Introduction for Unruly Labor

Introduction

PRODUCING LABOR HIERARCHIES

FROM THE EARLY DAYS OF OIL PRODUCTION IN ARABIAN SEA, OIL was connected to imperial militaries and oil companies were connected to imperial governance. Some examples of how imperialism, the military, and oil were connected include the British acquisition of the majority voting share of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC, later AIOC and then BP) in 1914; the belief that oil gave the British a strategic advantage during World War I; and financial support from the US government to California Texas Oil Company (Caltex), the parent company of Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco), during World War II to restructure its refinery to produce jet fuel.¹ Despite these connections, from 1933 to 1945, the British administration showed little interest in strikes occurring in the Arabian Peninsula. The treaties signed between the British government and local rulers specified that local rulers ran the internal workings of their sheikhdoms, and the British government was responsible for external relations. Prior to 1945, the British administration had a general policy of noninterference with the Arabian Peninsula.

In June 1932, workers at Bapco discovered oil in Bahrain, at what is today known as the Awali oil field.² This was the first time oil was found in one of the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. This discovery by Bapco, a Canadian subsidiary of US-based Standard Oil of California (SoCal), came seven years after the sheikh of Bahrain granted the first oil concession.³ It also came days after SoCal sold half of its shares of Bapco to Texaco, another oil company based in the United States.⁴ Almost six years after oil was discovered in Bahrain, the world remained in the midst of a severe economic downturn, and prices were rising throughout the country. Only a small percentage of the population could find employment at Bapco, and those who did work there were housed in bare barracks made of wood.⁵ In this context, in 1938, the workers at the Awali oil field held their first organized strikes.⁶ A US manager at Bapco reported that for months before the strike, “murmurs of discontent had been mounting,” but the company “refused to place guards at various places to keep the workmen on the job.” As a result, during the strike “all the drilling wells were idle.” The manager also observed that the strike ended after police “swung long wooden clubs—and swung them rather vigorously, according to reports. After a few heads were cracked, the crowd broke.”⁷

Strikes were common in the 1930s, and in Manama, the capital of Bahrain, they were a regular occurrence.⁸ Indeed, as this book will discuss, workers went on strike frequently throughout oil projects in the Arabian Peninsula from the 1930s through the 1960s. In 1938, there were numerous strikes in the Middle East, the Arabian Sea, and globally. For example, the Palestinian peasant movement was at its height.⁹ In India, on November 7, 1938, over 200,000 workers from multiple trades stopped work and took to the streets in protest of a labor bill that aimed to diminish the power of unions.¹⁰ Also in 1938, in the United States, 2,772 strikes began, involving more than 688,000 workers and more than 9 million lost working days.¹¹ Similarly, in the United Kingdom, over 1.3 million working days were lost to strikes.¹²

In Bahrain, the 1938 strikes involved a coalition of workers that included Bahrainis, other Arab workers, and Indians. After Bahrainis, British Indians (those from parts of India directly ruled by the British Empire) were the largest nationality working at Bapco. The 352 British Indians at Bapco comprised 13 percent of Bapco’s workforce and outnumbered all US, Canadian, and British workers combined.¹³ These workers were just a few of the increasing numbers of Indians working in the Arabian Peninsula, and by 1950, approximately fifteen thousand Indians worked in oil and related industries in the Arabian Peninsula.¹⁴ Indians worked, and went on strike, alongside local workers as well as those from other Arabic- and Farsi-speaking countries.

In the first half of the twentieth century, worker strikes at oil projects often comprised coalitions of workers of differing religions and ethnicities. For example, the 1938 strike in Bahrain was, according to British sources, inspired by ideas of Arab nationalism that were “spreading across the increasingly well-educated Bahraini population, and reform movements [that] were emerging in Kuwait and Dubai.”¹⁵ A broad swathe of Bahrainis participated in the strike, which also included workers from India. Working together, the strikers sought equal pay for Bahrainis and Indians. After the strike, some of the workers’ demands were met, but not that for equal pay. There was another strike in 1943 that did more to further worker demands. Labor organizers focused on common conditions as a way to bring workers together.¹⁶ Working and living together impacted how workers formed solidarities and agitated to improve their conditions.

From the 1940s through the 1960s, however, worker strikes became increasingly fragmented, and workers faced growing restrictions on the right to strike. To understand how worker actions changed, this book examines British imperial policies, oil company management practices, and worker practices at oil projects in Iran and the Arabian Peninsula (the present-day countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen). During this period, labor hierarchies were shaped, contested, and codified as formal British colonialism ended and oil companies implemented new management practices. This book historically interrogates the relationships among governments, oil companies, and workers. Examining these relationships demonstrates the process by which the line between citizen and noncitizen was constructed and how citizenship shaped worker organizing.

