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³ Dubai is an emirate within the federation of the United Arab Emirates (the UAE), which came into existence in 1971, following British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf. Prior to its consolidation as an independent nation, the different chiefdoms and port cities of the UAE were called the Trucial States. Although lodged territorially within the UAE, Dubai has tremendous decision-making powers of its own and runs its own government, making it a city-state, akin to Singapore or Hong Kong.

⁴ ‘Anecdotes of smuggling into and out of the Port of Bombay during the late 1930s and the Second World War’: undated notes, author unknown, describing attempts by smugglers of gold, silver, jewellery, and narcotics, to foil the Bombay Customs Department, IOR/Mss/Eur/C446. Also see ‘Patrick Brian Sweeney Papers’, IOR/Mss/Eur/D1169.

⁵ I base my argument on the trans-regional economy of smuggling in the western Indian Ocean on the concept of an intermediate scale, as articulated by Engseng Ho. For details, see Ho, E., ‘Afterword: Mobile law and thick transregionalism’, Law and History Review 32, no. 4 (2014), pp. 883–889CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ A national economy celebrated as the new norm in the post-war world was no unfamiliar concept to the Indians who had fought the struggle for independence, to a large extent, on economic grounds. For a quick overview, see Goswamy, Manu, Producing India: From colonial economy to national space (London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 209–241CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ For scholarship that puts the state at the centre of the debate on smuggling, see Vaidyanathan, A., ‘Consumption of gold in India: Trends and determinants’, Economic and Political Weekly 34, no. 8 (1999), pp. 471–476Google Scholar; Sen, Sunanda, ‘Smuggling exchange controls and Indian economy’, Economic and Political Weekly 10, no. 5/7 (1975), pp. 205–216Google Scholar; Bhagwati, Jagdish and Hansen, Bent, ‘A theoretical analysis of smuggling’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 87, no. 2 (1973), pp. 172–187CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ K. C. Khanna, ‘Gulf sheikhdoms too rich to revolt’, The Times of India, 16 November 1958.

⁹ William Tuohy, ‘Dubai's golden fleece’, The Guardian, 13 January 1971.

¹⁰ Colin Chapman, ‘The richest man in the world’, The Observer, 16 April 1975.

¹¹ Khanna, ‘Gulf sheikhdoms’, p. 6.

¹² Exceptions have been economists but, as stated earlier, their framework has not exceeded the state and its economic policies.

¹³ Some essays from this extensive body of scholarship include Weiner, Myron, ‘International migration and development: Indians in the Persian Gulf’, Population and Development Review 8, no. 1 (1982), pp. 1–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Birks, J. S. and Sinclair, C. A., ‘International labour migration in the Arab Middle East’, Third World Quarterly 1, no. 2 (1979), pp. 87–99CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Seccombe, Ian J., ‘Labour migration to the Arabian Gulf: Evolution and characteristics 1920–1950’, Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies) 10, no. 1 (1983), pp. 3–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Fuccaro, Nelida, Histories of city and state in the Persian Gulf: Manama since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Onley, James, The Arabian frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, rulers, and the British in the nineteenth-century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Markovits, Claude, The global world of Indian merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gupta, Ashin Das and Dasgupta, Uma, The world of the Indian Ocean merchant, 1500–1800: Collected essays of Ashin Das Gupta (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Chaudhuri, K. N., Trade and civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An economic history from the rise of Islam to 1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chaudhuri, K. N., Asia before Europe: Economy and civilisation of the Indian Ocean from the rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

¹⁶ For work on globalization and the city both as its instrument and most perceptible material form, see Amin, Ash and Thrift, Nigel, Cities: Reimagining the urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002)Google Scholar; Sassen, Saskia, ‘Introduction’, in Global networks: Linked cities, (ed.) Sassen, Saskia (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–36Google Scholar; Sassen, S., The global city: New York, London, Tokyo (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Castells, Manuel, The informational city: Information technology, economic restructuring and the urban-regional process (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Leonard, Karen, ‘South Asians in the Indian Ocean world: Language, policing, and gender practices in Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 3 (2006), pp. 677–686CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Vora, Neha, Impossible citizens: Dubai's Indian diaspora (London: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 91–116CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ This narrative was crafted out of a series of interviews undertaken by the author with Maghanmal Pancholia in Dubai in December 2011.

