Originally, I wanted to situate maritime transport and logistics in the Arab world in a much more historical context. I wanted to understand how these capital-intensive modern ports came about. Around the same time, I got the chance to travel on some container ships, and that was a formative experience. It allowed me to see not only the political and the economic, the infrastructure, and the big macro-political, but it was also the day to day life of the seafarers and the dockers once the ship came into port.
TM: Was it easy to talk with them and approach them as a researcher?
LK: Obviously people are often very apprehensive speaking to journalists or academics in many of the countries of the Gulf because they do worry about surveillance and state repression. In particular, the question of worker mobilization tends to be extremely sensitive in the richer countries of the Gulf. I was very careful about not endangering anybody by trying to approach them from the landslide. The people that I interviewed were mostly mid-level managers and experts. I also interviewed some ministers and deputy ministers. Being on the ship made it easy for me to talk with the workers. As a passenger they were quite happy to talk with me. I also went through the unions’ Facebook groups which is an amazing resource.
TM: According to Statista, Asian economics are experiencing a boom for being home to the world’s leading container ports, and the largest container ship fleets worldwide. In their view, Dubai belongs to this group along with Shanghai, and Singapore. How do you explain this boom especially in the United Arab Emirates?
Laleh Khalili: In the Journal of Commerce lists of the top ten ports of the world, Dubai is the only port that isn’t either in East Asia or Southeast Asia. In the top 10 list you have Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, you have ports in South Korea and elsewhere. There are multiple things at work here. There is an old colonial history which is I think really important to know. A lot of the great ports that today appear on the top ten list used to be colonial city states, and used to be part of the British Empire, as Dubai was for example. There is an entire colonial history of the British having these transit ports which also acted as strategic strongholds. There are other factors as well, I think in the post-colonial era after the Second World War, this happened in a staggered way for different countries.
For Dubai and the countries in the Arabian Peninsula it happened after oil was nationalized. The profits from oil instead of being expatriated to Europe or North America ended up being kept internally and some element of it ended up in infrastructure. In other places, this process happened earlier. This infrastructure investment was important.
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Tugrul Mende | Radio Free (2020-06-30T00:00:00+00:00) Ports, ships and the human economy of global sea trade: an interview with Laleh Khalili. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2020/06/30/ports-ships-and-the-human-economy-of-global-sea-trade-an-interview-with-laleh-khalili/
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