In 2008, during the month of Ramadan, Kuwait Television aired a new series called ?h Y? M?l (literally, Oh, Wealth/Money). The story highlighted the adventures of Humoud, the son of a poor Kuwaiti sailor, who joins a dhow sailing to Zanzibar in order to earn his family a meager income. While the themes of poverty and hardship were common to Kuwaiti soap operas, this time they were explored in a relatively novel setting, the Indian Ocean. The cast of characters, which included sailors, nakhodas (dhow captains), merchants and murderers, moved frequently between Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen and East Africa and the bodies of water in between. Set against this backdrop of fluid spatial mobility was a plotline that highlighted a mobility of a different, yet inextricably linked kind: socio-economic mobility. In ?h Y? M?l, as well as other shows like it, the sea was a body of endless potential from which merchants, sea captains and mariners alike could draw to remake their lives and reinvent themselves. Drawing on the life accounts of several different merchants, as well as 19th century histories from the region, I explore how Gulf merchants’ movements around the Indian Ocean afforded them unique opportunities for social, economic and political mobility at home. While the Gulf may have been relatively barren region, those who were able carve a place from which they could draw on the resources of the broader Indian Ocean and channel them back to the home ports were in a position to exercise considerable degrees of political and economic influence. Merchants were able to build substantial bodies of debtors and clients whom they could mobilize in support of a range of political ambitions. At other times, they even established proto-states from which they mounted significant political challenges to rulers in different Gulf ports. In mapping out a political world in flux, this paper thus makes three broad points. First, it demonstrates that mobility was a key component of political life in the pre-oil Gulf. Second, it asserts that any political map of the Gulf in the 19th century would have to be constantly shifting to reflect this mobility. And finally, it argues that the world of the Indian Ocean was inextricably linked to economic and political life in the Gulf – that the history of the former can, and must, be written into that of the latter.