Sailing like There Is Still a Horizon

On August 4, 2020, 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate exploded in a warehouse at Beirut’s port. The blast left tremendous physical and human devastation radiating outward from the port’s location in the center of the city. This entirely avoidable disaster, brought about by years of negligence at many levels of the Lebanese government, accelerated already existing inequalities in which some lives and places are treated like they are disposable. In this way, the blast is a concise expression of how the vectors of global commerce generate destruction and how urgent the need is for critical perspectives that can grapple with its relation to military endeavor. Sinews of War and Trade advances an expansive and historical perspective on the place of shipping, logistics, and the racialized deprivations and strategies of accumulation within contemporary capitalism. The book focuses on a crucial set of regional nodes in this global system located in the Arabian Peninsula. Sinews of War and Trade offers an analytical perspective that reaches much further than the specific history and places that it illuminates, in which Beirut makes only brief appearances. Laleh Khalili’s text expands how we might understand political economy, employing a methodological framework that grasps how the infrastructures that now exist were far from inevitable. Much like the blast at the Beirut port, shipping economies are techno-logistic marvels that are also ongoing catastrophes, which operate at scales that exceed human sensory capacities. They are also the product of seemingly opaque financial systems, legal arrangements, and securitized sovereignties that have reshaped ecologies to help smooth global circulation. Sinews of War and Trade possesses rich historical depth and is politically uncompromising in its conclusions. Perhaps even more importantly, the book dares to be fascinated with its topic and exudes an appreciation for the sensuous qualities of and lived experiences of otherwise-dehumanizing situations. In what follows, I pull out a few key elements that demonstrate how this book and this event, taken together, present a mutual if refracted illumination.

Sinews of War and Trade examines how shipping has enabled strategies of accumulation and state formation. The book grants a perspective on the contemporary multipolar world relieved of its terrestrial bias, dispersed across imperial geographies, legal jurisdictions, and authoritarian structures that range across the twentieth century. Khalili traverses seas, stops in port archives, and talks to harbor masters and sailors alike. This allows her to interrogate how the political horizon brims with possibility even as the violence of modern logistic systems condition everyday life. Sinews of War and Trade demonstrates how the labor hierarchies that keep supply chains functioning are founded on racialization, as are the projects of sovereignty and militarization that they presume and support. The book examines how the creation of new ports and rail systems in the Arabian Peninsula served the strategies of the powerful, but it avoids reducing their history to elite objectives. Strikes and labor-led political revolts, such as those that emerged in Aden in 1948 (Khalili 2020, 186), are also shown to have made a lasting impact on the organization of shipping.1 This balanced perspective becomes a better vantage point from which to understand the contemporary centrality of Chinese and Gulf ports to global supply chains and energy systems.

In an article published just four days after the blast, Khalili extended the insights of her book to answer a deceptively straightforward question: How did all that ammonium nitrate even end up stashed in a warehouse in Beirut’s port to begin with?2 In addition to the obvious negligence of Lebanon’s ruling regime, the article traces the connections between maritime law, shadowy business networks, precarious labor conditions, and financial arrangements that resulted in the ship and its crew being abandoned in Beirut. The ship’s cargo was eventually offloaded and mainly ignored by anyone with authority to act. As described in Sinews of War and Trade, Beirut’s port remains in the city’s historic core, unlike many of the securitized special economic zones that were created outside of city centers after the 1940s. The opacities of the Beirut port’s inner workings are defined by the overlapping interests that run it—multiple state bureaucracies and political parties exercising jurisdiction and claims to organize and monitor shipment, diffusing accountability and refusing public oversight. At the time of this writing, the political elite remain united in their commitment to not allowing even a modicum of symbolic justice to move forward.

There is a quality of the operation of infrastructure and logistics that escapes many who try to explain it. This challenge is compounded by those accounts that remain attuned to the humanity of the people it involves. The world of shipping comes alive in Sinews of War and Trade, with the clacking of containers echoing alongside the attitudes of captains of industry and the aspirations of those who work on ships and land. The book presents the epistemic practices and know-how that guided several centuries of navigation, trade, and warmaking. This is not simply to contextualize the epochal shifts of the twentieth century, as the book reflects a maritime way of understanding the making of contemporary capitalism. This amphibious method relieves landlocked myopia without romanticizing the brutalities that persist into the present. While chapters 6 and 7 draw the most directly on ethnographic research, these voices are interwoven throughout the book, forging solidaristic relation where power would prefer silence and forgetting. Khalili also allows us to see how the arrangement of infrastructure exerts a subtle and not-so-subtle world-making effect, shaping space and the linkages between places, making the ethnic and racial hierarchies of labor that result seem natural. So too can catering to the needs of running a military make the geographies that result seem inevitable.

Like how older ports and shipping routes can fade in the foamy wake of ships of previous imperial and military projects, so too are populations rendered surplus to new economic formations and geoengineered coastlines. Yet these lives also persist, unevenly, in places like Lebanon, where it becomes clear how sectarian clientelism since the official end of the civil war in 1990 remains inseparable from the rule of militias during the conflict. State governance and accountability became a secondary concern to negotiating power-sharing agreements between sectarian parties and their banking elite partners. The interests or flourishing of the population who remain in the country truly became an afterthought. The 2019 collapse of the country’s banking sector and spiraling inflation exacerbated preexisting inequalities and sharpened the divides of citizenship. These events were accompanied by a deepened devaluation of humanity that conflicted with liberal democracy’s self-image and the aspirations of those who would see Lebanon live up to the promises of liberalism. Those aspirations have often also been in conflict with those who would see more radical equality emerge, in solidarity with racialized migrant laborers and people displaced by wars in nearby Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. Yet the so-called Golden Era of 1960s Lebanon, when the country was awash in petrodollars and the money of those fleeing nationalization (especially Egypt) or occupation (especially Palestine), looks increasingly to be a nostalgia for a foreclosed future in the era after the port blast. Here again, Sinews of War and Trade shows how this period was contingent on regional economic imperatives—many of the financial institutions that emerged in Beirut would relocate to the Gulf after 1975, fleeing the civil war. Others thrived on the wartime and postwar economy, leading to the contemporary predicament.

The Beirut port catastrophe embodies this tension between liberal rights and their relationship to neo/imperial contracts, infrastructure projects, militarization, and racialized labor regimes. That tension culminated in the blast’s world-shaking force, equaled only in scale by the unaccountability of the ruling elite. Sinews of War and Trade shows how entire coastlines were and are remade to accommodate ever-larger ships in securitized locations far from urban centers. While this can lead to the loss of lively port districts, it typically takes longer than the unexpected instant of an explosion. Between the slower ruination of abandonment and the unfeeling instantaneity of an explosion is a crucial difference in temporality. The slo-mo replays of the moment of the shockwave’s sinister advance, or its sudden arrival captured on cellphones and other cameras by accident, remind spectators of this fact. The capacity to control the replay button informs the compulsion to then powerlessly rewatch. One expression of this drive to see and control is in the popular video montages of supercuts of the few moments after the blast, giving viewers the explosion and the first moments after it on repeat. The repetition of this single moment leaves only ruins and ruin-watchers. Making sense of the blast, in visual and literary form, causes us to encounter many of the problems that also arise in representations of networks, where it becomes preferable to examine the phenomenological experience of their operation or the origins and afterlives of the catastrophe.3 Maybe this failure to represent is the true haunting of the commodity fetish—that the blood in the machine will eventually kill us.

The relationship between building infrastructure and the ongoing labor of maintaining it can sometimes be framed as sublime, lending a sense of inevitability to the empires, corporations, and autocracies that command geoengineering and hoard wealth. One thing that the instantaneity of an explosion and the ongoing process of decay have in common is that both are the product of strategies of accumulation. Both can involve some people being made into surplus populations whose demands are seen by the powerful as a nuisance to be managed. Symptomatic of this is the export of people from Lebanon’s coasts, who increasingly take to the sea from unofficial points of departure to escape what the officialdom of airports and visas block. In her previous work on the social worlds of Beirut’s seaside corniche promenade, Khalili shows how this public space becomes a uniquely accessible—if gendered—venue for leisure and pleasure, giving all a rare view of a maritime horizon.4 Similarly, Sinews of War and Trade reminds us that the networks that govern are also pressure points that enable the solidarities that could unmake or repurpose them.

Hatim El-Hibri is associate professor of film and media studies at George Mason University. He was previously a faculty member in the Media Studies Program at the American University of Beirut and earned his PhD in media, culture, and communication from New York University. He is the author of Visions of Beirut: The Urban Life of Media Infrastructure (Duke University Press, 2021).