A Living Peninsula

In her book Sinews of War and Trade, Laleh Khalili leads us along the many ports and harbors established on the shores of the Arabian Peninsula, where ships and tankers travel from the Suez Canal down the Red Sea, into the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, and around into the Persian Gulf. We travel across these interconnected bodies of water with crews and laborers aboard ships and the colonial and imperial officials, predominantly from the United States and the United Kingdom, managing the finance and security of their cargo. We learn about the relatively short period of a century during which the peninsula transformed from a marine economy for fishers and pearl-divers, and the Muslim pilgrims that came through its shores to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina, into a global site of extractive and military intervention. Khalili tells the story of the undersea resources (mainly oil) that have brought British and U.S. officials, along with their military and corporate representatives, to build massive infrastructures such as rails, roads, tankers, and harbors since the early twentieth century.

Khalili provides numerous pathways into the story she lays out in this book. The route I want to swim across here is one where the bodies of water lapping against the shores of the peninsula are alive, biodiverse entities. While the book is predominantly concerned with human infrastructures of war and capital that overlook the peninsula as a living ecosystem and habitat to multispecies organisms, there are moments in the book where Khalili pauses on these facts. “The [Persian] Gulf is a relatively shallow young sea,” she writes, “formed only in the last 15,000 years as glaciers melted and the Indian Ocean waters rose and poured into the dry lakebed the Gulf had become.”1 Khalili’s description of the Gulf as a “young” sea that was formed from melting glaciers in the last fifteen thousand years provides a fresh perspective on the timeline of change that has taken place in the Gulf over the course of the last century. Geological time not only allows for a wider planetary perspective that connects multiple bodies of water and their ecosystems together but also insists on a temporal perspective that exceeds the comparatively brief historical time of imperial recordkeeping. Such a perspective is significant for anticolonial movements that struggle against extractive economies since it is by virtue of the contemporary rendering of the seabed as dead matter—as fossil belonging to no one—that drills and tankers have come to claim possession and sovereignty over the waters flowing around the peninsula. Khalili’s geological description urges us to think beyond the relatively recent imperial timelines that have brought a shallow perspective to this complex and biodiverse body of water.

In my own research on oil cultures, I insist on thinking with oil as living rather than as a nonsentient matter waiting dormant to be extracted and transformed into fossil fuel. Oil can indeed be understood as the dead fossils of millions of plants and animals that have pressurized over millennia into a thick ooze. Yet, the fact of oil’s supposed deadness has been understood in diverse ways by various cultures across time. In my book Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics, I detail the many ways in which people living in the Persian Gulf region have built relations with bitumen and oil seeps that leak out of the earth.2 I bring attention to the religious and cultural practices centered around these sites that have venerated the energy and spirit of oil. I discuss, for instance, Zoroastrian flame keepers who built temples around oil seeps and contemporary artistic practices that claim oil as living ancestors. I also discuss the ways in which oil itself resists extractive economies by bursting into flames defying the extractivists’ desires for its smooth flow into pipelines. The colonial extractive perspective on oil, which has become the predominant capitalist narrative since the early years of the twentieth century, has actively suppressed and erased other living relations to oil in order to facilitate its extraction and exportation globally. As I elaborate in my book, capitalist economies have promoted the secularizations of natural resources, desacralizing living matter, such as petroleum, through commodification. As Khalili notes, “For major imperial powers the sea was about translating the commodities underneath it into dollars or sterling” (107).

Given the supremacy of the language of petrodollars and sterling, it is important to dive deep into the waters of Khalili’s book and get stuck in the atolls of resilient coral reefs that line the Red Sea. Unlike the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, in Khalili’s words, is “older and deeper” where “treacherous maze of coral reefs” run “in lines both perpendicular and parallel to the coast” (79). The Red Sea houses a unique and complex system of corals that, despite rapid temperature rise, has been able to withstand the summer heat through thermally resistant features that prevent coral bleaching.3 Yet, as Khalili’s book makes clear, extractive economies have related to this seabed as a “treacherous maze” dispatching crews of geoengineers to clear it out for networks of cables owned by global telecommunication companies (26–27).