In the mid-twentieth century, oil company managers developed practices meant to control workers, including the segregation of workforces by nationality. Simultaneously, states grappled with who was a citizen, and government officials debated how to ensure citizens’ rights, both of which influenced how solidarities developed among workers. Exploring the changing ways workers formed solidarities, oil companies managed workers, and governments responded to strikes provides critical insight into how understandings of difference were historically produced and used as tools for domination.¹⁷

As British bureaucrats and oil company managers responded to worker actions within a context of geopolitical competition, bureaucrats and managers refashioned older colonial labor infrastructure to supply the large numbers of workers needed for oil projects. This system of labor mobility was originally developed in the nineteenth century to move indentured workers from India to plantations throughout the British Empire.¹⁸ Worker actions, considered in conjunction with oil project staffing, management practices, and the securitization of oil, illuminate the messy process that produced the racialized labor hierarchies and precarious working conditions of today’s Arabian Peninsula.

COLONIAL TROPES AND ARCHIVAL SOURCES

Accounts of worker actions appear in records written by British administrators and oil company managers in the Arabian Peninsula. As managers and administrators described worker actions, they incorporated existing colonial tropes and stereotypes about the region. Mobilizing these tropes, strikes were described as the result of outside influences and workers’ attitudes. Often, these descriptions of strikes erased the role of mobile laborers and obfuscated the role of imperialism and oil companies in shaping contemporary governance and labor practices.

Colonial fictions were central to how the history of the Arabian Peninsula was written. Importantly, those in positions of power, including colonial authorities and oil company managers, worked and reworked certain tropes, and these tropes impacted how British administrators and oil company officials interpreted the events they observed. This included an understanding of labor movements as apolitical. These tropes also obscured the relationship between the British administration and oil companies. We see one example of this during the establishment of states’ boundaries in the Arabian Peninsula. In 1938, the British administration asserted that it was “impossible to define boundaries between tribes. In fact, there are none.”¹⁹ As a result, the British felt they had to try to draw geographic boundaries prior to offering oil concessions.

Colonial fictions informed governmental administrative practices and served as a means of legitimizing these practices. For example, one officer in the British Indian Army, Lieutenant-Colonel David Lorimer, who visited the Gulf in the late 1890s, wrote of the region: “The general impression of Dohah is unattractive; the lanes are narrow and irregular, the houses dingy and small. There are no date palms or other trees, and the only garden is a small one near the fort, kept up by the Turkish garrison.”²⁰ Such views of the Arabian Peninsula as desolate and isolated were repeated throughout the twentieth century by British colonial authorities, with isolation conflated again and again with “backwardness” and lack of development.²¹

Even as the economic activity of the region changed, colonial tropes endured. By 1969, in the Trucial States (today the United Arab Emirates) agricultural practices were increasing; there were water cargo jetties, a cement factory, a fertilizer plant, and a flour mill; people had access to health and education facilities; and vocational training for tradesmen had begun.²² Yet, despite these changes in infrastructure accompanying the commercial export of oil, the British argued the social mores of the region remained stagnant. According to this discourse, the Arabian Peninsula was ostensibly in the grip of unchanging religious practice and traditions frozen in time. One British administrator wrote, “The gaunt stronghold of medieval Islamic thought and tradition still cast its gloomy shadows over every aspect of social life.”²³ “Puritanical Wahhabism,” as it was often classified by British officials, was understood to be most prevalent in Saudi Arabia and Qatar, whereas the Trucial States were felt to have “stirrings” of liberal ideas.²⁴

Colonial fictions such as these were central to how managers and government officials described and responded to worker actions at oil projects. In the archive, we find that strikes were characterized as nonsensical or as influenced by outside groups, including communists and pan-Arab nationalists. Indian government officials, for their part, often saw strikes as representative of Indian nationalism. These varying ways of describing strikes oversimplified and distorted worker claims. Strikes were denied their contemporaneity while increasingly viewed as destabilizing to local rulers, imperial governance, and oil production. Governmental, and particularly imperial, intervention was described simply as attempts to “restore order.” Such descriptions of strikes “conceals . . . [the] intentionality and socially constructed significance” of both worker action and responses to strikes.²⁵

In order to critically interrogate the archive and to examine the shifting constellation of workers that composed the historic geographies of labor subjectivity, I draw inspiration from scholars in Subaltern Studies, and particularly, Ranajit Guha’s work in which he provides a methodological approach for reading and questioning the archives to uncover the heterogeneity of worker practices and motivations.²⁶ I am also influenced by Shahid Amin’s work as a model for close reading of and careful engagement with archives, and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s attention to the history of the gaps in the archive.²⁷ In addition, I use anthro/history to provide perspectives that are “betwixt and between” disciplines. These perspectives allow us to question the production of historical narratives and critically engage with how certain fictions become fixed as “real.”²⁸ Such an approach grapples with dominant narrative structures by examining “the interstitial, intermediate, indeterminate, and unfinished frames of knowledge” that arise in an event.²⁹ In doing so, the ethics and politics of knowledge production become clearer. In the case of labor in the oil industry in the Arabian Sea, this approach demonstrates the process by which oil company management practices, colonial governance, postcolonial states, and workers themselves shaped the labor hierarchies upon which oil production depends.

