Читать книгу Sinews of War and Trade - Laleh Khalili - Страница 10

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 the huge crates rising in the sky, with no one pulling them up. Even the man on the deck of the ship who pushed the tremendous crates with one hand, moving them from one side to the other, seemed to the watchers on shore more a demon than a man.²

In writing this story of demonic upheavals, Munif was supremely alive to what was needed to make oil companies sovereigns in Arabia. Not only did lives have to be undone and redone, but spaces and places had to be redrawn. Munif records the banal details that most accounts elide: new, large ports were needed to facilitate unearthing petroleum in some places and turning the wheels of commerce in others. Between 1933, when oil was discovered in Bahrain, and the late 1960s, when it was feverishly exploited in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman, the shores of the Arabian Peninsula were monumentally reshaped. This redrawing of maps and the rapid construction of harbours epitomise the stupendous changes in global capital. New ports, new harbours, new coastal conurbations, new industrial megalopolises, new oil terminals and breakwaters and jetties and piers arose out of the mudflats of the Gulf, the jagged coral-reef coasts of the Red Sea. The pearling, fishing, and dhow trades, for which many of the Peninsula havens had long been known, were overshadowed by ports hosting cargo boats, very large crude carriers (VLCCs), and roll-on/roll-off (ro/ro) ships carrying thousands of automobiles. Harbours and warehouses shifted out of city centres to far-flung suburbs. So much of the machinery of capital has been made inaccessible, invisible, hidden behind the veils of security and bureaucracy and distance.

This book is the story of what the making of these new ports and shipping infrastructures has meant for the Peninsula, the region, and the world beyond. Reflected ‘in the murky mirrors of distant waters’³ is that maritime transportation is not simply an enabling adjunct of trade but is central to the very fabric of global capitalism. Maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport are the clearest distillation of how global capitalism operates today. The maritime transport enterprise displays this tendency through its engineering of the lived environment: transforming ‘natural’ features of the world into juridical ones, creating new spaces, structures, and infrastructures that aim at (though rarely achieve) frictionless accumulation and circulation of capital; creating fictive commodities, financial fetishes, and ever more innovative forms of speculation; and creating racialised hierarchies of labour.

Think of a port as a bundle of routes and berths, of roads and rails leading away, of free zones and warehouses and the people who make and populate them. The sea routes are evanescent – whether they are ephemeral foam in the wake of a ship or digital fragments flowing through wires. When harbours are built, the material that goes into the concrete comes not only from this land but from the sea and from other places. Sometimes the roads and rail are built long after the ports, as if in an afterthought. Sometimes the free zones are built before the ports, as if in a fond wish. Geographical features near ports and harbours are remade into legal categories to facilitate their exploitation. Commercial rules; the law, in its multilayered, multivalent complexity; and transnational tribunals all reinforce some version of maritime economic and political relations. All are meant to magic into being the intercourse of commerce.

This is a book about the landside labourers who build the ports and work in them: their collective struggles, their migrations, and their gains and losses. It is also about shipboard workers, their racialisation over the centuries, and the work they do today, with eyes trained to gaze far to sea. I write about the colonial continuities of capital, and about finance and insurance and subterfuge and paternalism and pressure that are the hallmarks of these ports; about kings and bureaucrats, advisers and courtiers, and merchants and industrialists, and middlemen and brokers. And, of course, war – and the mutually constitutive relationship between violence and maritime commerce.

But this book is also specifically about the Arabian Peninsula, written from the sea, gazing at the shores. The historical accounts of the Peninsula are often radically bifurcated – a great deal of excellent works tell the story of the Peninsula as a node in historical Indian Ocean trade; many more modern accounts recount the story of a world undone and redone by oil. If maritime trade is spoken of, it is often in the context of the former, not the latter. No matter that the ports in the Peninsula are some of the biggest and highest-volume in the world. Or that there are more of them, and more people working in them, than ever in history. Or that the connections they forge – not just to destinations for petroleum and petroleum products – are global conduits not just for cargo, but for migrants, capital, new financial instruments, management regimes, and legal categories. This book is what Michael Pearson has called an ‘amphibious’ story, ‘moving between the sea and the land’⁴ in telling the story of maritime transportation infrastructures in the Peninsula.

My interest in the area arose partially because of how the ports of the Peninsula seem to manifestly crystallise the confluence of military/naval interest, capital accumulation, and labour. I was also interested in the region because I have found that so much writing about the Peninsula exceptionalises the area or focusses on tired old scholarly clichés (whether around rentierism or the security role of the Persian Gulf). I have wanted to better understand a region whose fortunes are so tightly tied to not only other Arab countries of the Middle East but to South Asia, East Africa, East Asia, and the metropoles of Europe and North America.

The book draws on my research in several archives, including US and UK national archives, India Office Records, the UK Maritime Museum archives, the papers of Lloyd’s of London at the Liverpool Maritime archives, those of Grey Mackenzie/P&O at the London Metropolitan Archives, the British Petroleum archives, papers related to Aramco and Oman at Georgetown University Archives, and several other university archives in the US and UK where private papers of relevant historical figures are held. Other research materials include back issues of a vast range of newspapers, trade magazines, business journals and the like (some via online databases, others from the dusty shelves of libraries); memoirs, poetry, and novels written by people in the region, in businesses related to the region, or visiting the region; and vast repositories of statistics and reports produced by transnational organisations, think tanks, and management consulting firms, and the region’s governments. I also draw on landside visits to most of the main cargo ports of the region (except for those in Saudi Arabia and Yemen), interviews with a range of businessmen, government officials, workers, activists, and others with stakes in the business throughout the Peninsula, as well as my own travel on two different container ships (some of the largest on the seas today) which afforded me shipboard visits to the ports in the regions (including Jeddah in Saudi Arabia).

This is an untidy book. It is curious about everything and hungry to tell stories. Mike Davis writes about one of the sprawling chapters in his idiosyncratic, absorbing, magisterial City of Quartz that ‘I became so attached to every sacred morsel of facts about picket fences and dog doo-doos that I failed to edit the chapter down to a reasonable length. I soon came to fear that I had made a suicidal mistake. “No one”, I told myself, “will ever read this”.’⁵

I also became obsessed with everything maritime: ports and ships and the routes that led to them. The strange conjunctures of capitalism and trade and migrant labour and geopolitics and oil and dirt and filth and violence that make the sector are no less fascinating because they are made so invisible.

As sprawling as the book may be, it does not aim to be comprehensive. It does not sketch out reviews of scholarly literature, nor does it mention all possible sources about a given subject (though it cites whatever it quotes or paraphrases and what ideas have influenced its arguments). I have not alluded to a huge swathe of academic scholarship not because I did not read it or because I did not deem it worthy, but because this book wanted to do something else: it wanted to tell stories. Stories about how ports and maritime transport infrastructures have emerged out of the conjuncture of so many histories, struggles, conflicts, and plans (half-formed, implemented, and failed).

The first four chapters of the book are about four factors that constitute a functioning port: routes, harbours, legal infrastructures and zones, and land transport. Chapter 1 looks at how ports anchor sea routes – whether they are mapped on the sea or in the route-pricing indices of maritime exchanges and freight derivative markets. Plans to build harbours are rarely about objective or neutral calculations of cost. Politics and geopolitics matter, as chapter 2 makes clear. But environmental considerations matter a lot less, at least to the planners. The construction of harbours transforms fragile and coastal marine ecosystems, not just where ports are built but in faraway places from which construction materials are extracted. Chapter 3 deals with the legal presences and absences that are the virtual scaffolding of maritime trade. Arbitration courts and the mapping of geophysical features to legal categories all speak to the complex legal apparatuses capitalism needs to facilitate the building of ports. But laws and regulations held in abeyance – as they are in free zones or special economic zones that so often flank ports – are also crucial in creating the pulsating economic macro-organisms that port systems are today. Chapter 4 ties the ports to their hinterlands by drawing out the variegated history of the land transport that carries goods away from or to the port on roads and rail.

The next three chapters are about the people who have played roles in the making and operating of ports. Chapter 5 is about international, regional, and local capitalists and merchants, bankers and insurance companies, and political and technical experts who had a hand in the transformation of maritime trade in the Peninsula. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on landside and shipboard workers: the racialisation of their labour; the legal, migratory, and technical systems that have been used to discipline them; and the ways they have struggled for better workplace conditions and for political causes.

The final chapter of the book is about war and the bounties it has provided for shipping in most of the Peninsula – though not Yemen. Though war stories are woven through the fabric of the book, in chapter 8 I focus on how wartime has so often been the impetus and setting for the rise of military and civilian logistics and benefitted the ports of the region that have sided with metropolitan or imperial powers.

In all, this book makes a case that mercantile histories, colonial pasts, and the stories of empires of free trade indelibly shape today’s shipping practices. It insists that we gaze at invisible infrastructures, forgotten histories of struggle, and hidden and recognisable relations of power. It is a book about the sinews of capitalism and conflict.