²⁰ The Thattai Bhatias had a presence in the Persian Gulf much earlier than the colonial period, and were one of the earliest communities to settle in Muscat and parts of present-day Iran. For details, see Markovits, The global world, pp. 10–12.

²¹ See Chapter VIII of the Administrative Report of the Persian Gulf for the Year 1929, File No. 192-S in Vol. 158-N (1930), Secret Department, NAI. Also see Al-Sayegh, Fatma, ‘Merchants’ role in a changing society: The case of Dubai, 1900–90’, Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 1 (1998), p. 94CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Morsy, Abdullah, The United Arab Emirates: A modern history (London: Croon Helm, 1978), p. 104Google Scholar.

²² ‘Policy on the Arab side of the Persian Gulf’, File No. 194-N/39 Serial No. (1) of External Affairs Department, Secret Department (1939), NAI.

²³ IOR/R/15/1/281.

²⁴ Defence Policy in the Gulf, IOR/R/15/2/762.

²⁵ For a brief idea of the departments involved in the administration of the Persian Gulf increasingly becoming a part of the Middle East for bureaucrats in London, refer to IOR/L/PS/18/B34.

²⁶ For details, see File No. 20 (6)—E.T/41 of July 4, 1941, Department of Commerce, Government of India, in File No. 15 (94)-W of 1941 (Secret), Near Eastern Department, NAI.

²⁷ Control of Exports from Trucial Coast and Oman, IOR/R/15/2/772.

²⁸ These bars were in units of 10 tolas, weighing a little less than a quarter of a pound and costing as much as US$ 150 in Dubai. A tola is an Indian measure equivalent to roughly 0.375 troy ounce.

²⁹ Magabha and a Dubai-based Arab, whose family he remains in contact with, helped him to test the purity of gold, which ranged anywhere between 21 to 24 carats. For more details, see his reflections on life as a merchant in Dubai: Pancholia, Magabha, Footprints: Memoirs of an Indian patriarch (Dubai: Motivate, 2009), pp. 53–54Google Scholar.

³⁰ Kothari, Rita, The burden of refuge: Partition experiences of the Sindhis of Gujarat (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2009), pp. 68–113Google Scholar.

³¹ Buxani, Ram, Taking the High Road (Dubai: Motivate Publishing, 2003)Google Scholar.

³² For details, see Currency in Arab Sheikhdoms, IOR/R/15/2/379; and Bahrain Intelligence Summary, IOR/R/15/2/320.

³³ The discussion on how the prolonged life of the rupee reinforced gold smuggling circuits throughout the 1970s and 1980s solicits a different kind of enquiry and is beyond the scope of this article.

³⁴ Miller, William H., British India Steam Navigation Company liners (Gloucestershire: Camberley Publishing, 2014)Google Scholar.

³⁵ Part of the reason the British were anxious to restore shipping in the Persian Gulf was to capture their markets lost to Japan during the war. For details, see IOR/R/15/2/369. For a brief period, the British managed to do well, but by the 1960s the Japanese had more or less regained their position, while the Americans gradually consolidated their markets.

³⁶ For details, refer to the confidential report on smuggling prepared by Patrick Fyere, commercial officer at the Political Agency, Dubai: ‘External relations’, in Annual records of the Gulf, UAE, 1962 (Slough: Archive Editions, 1993), pp. 514–518Google Scholar.