THE SCALES OF OIL PRODUCTION

In labor history, strikes are often key events in a narrative that relies on the nation-state as the “main analytic or expository frame,” and a diverse set of struggles are collapsed into the story of the nation-state.³⁰ Privileging the nation-state erases the diverse solidarities that workers formed, projecting contemporary understandings of nationality and ethnicity into the past. Doing so also obscures how imperial governance and corporate practices impacted labor movements.

In the Arabian Peninsula, focusing on nation-states means that worker movements in the oil industry are viewed as separate from both global labor movements and world economic practices, and the possibilities of worker strikes are narrowed.³¹ Worker mobilizations were dependent on solidarities that shifted over the course of the twentieth century. Critically engaging with worker solidarities makes clear how strikes and other activities were informed not only by nationalism but also by the process of migration, working and living conditions, and broader anti-imperial movements.³² Some worker coalitions were new and fostered by the growing oil industry, while other networks built upon earlier relations of trade, imperialism, and cultural exchange that have historically moved through the Indian Ocean.³³ As workers agitated for better working conditions, worker actions shaped and were shaped by governance, citizenship, and laws.

In the mid-twentieth century, materials, ideas, and people were all moving through circuits that cut across empires and nations, solidifying the salience of those political entities in some instances, while challenging them in others. This book explores the ways workers, bureaucrats, oil company managers, and recruiting agents used networks to facilitate and, at times, impede oil production. What emerges is a view of oil that draws on and reconfigures the scales of analysis. I use the Arabian Sea as a geographic framework for this book in order to underscore the multiple scales at play for corporations, governments, and workers. Oil production drew upon and reconfigured networks that moved across regions, throughout South Asia, Iran, the Arabian Peninsula, and the world. Worker actions extended beyond the sites of production to workers’ networks of affiliation. By attending to the ways workers formed solidarities and participated in labor actions, we find labor movements challenged the boundaries of organizations, nation-states, and empires.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Indian workers invoked or ignored state borders as they protested the managerial practices common at oil projects. British companies and the British colonial government preferentially sought to hire Indians for oil projects, but Indian workers were not always sympathetic to British imperial projects. In the 1940s, Indians frequently participated in strikes at oil projects in the Arabian Sea, including in Kuwait in 1946, in Bahrain in 1942 and 1947, and in Saudi Arabia in 1943 and 1945. During some of these strikes, workers formed solidarities across national, religious, and linguistic lines. Often these solidarities were informed by workers’ proximity to one another—on the job, in the company mess hall, and during their leisure time. At other times, workers formed solidarities based on a shared natal village. These represent, to borrow a phrase from Farina Mir, a highly localized aspect of social lives that workers maintained as they moved from their natal villages to oil projects in Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.³⁴ In such cases, one sees the formation of a localized politics with transnational implications. These cases also demonstrate that nationalism influenced worker action, but we are reminded that nation-states are only one factor informing labor actions.

Considering worker actions and the role of migrant workers in these actions offers new insights into how the production of oil, the international managerial practices of natural resource extraction, and the politics of new nation-states were developed through engagements among the diverse actors involved in oil production.³⁵ These interactions shaped labor regimes and oil complexes that in turn impacted global governance practices and international oil companies. Workers’ solidarities were formed as they tried to make changes to their working and living conditions, and as they responded to the management practices of oil companies, to shifting political and economic factors, and to their own kinship and exchange obligations.

Workers’ strikes, protests, and complaints illustrate that the production of oil was a site where international carbon managerial practices and localized politics met. Focusing on this conjunction presents opportunities to destabilize historical narratives that privilege the history of nation-states and sheds light on how workers’ various networks and solidarities invoked, and also helped to shape, the scales of the local, national, and transnational. Through critically following worker activism in the oil industry, we uncover the power of national and transnational institutions to obfuscate power structures, as well as the limits of these power structures.

Attending to migration that crosses state borders does not negate the importance of the nation-state, but it reminds us that nation-states are only one factor informing labor politics. Looking at worker action before and after India’s independence in 1947 illustrates when and how workers selectively invoked their nationality or the nation-state. In the years after 1947, when Indian workers did appeal to the state, they often described the racist treatment they experienced while at oil projects in the Arabian Peninsula. They also invoked India’s status as an independent country. The dignity that Indians felt they were due after India’s independence served to bolster their claims. India’s independence also helped Indians form alliances across boundaries of language, geography, and, at times, class.

The Indian government’s responses show us that as people moved internationally after India’s and Pakistan’s independence, the rights of citizens and restrictions on citizens’ movement were developed in tandem. Many Indian officials felt it was necessary to push for Indian migrants’ rights to religious practice and good working conditions. Developing these transnational citizenship regimes allowed the Indian government to define its borders and its people. Exploring such interactions between states, citizens, and the oil industry reveals how postcolonial states and imperial governments attempted to establish sovereignty and the centrality of citizenship for the effectiveness of worker strikes.