To the militarized extractivists stationed at the ports of the Arabian Peninsula, the labyrinthine architecture of the seabed is nothing but an obstruction to the flow of capital. Khalili writes in some detail about the mass-scale industrial reshaping of the peninsula’s coastlines. “So much has been changed in that space where land meets sea,” she writes, “so many shorelines shifted, seabeds lifted, hills levelled, and lands claimed, that very little remains of the coastline that the fishermen, pearl-divers, sailors, and merchants of the eighteenth or even nineteenth centuries could recognize” (80). Among her most detailed descriptions are massive dredging projects that sweep the seabed, decimating natural habitats along the shores. Khalili writes:

Dredging can have catastrophic effects. The deep sweeps of seabeds and coastlines disturb the sediments on the seabed and upturn fragile biological habitats under the sea or at the shoreline. Because of the frequency of oil spills, sedimentation of airborne pollution on the seabed, and contaminants from successive wars, disturbing the sea floor reintroduces toxic residues into the water and the pelagic fauna’s diets. Coral communities are wrenched apart by dredging cutters and suction pipes. Sabkhas and mudflats—which are rich environments for marine and coastal species—are despoiled. (81)

Dredging does not simply sever coral communities and reintroduce toxins from warfare and oil spills back into the food chains of pelagic organisms such as fish and birds; it relocates what they sweep up into another location. “Dredgers dump vast quantities of soil and sand they have scooped from the seabed,” Khalili writes, “in places where new land is being raised out of the water” (83). While the new lands become capital gains making new headlands, islands, ports, and quays, “land reclamation destroys mangroves, sabkhas, mudflat, and shallow-water marine ecosystems and devastates migratory and local bird habitats that depend on these coastal and intertidal systems” (82).

The militarized extractive economy is focused on what it can possess, what it can build, and what it can take, yet it also leaves much behind. It leaves “lumps of tar buried in the sand” that “attest to leakages and spillages of oil” on the gulf coasts and the Arabian Sea (77). It leaves “slicks of green, oily discharge” floating “on the surface of the sea for miles, refracting the sun through a yellowish prism” (77). It leaves extravagantly unsustainable structures, such as the reclaimed artificial islands of Jebel Ali and Jumeirah fanning out like palms out of Dubai and into the Persian Gulf. These consequences attest to the ever-increasing hubris of global capitalism.

Such structural and habitat changes in the last century have not happened without major protests, political upheavals, and revolutionary actions. Khalili writes in detail about labor protests by local and migrant laborers aboard ships and on the ground, as well as mass movements and legal battles pitched by decolonial governments struggling against ongoing war and imperial military forces in the region. Yet, what Khalili highlights time and again are the ways in which the legal rendition of the sea as terra nullius (an empty space belonging to no one) have allowed for the ongoing military and corporate presence of U.S. and British bases in the peninsula. A century ago, land possession was based on hierarchies established by imperial powers. Khalili details imperial hierarchies that allowed for legal possessions of lands “‘if one finds himself in places without inhabitants, as on the sea, in a wilderness, or on vacant islands’ or in places where property was still held ‘in community’” (105). Currently, in the aftermath of civil mobilizations against U.S. military presence in the region, as Khalili notes, bases are made covert, some “hidden offshore aboard warships with their Automatic Identification System [AIS] turned off ” (260). Such tactics, while different from the legal category of “terra nullius,” continue to view the sea as empty and available for warships to hide out of view. While imperial relations are in flux, the legacies of terra nullius continue to allow for military-backed dispossession and displacements.

Thinking with the sea as a living entity is significant for challenging the possessive, colonial, and destructive movement of capital across seabeds. When we shift our attention to underwater organisms that disperse and disappear as oil and other contaminants spill onto the seabeds, or as cables and pipelines are laid underwater, we begin to see our environments as more expansive than the habitats of the human alone. I will leave you with a final quote from Khalili that, in my reading, is an account of nonhuman protests against marine infrastructures that have always occurred alongside labor protests. Khalili writes, “The cable itself a thin copper wire laminated with gutta-percha and swathed in hemp proved vulnerable to the warm salty water of the Red Sea, and to the scabrous layer of barnacles that weighed it down and sometimes made it split” (26). There is much to learn here from the “salty water of the Red Sea” and the “scabrous layer of barnacles” that have made infrastructures of capital split. While Khalili’s book is primarily focused on militarized economies of power, it nonetheless reveals the parallel processes of subjection and resistance introduced by the bodies of water circling the Arabian Peninsula.

Salar Mameni is the author of Terracene: A Crude Aesthetics (Duke University Press, 2023) and is assistant professor of comparative ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley.