Maritime trade is unavoidable in any analysis of the explosion in global flows of commodities over the past centuries. Tracing the history of such trade into the present, however, presents a major difficulty: as logistics spaces have increased in importance, the more invisible they have become. Urban port districts used to form a vibrant and potentially explosive meeting point of different types of itinerant laborers, merchants, industrialists, and state officials; by contrast, the ports of twenty-first-century capitalism are highly securitized, separated from residential zones by razor-wire fences, no man's lands, and surveillance cameras, and often presided over by entirely different legal codes. Such securitization has made it difficult to situate more recent histories of maritime logistics in the hinterland societies to which they were formerly so richly connected. This is especially the case for the Arabian Peninsula, where a central position in the global flow of fossil fuels has spurred military responses to logistics risk. To overcome the separation between the maritime historiography of the Indian Ocean and the hinterland historiography of the Arabian Peninsula's oil polities, Laleh Khalili's Sinews of War and Trade offers both academics and the general public a view behind the razor wire. Describing her project as an “amphibious history”, Khalili not only blurs the historiographic boundaries between sea and land, but also between empire and nation state across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
Concretely, this means tracing the power struggles that shaped shipping to and from the Arabian Peninsula. The first chapter shows how shipping routes are not simply the fastest journey between two points, but are durable patterns contingent upon power relations, technological change, pilgrimage practices, and physical infrastructure. Routes find material expression in admiralty charts, fueling stations, canals, and undersea cables. In the age of empire, they formed an information network integrating metropole and colonies. Routes interact with technology in unexpected ways. The wartime closure of the Suez Canal led to the construction of much larger crude oil carriers to sail around the Cape of Good Hope; after the wars had ended, the canal reopened, but the ships were too large to pass through. Most interestingly, Khalili describes how financial instruments and shipping routes mutually constituted one another. In the nineteenth century, empires encouraged the formation of cartels to manage route prices; since the 1970s, freight rates and futures contracts have been compiled into route-specific index funds. Together, cartels and financial markets allocate the maritime resources underpinning the global flow of oil.
In the second, third, and fourth chapters, Khalili delves deeper into the shifting alliances between capitalists and states by detailing the creation of landside infrastructure. Here, she shows the continuities and disruptions from nineteenth-century empire to twenty-first-century capitalism, with imperial extraction networks repurposed and expanded for oil. The Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) and the Saudi state established Dammam as a major oil terminal, Dubai leveraged its relationship to the British Empire to build out a cargo hub, while Aden suffered from a British capital strike during Yemen's struggle for independence. Geopolitics was accompanied by geoengineering. The shallow seas of the Persian Gulf have been dredged, and massive quantities of rough riverbed sand have been shipped from elsewhere to reclaim land. The ports are serviced by road and rail connections into the hinterland, again riven by axes of power. Linking potentially rebellious regions to logistics hubs integrated them into post-colonial states, and never failed to draw the attention of foreign corporations and militaries. Just as the sea was transformed into physical infrastructure to service trade, so harbors were transformed into legal categories. Free ports, arbitration tribunals, flags of convenience, and offshore privatizations allocate logistics rights and rewards. Khalili uses the fascinating case of Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis to show how global power transforms sovereignty. When, in 1958, US military and corporate interests objected to Saudi Arabia granting a monopoly concession to Onassis, an arbitration tribunal in Switzerland ruled that the earlier contract with Aramco had precedence over Saudi sovereignty.
Although located far from the public eye, the logistics infrastructure Khalili describes is never lifeless. The people who animate it form the subjects of Chapters Five to Seven. She describes the tangled webs of merchant families familiar from the Indian Ocean historiography. Merchant firms relied on contact with technocrats through successive phases of empire, nationalization, and global financialization, spawning corporate forms that blended state and capital. Such networks could be leveraged to suppress labor organizing, as when an Aramco officer thanked the Saudi royal family for an anti-strike law in the 1960s. Despite repression, workers did organize into unions, with varying degrees of politicization, and could derive social power from their position in the logistics chain, either to disrupt it or to connect struggles in different locations. Geographies of worker power intersected with geographies of capital: Khalili shows that companies’ recruitment structures follow imperial routes that long predate oil, and are subject to racializing laws and indentured contracts pioneered in the nineteenth century. In the final chapter, she shifts her attention to soldiers and military planners, describing how war generated new logistics formations. For instance, during the succession of Gulf Wars starting with the Iran–Iraq War, missiles manufactured in Western Europe and the United States were directed at oil tankers, spurring the further securitization and militarization of trade routes. US and British military bases dot the shores of the peninsula, creating profitable circuits for such military–logistics conglomerates as DHL.
Like the logistics systems it describes, the book sets out distributed narrative nodules that lack a clear center. As Khalili writes in the introduction, she wanted the book “to tell stories” without synthesizing them into a more general argument. She makes use of a varied and innovative methodology to assemble these stories. Her work in newspaper archives and court records is combined with hands-on experience on a freight ship and interviews with workers. This blend of ethnography, oral history, and workers’ inquiry gave her a sense of the concrete labor practices that go into otherwise abstract logistics networks, and infuses her narratives with humanity. She has an acute eye for the injuries, inequalities, and resiliencies in the labor undergirding global trade.
Her decentralized distribution of stories depicts the contingent entanglements of logistics, war, labor, and law in a highly readable way, but they leave the reader to evaluate the broader connections and implications. What conclusions can we draw about the geographic transformations driven by such a dizzying array of conflicts? One theme that runs through the book is extraction: Khalili's provocative use of “accumulation by dispossession” to describe land reclamation for harbor projects, as well as her discussion of how suboceanic resources are claimed in international law, raises interesting questions about the importance of territorial dispossession not just for capital accumulation but also for facilitating trade. Another theme is the co-production of states and global trade networks, but Khalili does not explicitly engage with the extensive literature linking oil extraction and militarized state-formation on the Arabian Peninsula, leaving the reader to decide which of the conflicts she describes was the most decisive. What was the relative importance of imperial competition as compared to resistance from below in the creation of militarized states? How have logistics workers shaped the political geography of the peninsula? A more specific example that could be thought about systematically is Khalili's argument about shipping cartels and freight prices, echoing concerns in the economic historiography of “globalization”. What was the effect of cartelization relative to changing turnover times under technological, managerial, and financial pressures? How have empire and capital interacted to create certain types of markets, and what have the effects been on the allocation of trade resources?
To link up Khalili's various themes and narratives, it might be useful to think about the dynamics and interrelations of various types of capitalism: merchant; industrial; imperial; neoliberal; extractive; and war capitalism. Khalili avoids typologizing, but her book could provide an opportunity to reassess these categories from the ground up. By focusing on the continuities and disruptions of space, the book shows that war capitalism continued to suffuse industrial capitalism, and that merchant capitalism remained an important force throughout. It stands as an important reminder, accessible to readers beyond academia, of how the legacy of empire is materialized in the logistics landscapes of twenty-first-century capitalism.