When we look at the role of nationalism in fostering worker solidarities, we see that nationalism, at times, united workers of different job categories and skill levels in protest. Nationalism was also sometimes mobilized in a context of anti-imperialism, and this had the potential to foster solidarities between groups.³⁶ However, nationalist imaginaries based on a homogenous population limited some solidarities. The resulting racism, as Étienne Balibar explains, is a “supplement of nationalism or more precisely a supplement internal to nationalism, always in excess of it, but always indispensable to its constitution and yet always still insufficient to achieve its project, just as nationalism is both indispensable and always insufficient to achieve the formation of the nation or the project of a ‘nationalization’ of society.”³⁷ Over the course of the twentieth century, as workers fought to change their working and living conditions, the project of nationalism and accompanying racism were grappled with and taken up by people working within and outside of their country of citizenship.

Nationalism did not exist within a vacuum, and the increasing formation of worker solidarities by nationality was further reinforced by oil companies’ managerial practices. Increasingly over the mid-twentieth century, oil company managers in the Arabian Peninsula were effective at segregating workers by nationality in their jobs, living accommodations, and access to leisure activities. In addition, worker camps were based on nationality, located in remote areas, and there were few possibilities for interaction among workers of different nationalities. Managers also gave workers of different nationalities different benefits and pay, thereby spurring conflict between them. Taken together, these management practices decreased the likelihood of workers forming broad, class-based solidarities that had the potential to halt oil production, and strikes were increasingly fragmented along the lines of nationality.

LABOR AND THE STATE

Each chapter of this book begins with a discussion of a strike by workers at an oil project as a way to center labor in the history of oil. Laborers rarely show up in histories of oil, and their presence in the archive is often limited except during moments of collective action.³⁸ During these moments, workers were characterized as “unruly” by oil company managers, British administrators, and local government officials—it was this unruliness that disrupted oil production. In turn, these disruptions illuminate how governable space amicable to the extraction and commodification of natural resources was developed and given legitimacy.³⁹

Oil’s importance influenced responses to strikes. From 1940 to 1970, the world’s energy consumption grew rapidly, almost tripling. In 1940 and 1950, coal continued to be the world’s main source of energy, providing 49 percent in 1940 and 43 percent in 1950. However, oil was quickly replacing coal as the primary source of energy. By 1960, oil accounted for 31 percent of the world’s energy whereas 38 percent was provided by coal. By 1970, oil had outpaced coal, providing 43 percent of the world’s energy versus coal’s 27 percent.40 In 1940, the United States was the single largest producer of oil, producing 62 percent of the world’s oil. In 1971, the United States continued to be the single largest producer, but its share of oil production dropped to 21 percent. In the Arabian Peninsula, oil production grew rapidly following World War II, and by 1971, the countries of the Arabian Peninsula (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) produced 20 percent of the world’s oil, and these countries’ oil production was continuing to rise.⁴¹

Examining strikes and responses to strikes illuminates changing relationships among local governments, imperial powers, oil companies, and workers from the 1940s to 1970. By historically contextualizing these relationships, we are able to see that the political economy of the Arabian Sea was actively shaped by multiple participants. Such a perspective helps us avoid the common “slippage between oil as a commodity of indisputable political, economic, and cultural significance and what one might call commodity determinism.”⁴² In addition, examining these relationships will make clear how the political economy of oil was shaped by colonialism, shifting worker solidarities, nationalism, oil company practices, discourses connecting oil and security, understandings of citizenship, and racialized labor hierarchies.

Responses to worker actions changed rapidly in the years after World War II. Strikes were increasingly characterized as costly for oil companies, threatening to the British economy, and destabilizing to local political leaders. As a result, oil company managers, local governments, and the British administration sought ways to minimize strikes and ensure workforce stability. In examining how attitudes toward strikes change, two key assumptions about oil emerge and gain traction: oil is scarce, and national security hinges on control of Middle Eastern oil. Over the course of the twentieth century, these assumptions became the dominant discourses around oil. While critically deconstructed by experts, including Timothy Mitchell and Robert Vitalis, these discourses have historically served as the ideological underpinning for numerous wars and military interventions, and they continue to shape contemporary US foreign policy.⁴³

These assumptions about oil were developed as perspectives on the economy and the responsibilities of the state changed. In the mid-twentieth century, the meaning of “the economy,” shifted from “the attitudes and transactions of commercial exchange” to a “distinct social sphere” that was the “realm of social science, statistical enumeration, and government policy.”⁴⁴ Economies were territorialized onto nation-states. One result of this, Nikolas Rose explains, was that the responsibility of the government “for the security of a nation, a state and a people, came to be understood in terms of their capacity to ensure the security of its national economic well-being.”⁴⁵ In this context, management practices gained power as oil production became increasingly attached to security; thus governments and oil companies invoked security as they sought to curtail strikes, including through militarized responses.

From the 1940s to 1960s, government officials and oil company administrators increasingly asserted that oil was critical for state security and industry. By looking specifically at labor in the oil industry, we are able to see how these understandings of the state, security, and the economy were formulated and contested. Oil’s connection to security shaped governance, company practices, and worker actions. In particular, oil companies, the British administration, and local governments developed forms of governance and management practices that were better suited to working with foreigners whose recourse to government support was tenuous. Also, in order to reduce the risk of wide-scale strikes and other worker action, oil companies increasingly sought to hire nonlocal workers.

Oil company managers and British administrators made concerted attempts to diminish the role of the local government in labor relations and, particularly, to curtail local government’s support for workers. Oil companies also increased practices such as contracting that made holding the companies accountable challenging. Fifty-fifty profit sharing helped align the interests of oil companies and local governments. To legitimate militarized responses to strikes, oil companies, the British administration, and local governments wrote labor laws that greatly restricted workers’ rights, including their rights to strike, free speech, and collectively organize. In short, workers were denied their rights based on arguments for political stability, in the name of protecting the economy, and through mobilizing dominant discourses about oil’s scarcity and its connection to national security.

THE CENTRALITY OF CITIZENSHIP

A US manager reflected on Bapco’s role in the 1938 strike, writing that “the great majority of the population had received little benefits” from the company’s activities.⁴⁶ This perspective, that a population will rise up if they do not receive benefits but be content if they do see the benefits of oil production, is seen frequently in the archive. This assumption is also common in the present, and the allocation of oil wealth is given as a reason for the persistence of monarchical governance in in the Arabian Peninsula.⁴⁷ Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates were, and continue to be, monarchies dependent on the export of oil.⁴⁸

In 1970, Hossein Mahdavy introduced the term “rentier states” to describe the impact of oil rents on countries where oil is a large part of the economy. He defined rentier states as “those countries that receive on a regular basis substantial amounts of external rents. External rents are in turn defined as rentals paid by foreign individuals, concerns or governments to individuals, concerns or governments of a given countries.” Because of the income from oil rents, countries are able to invest in large public works without taxing the people. Mahdavy argued that the results include the government playing a central role in the economy and an uneven distribution of wealth within countries.⁴⁹

In his examination of the connections between oil and democracy, Timothy Mitchell argues that the materiality of carbon and the differences between coal and oil production have led to differing forms of political action. He notes that shifts in social relations came with the greater harnessing of energy produced by coal, which helped support cities and large-scale manufacturing. In addition, the manner in which coal was transported and mined—namely, its requirement that laborers work in autonomous underground spaces and that coal transportation had choke points—enabled workers to strike effectively. Coal’s materiality and the worker relations it helped foster informed “the kinds of mass politics that emerged, or threatened to emerge, in the first half of the twentieth century.” Mitchell argues that the materiality of oil shaped forms of political engagements differently than those made possible by coal. Some key differences between the mining of coal and the production of oil are that oil requires a smaller workforce and workers are continuously aboveground and therefore open to continuous supervision. In addition, oil’s lightness and fluidity allow it to be transported through pumping stations and pipelines and/or to be shipped. This flexibility of transportation means that oil is transported in a “grid.” This grid-like transportation differs from the “dendritic networks” coal followed via railway. Oil’s grid makes it less vulnerable to strikes of the kind that caused choke points for coal’s transport. Consequently, Mitchell argues, the transportation and working conditions used in the production of oil curtailed “the democratizing potential of petroleum.”⁵⁰

Mitchell’s focus on the techno-politics of oil production leads him to the conclusion that oil workers were less likely to exert a democratizing impact on the state.⁵¹ However, this account does not consider the centrality of citizenship in shaping governance practices. Despite the limitations imposed in political action by the materiality of oil, workers in the Gulf oil fields continued to form alliances and negotiate their working conditions through political mobilization. In particular, the period of the 1940s through the 1960s includes a time when large amounts of oil infrastructure were being built. These projects required thousands of workers. This book examines labor across oil’s supply chain, with focus on the construction of oil infrastructure, oil production, and oil refinement. Construction, production, and refinement required vastly different numbers of workers. From these variable labor needs, issues emerged around redundant labor and workforce training. In these contexts, oil companies, workers, and governments addressed, fought over, and negotiated the problems intrinsic to the variable labor needs in oil’s supply chain.

In addition, although workers from India and Pakistan were not positioned to democratize governance in the Arabian Peninsula, their strikes and other worker actions brought international scrutiny to their situation and resulted in some, admittedly limited, improvements in their circumstances. As examinations of strikes and government responses will show, the key factor was not only the techno-politics of oil production. Rather, citizenship also emerges as a critical factor.

The centrality of citizenship appears in multiple contexts in this book, but citizenship was not experienced in the same way by workers—some workers were imperial citizens, others were citizens of an independent nation-state, and some were stateless. The meanings of citizenship for workers emerged in how laws were written and also how the idea of citizenship was put into practice by government bureaucrats and ordinary people. In Iran, India, and the Arabian Peninsula, questions arose over who should be a citizen. Particularly in the Arabian Peninsula, there were also initiatives—spearheaded not only by local elites but also British administrators and oil company managers—to restrict who was a citizen. These debates and initiatives draw attention to the role of the state as a guarantor of rights—an issue that is even more pronounced when we consider how statelessness negatively impacted workers. Taken as a whole, citizenship was both a vehicle for claiming rights and a process by which worker solidarities were fragmented.

Ultimately, the growing rates of contracting within the oil industry, the writing of labor laws that favored employers and restricted unions, restrictions on worker strikes, the recruiting infrastructure in India, and the increasing securitization of oil all contributed to shaping the labor hierarchies prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula’s oil industry. Because oil company managers could replace Indian and Pakistani employees who disrupted worksites, from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, workers from these countries were increasingly hired.

SHIFTING SOLIDARITIES

By considering how workers formed solidarities and how workers made claims on companies and states, we are able to critically interrogate colonial categorizations and document how ethnicity, race, and nationality were conflated and territorially fixed in the mid-twentieth century. In that period, colonial classifications and racism informed labor relations at oil projects. As Robert Vitalis illustrates in his history of the US involvement with oil production in Saudi Arabia, key methods developed by US oil companies to curtail labor strikes included the racial segregation of workers and discrepancies in pay based on race.⁵² Of course, the use of racism as a management technique was not unique to the oil industry.⁵³ The internationalization of such managerial practices provoked worker protests, which, in turn, highlighted the specificities of oil production in the Arabian Sea. Worker actions from the 1940s through 1960s at oil projects in places like Abadan, Abu Dhabi, Aden, Bahrain, and Qatar illuminate how oil companies’ managerial practices influenced and were influenced by imperial administrators, workers, and managers, with labor mobilizations increasingly segmenting along national lines.

Capitalism operates based on “antagonistic differences,” both within and between societies, and these differences are racialized, ordered hierarchically, and exploited to create profits.⁵⁴ Membership in the nation-state, too, is informed by this logic of difference.⁵⁵ In a colonial context, there was a drain of wealth, as colonial powers actively sought to profit from colonies, including through the appropriation of labor and natural resources.⁵⁶ In addition, colonial governments actively sought to “restrict” the economic potential of their colonies.⁵⁷ However, these historical processes were obscured through abstracting social relations, including the dispossession of labor. Such abstractions obfuscated how profits were, and continue to be, generated through inequalities.⁵⁸ Instead, global wealth inequalities were explained as a result of racialized difference.⁵⁹

From the 1940s through 1960s at oil projects in the Arabian Peninsula, race and nationality were increasingly conflated. The ideas of difference that underpin capitalism impacted who the state saw as a citizen and who could effectively make claims upon the state for protection. Radhika Mongia argues that “cultural racism succeeds, precisely, in securing an identity between a people and a territory such that both come to be described as ‘national.’”⁶⁰ This territorialization of culture and racialization of nationality make differences between groups appeared fixed and insurmountable, and they are predicated on a projection of current understandings of the world into a timeless past.⁶¹ This territorialization and racialization also actively obscures the fact that people, ideas, and items were always moving, interacting, and changing.⁶²

By the mid-twentieth century, work on the oil fields had become a major source of employment for Indian emigrants, and oil companies were hiring almost one-quarter of all Indian emigrants going overseas for jobs in 1951.⁶³ Though increasing numbers of Indians were moving to work in the Arabian Peninsula, conditions were far from ideal. Both skilled professionals and day laborers faced discrimination and difficult working conditions. In the 1940s and early 1950s, workers living in Aden, Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, and Qatar all had similar complaints. These complaints revolved around poor living conditions, lack of medical and recreational facilities, “gross discrimination . . . between senior staff which is American or British and the Indian or local junior staff,” poor sanitation, and the absence of any means for workers to redress grievances.⁶⁴ In order to improve their working conditions, Indian workers in the oil fields deployed multiple tactics—from work stoppages to hunger strikes to appealing to the Indian government for support.

Strikes by khaliji (Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula) workers in the oil fields also shaped political structures and labor relations. Oil and its nationalization were key factors in a wave of anticolonial movements. In 1951, following the nationalization of the Abadan refinery, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC) began to build an oil refinery in Aden and began to pursue additional oil projects in the Arabic-speaking Gulf. In the wake of a series of strikes held by khaliji workers in the Arabian Peninsula in the 1960s, government officials and the oil company managers worked together to reduce the impact of these strikes. Because oil company managers could easily replace Indian and Pakistani employees who disrupted worksites, from the late 1940s through the early 1970s, workers from these countries came to be increasingly hired for unskilled or semiskilled positions.

Government officials and corporate managers worked to codify citizenship in the states of the Arabian Peninsula. They also categorized workers through a conflation of nationality and race, and distributed benefits based on nationality. As a result, some solidarities between groups became increasingly challenging.⁶⁵ However, it was not only government officials and corporate managers who helped shape and concretize difference. Tracing the shifting politics of difference elucidates how workers also reinforced difference by invoking national belonging as a way to make claims for rights.

Over the course of this book, we will see that the interactions among governments, corporations, and workers produced these politicized identities.⁶⁶ Shifting solidarities formed along with the maintenance and revitalization of nineteenth-century colonial infrastructures used to move indentured workers, which were adapted in the twentieth century to bring workers to the oil fields. The proliferation of contracting, the writing of employer-friendly labor laws, and increasingly militarized responses to strikes all contributed to configure axes of unity among workers. The result was an evacuation of politics from the oil fields.

Notes

1. Ferrier, History of the British Petroleum Company, Vol. 1, 323; Jacks, “Purchase of the British Government’s Shares,” 139; Sampson, Seven Sisters, 56; UNT OH 0668: Interview with Murdo MacIver by Dr. Ronald Marcello, (Ridgefield Connecticut: November 9, 1985).

2. Today, all of Bahrain’s onshore oil reserves, 125 million barrels, is located in the Awali field. Bahrain’s offshore oil is located in the Abu Safah field, which is jointly shared with Saudi Arabia.

3. Bapco was “incorporated in Ontario, Canada, on the 11th January 1929 by the Standard Oil Company of California to carry on ‘oil business’ in the Persian Gulf. Its authorized capital is $500,000 in 5,000 shares of a par value of $100, and its Head Office is at Ottawa.” BP ARC123142: APOC and Bahrain Petro Company 1925–1933. Initially, Gulf Oil (Gulf) held the Bahrain concession, but Gulf found out that holding the concession violated the terms of the Red Line Agreement, which Gulf had signed. Gulf then sold the concession to SoCal. UNT OH 0659: Interview with Leslie A. Smith by Dr. Ronald E. Marcello (Greenville, South Carolina: August 1, 1985).

4. In 1937, Standard Oil Company of California (SoCal) and the Texas Company (today Texaco), jointly created the California Texas Oil Company (Caltex). Bapco was a wholly owned subsidiary of Caltex until 1981, when 60 percent of the company was acquired by the Bahraini government. In 1997, the Bahraini government assumed total ownership of Bapco. Later, SoCal became Chevron, then Chevron Texaco, and then Chevron.

5. UNT OH 0659: Interview with Smith.

6. Kinninmont, “Bahrain,” 35.

7. HIA McConnell, Box 1, Folder 6: Journal Entry, February 16, 1939.

8. Fuccaro, Histories of the City and State in the Persian Gulf, 151–52.

9. Beinin, Workers and Peasants, 96.

10. Bradley, “Indian Workers’ Great One Day Strike.” For more on strikes in India in the 1930s, see Chakrabarty, “Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions.” Note that British India, or simply “India” prior to 1947, refers to much of the area today known as India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Prior to 1937, British India also included Myanmar, which the British called Burma.

11. Crowther, Analysis of Strikes in 1938.

12. Office for National Statistics, “History of Strikes in the UK.”

13. NAI, MEA, Near East Branch, 1941, F 360-N/41: Annual Report of the Bahrain Petroleum Co. Ltd. 1940.

14. Seccombe and Lawless, “Foreign Worker Dependence in the Gulf,” 564–65.

15. Kinninmont, “Bahrain,” 35.

16. Kinninmont, “Bahrain,” 36–37.

17. Gupta and Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture,’” 16–17; Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents, 7.

18. For a discussion of indentured labor from India, see Bates, “Coerced and Migrant Labourers in India”; Carter, Servants, Sirdars, and Settlers; Kale, Fragments of Empire; Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, 136–44; Yang, Limited Raj.

19. Report by J. B. Howes, Assistant Political Agent Bahrain, 21 December 1938, FO 1016–56, in RE (8), 642.

20. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf.

21. Confidential dispatch No. 1/41 from Sir S. Crawford, Political Resident, Bahrain, to Mr. D. J. McCarthy, Arabian Department, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 14 April 1969, FCO8/1146, in RQ (3), 9; Board of Trade, 28 June 1928, Oil Interests in the Persian Gulf, IOR:L/PS/18/B413, in RE (7), 769.

22. Note, tradesmen is used in this book to describe the category of work that was historically called “artisan” or “artisanal.” In addition, tradesmen calls attention to the fact that all of the workers discussed in this book were men. Indian women did migrate during this time, but usually with family members. For a discussion of women’s migration to the Arabian Peninsula in the 1950s and 1960s, see Wright, “‘The Immoral Traffic in Women.’”

23. Letter to British Political Agency, Doha, from RHM Boyle, 7 April 1969, FCO8/1146, in RQ (3), 7–11.

24. Review of Events in Qatar, 29 December 1969, in RQ (3), 23–33.

25. Coronil and Skurski, “Dismembering and Remembering,” 289.

26. Guha, “Prose of Counter-Insurgency”; Guha, “Small Voice of History.” See also Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism.”

27. Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory; Amin, “Gandhi as Mahatma”; Chakrabarty, “Conditions for Knowledge of Working-Class Conditions,” 229; Chakrabarty, Rethinking Working-Class History.

