wright, Andrea. Between Dreams and Ghosts: Indian Migration and Middle Eastern Oil (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Univeristy Press, 2021)