³⁷ For details, see Bott, Sandra, ‘South African gold at the heart of the competition between the Zurich and London gold markets at a time of global regulation, 1945–68’, in The global gold market and the international monetary system from the late 19th century to the present: Actors, networks, power, (ed.) Bott, Sandra (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 109–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁸ Both the Swiss and the French took a liberalized approach to gold trading in spite of IMF sanctions. Accordingly Swiss banks became quite active in gold arbitrage transactions in the immediate post-war years and were able to earn profits as high as 40 per cent an ounce. For details, see Green, Timothy, The new world of gold: The inside story of the mines, the markets, the politics, the investors (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1982), p. 127Google Scholar. A considerable part of this gold was absorbed by the Swiss watch and jewellery manufacturers while substantial amounts were also supplied to Italians, West Germans, and the French. For details, see Green, The world of gold, p. 143.

³⁹ In what may be considered an upscaling of his activity around buying and selling gold in the early 1940s, Magabha recounted during the interview how he often flew to Bahrain and Kuwait to buy the gold needed in Dubai himself. He briefly narrates in his memoirs an episode of chartering an eight-seater flight for a trip to Dubai in the 1980s where he was to deliver a few consignments of gold that he had bought in Kuwait, some 30 years before the publication of the book. There was nothing unusual about the trip since the gold route between Bahrain and Dubai, with pilots flying weekly shipments between the two cities, was an established one. See Pancholia, Footprints, pp. 124–125.

⁴⁰ Meanwhile, the source of London's gold was South Africa's mines, something that had been an established tradition since the late nineteenth century. For more details, see Ally, Russel, Gold and empire: The Bank of England and South Africa's gold producers 1886–1926 (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Ally, R., ‘War and gold—the Bank of England, the London gold market and South Africa's gold, 1914–19’, Journal of Southern African Studies 17, no. 2 (1991), pp. 221–238CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ The 1947 ban that directly affected the refiners, assayers, and bullion houses in London, which was the world's largest bullion market until then, was in compliance with IMF's gold policy. The Bank of England was under pressure from the IMF to watch the exchange rate of the sterling and maintain its external convertibility. The increased arbitrage in gold could threaten these, leading to a depreciation not just of sterling but of the dollar too. For details, see Bott, The global gold market, pp. 109–118.

⁴² For details, see H. R. Vohra ‘Gold flow traced to Dubai’, The Times of India, 27 February 1968; Tuohy, ‘Dubai's golden fleece’; and Eric Pace, ‘Smuggler's gold’, The Times of India, 28 July 1971.

⁴³ Green, The world of gold, p. 144.

⁴⁴ Gianni, Toniolo, Central Bank co-operation at the Bank for International Settlements, 1930–1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 350–380Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ These banks were based in Dubai and included the British Bank of the Middle East, National Bank of Dubai, Dubai Bank, Bank of Oman, Arab Bank, Eastern Bank, and the First National City Bank of New York. See Green, The world of gold, p. 227.

⁴⁶ See B. A. B. Burrowe's letter of 17 October 1956, in Trench, Richard (ed.), Arabian Gulf cities: Doha, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah (Slough, UK: Archive Editions, 1994), pp. 325–326Google Scholar.

⁴⁷ For details, see B. R. Shenoy, ‘A close look at foreign aid: II-need to stop leakages’, The Times of India, 28 August 1970.

⁴⁸ Many of my informants in Malabar first made their first voyage to ports in present-day United Arab Emirates on a dhow, or a launch as it was otherwise called, in what could be called episodes of human smuggling.

⁴⁹ For details on events that led to the decline of Surat and the rise of Bombay, see Gupta, Ashin Das, Indian merchants and the decline of Surat: c. 1700–1750 (New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1994)Google Scholar; Subramanian, Lakshmi, ‘Banias and the British: The role of indigenous credit in the process of imperial expansion in western India in the second half of the eighteenth century’, Modern Asian Studies 21, no. 3 (1987), pp. 473–510CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Subramanian, L., ‘Capital and crowd in a declining Asian port city: The Anglo-Bania order and the Surat riots of 1795’, Modern Asian Studies 19, no. 2 (1985), pp. 205–237CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁵⁵ There were exceptions on the Persian or the Iranian side of the Gulf, as it is known today, where opium was grown inland and brought by caravans to Bushire for shipment to Britain, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

⁵⁶ See File No. 1129 of 1867, Revenue Department 20th March 1867 forwarded to the Commissioner of Customs, Salt and Opium in Vol 87. of 1867 Pol. Dept, MSA. Also see Jones, ‘British India steamers’, p. 25.