28. Stephan Palmié points out that the writing of history is an exercise in power. Western modernity “ultimately rests on a fortiori logic that unfolded—and continues to unfold—not on the basis of any transhistorical first principles, but through the global realities of power that it both reflects and reproduces into its own narrative structures or dispelling them into the realm of the irrelevant, mistaken, unreal, or fictitious.” Palmié, Wizards and Scientists, 16. See also Coronil, Fernando Coronil Reader; Trouillot, Silencing the Past.

29. Cohen and Odhiambo, Risks of Knowledge, xi. This book is also informed by Chandra Bhimull’s anthro/historical approach and the multiple ways she engages with short-lived or scarce moments in the archive. Bhimull, Empire in the Air, 84–90.

30. Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory; Eley, “Transnational Labour History”; Eley, A Crooked Line; Guha, “Small Voice of History,” 1, 8; Trouillot, Silencing the Past.

31. For a discussion of contemporary connections among the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, Middle Eastern economics, and global capitalism, see Hanieh, Money, Markets, and Monarchies.

32. As Nicos Poulantzas stresses, “Social class is defined by its place in the ensemble of social practices, i.e., by its place in the ensemble of the division of labour which includes political and ideological relations.” In addition, classes only exist as part of class struggle. However, Poulantzas cautions, we should avoid “the ‘voluntarist’ error of reducing class determination to class position.” Poulantzas, Poulantzas Reader, 186.

33. For examinations of ideas and practices circulating throughout the Arabian Sea, see Alam, Languages of Political Islam; Bishara, Sea of Debt; Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War; Cole, Roots of North Indian Shī‘ism; Ghosh, In an Antique Land; Hegland, “Shi‘a Women’s Rituals”; Jalal, Partisans of Allah; Majchrowicz, World in Words; Metcalf, Islamic Revival in British India; Metcalf, Islamic Contestations; Minault, Khilafat Movement; Zaman, Ulama in Contemporary Islam.

34. Mir, Social Space of Language, 139.

35. Such changes are not unique to the Arabian Peninsula, and in Iraq we see these interactions to shape urban space and understandings of ethnicity. Bet-Shlimon, City of Black Gold.

36. See, for example, Karl, “Creating Asia.”

37. Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 54; Tilly, “States and Nationalism in Europe” 133, 142–43.

38. Ehsani, “Disappearing the Workers,” 18, 25.

39. Watts, “Resource Curse?,” 53; Watts, “Righteous Oil?,” 375–77.

40. Martin-Amouroux, “World Energy Consumption.”

41. Our World in Data, Energy Institute, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/oil-production-by-country.

42. Watts, “A Tale of Two Gulfs,” 439.

43. Vitalis, Oilcraft; Mitchell, “Ten Propositions on Oil.”

44. Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 74.

45. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 102.

46. HIA McConnell, Box 1, Folder 6: Journal Entry, February 16, 1939.

47. For example, see Davidson, Abu Dhabi, 2.

48. For example, in 1965, oil made up 97 percent of the Saudi Arabia’s, Kuwait’s, and Qatar’s total exports. Rouhani, History of O.P.E.C., 107.

49. Mahdavy, “Patterns and Problems,” 432, 437.

50. Mitchell, “Carbon Democracy,” 408; Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 5–8, 21. See also Daniel Yergin’s discussion of pipeline development in the 1860s in the United States as a way of moving oil that was not be easily interrupted by striking workers. Yergin, The Prize, 16–18.

51. Mitchell, Carbon Democracy, 35–36, 105–8.

52. Vitalis, America’s Kingdom.

53. For example, Das Gupta shows that racism in colonial industrial projects informed working conditions and management policies. Das Gupta, Labour and Working Class, 63–64.

54. Robinson, Black Marxism, 24; Coronil, Magical State.

55. Pandey, “Racialization of Subaltern Populations,” 89.

56. Naoroji, Poverty and Un-British Rule; Dutt, Economic History of India; Patnaik, “Revisiting the ‘Drain.’”

57. Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.

58. Coronil, Magical State, 33–35, 45; Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 16; Wang, End of the Revolution, 62.

59. Coronil, Magical State, 34, 45, 388; See also Tsing, “What Is Emerging?,” 335.

60. Mongia, “Race, Nationality, Mobility,” 535.

61. Pandey, “Racialization of Subaltern Populations.” According to Benedict Anderson, one of the paradoxes of the nation is “the objective modernity of nations to the historian’s eye vs. their subjective antiquity in the eyes of nationalists.” Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5.

62. Malkki, “National Geographic”; Sanjek, “Rethinking Migration, Ancient to Future.”

63. NAI, MEA, Emigration Section, 1953, F.6–6/53-Emi: Oil Companies in the Persian-Gulf and Mid-East—Recruit of Indian workers from India.

64. NAI, MEA, Emigration, F. 22–8/48-Emi: Skilled workers engaged by the Bahrein [sic] Petroleum Co., Bahrein.

65. Hall, Fateful Triangle, 98.

66. Brown, States of Injury, 52–76.