⁵⁷ For an excellent study of dhows and their commercial activity in the form of servicing niche markets in the nineteenth-century western Indian Ocean, see Mathew, Johan, Margins of the market: Trafficking and capitalism across the Arabian Sea (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016)Google Scholar. Also see the details on Mohammerah by Jones, ‘British India steamers’, p. 36.

⁵⁸ Many traditional ports in western India like Mandvi and Malabar had, for a brief while, been reduced to coasting ports, a state of affairs that had much to do with the abolition of slavery and the Bombay government's efforts at putting an end to piracy. For details, see Tod, James, Travels in western India, embracing a visit to the sacred mounts of the Jains, and the most celebrated shrines of Hindu faith between Rajpootana and the Indus: with an account of the ancient city of Nehrwalla (London: W. H. Allen and Company, 1839), pp. 449–453Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ When trawling through the records I did not come across a single instance when a dhow was caught smuggling gold or silver, although many older migrants I interviewed in Dubai told me repeatedly how this was not at all unusual.

⁶⁰ Export of Silver and Gold, IOR/R/12/2/352.

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⁶³ Baldeo Sahai, The Ports of India (New Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Govt. of India, 2016).

⁶⁴ This was a practice from the inception of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Abadan in the early years of the twentieth century. For details, see File No. F 13-17/53 (Emi) of 1953, NAI. Also see Srinivasan, Kannan and Gongoli, Geetanjali, ‘India and Middle Eastern oil: 1900–1950’, Journal of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library 4, no. 1 and 2 (2005), pp. 57–103Google Scholar.

⁶⁵ ‘Smuggling bid foiled’, The Times of India, 21 July 1968; ‘Two held at airport on smuggling charge’, The Times of India, 3 November 1982.

⁶⁶ ‘Airlines staff held for smuggling gold’, The Times of India, 13 February 1987.

⁶⁷ I gathered much of this information during my fieldwork in the Malabar districts of Kerala among migrants who had taken this route to the Persian Gulf.

⁶⁸ It was not entirely coincidental that Dubai and Bombay had the greatest number of dhows in the 1960s and the 1970s out of all the different ports in the western Indian Ocean. For details, see Martin, Esmond Bradley and Martin, Chrysee, Cargoes of the east: The ports, trade and culture of the Arabian Seas and western Indian Ocean (London: Elm Tree Books, 1978)Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Interview in Malayalam with Mr Ashraf (name changed to protect anonymity), January 2012, Dubai.

⁷⁰ Haji Mastan was the iconic smuggler in the Indian popular imagination.

⁷¹ For a brief description of how dockworkers transferred goods in gunny bags and boxes in a workers’ chain, see Zaidi, S. Hussain, Dongri to Dubai: Six decades of the Mumbai mafia (New Delhi: Lotus Collection, 2012), pp. 3–17Google Scholar.

⁷² It is perhaps unnecessary to describe here what the political advantages accruing to smugglers were, since the lives and activities of men like Dawood Ibrahim, who operate out of different geographies, best exemplify them for us.

⁷³ I have borrowed the idea of ‘accidental traders’ from Jeff Sahadeo's discussion of the Uzbeki and Azeri Kyrgyz migrating to Moscow and trading in its grey markets in the late twentieth century. For details, see Sahadeo, J., ‘The accidental traders: marginalisation and opportunity from the southern republics to late Soviet Moscow’, Central Asian Survey 30, no. 3–4 (2011), pp. 521–540CrossRefGoogle Scholar.