This paper traces how new geographies of credit in the Persian Gulf shaped – and were shaped by – new banking infrastructures, reconfigured political networks, and shifting conceptions of indigeneity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, merchants with links to the Indian subcontinent – particularly Bombay – created a sprawling network of trade and credit within the British imperial system. But starting in the 1940s, as national differences sharpened and British banks aggressively fought to profit from an expected oil boom, the web of trust and credit that had once provided a financial scaffold for imperial rule across the Indian Ocean world was destroyed by many of the very institutions that created it. Lower capital transfer costs, enabled by global credit networks and air transport, increasingly made money more like money – an abstract representation of value – releasing capital from the regional commodity markets and monsoon winds that had linked the Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Intent on expanding their profits from currency exchange and import credits, banks actively encouraged stronger links to Western Europe and the British Empire with themselves as middlemen, reorienting the economic hinterlands of Gulf cities. As new conceptions and legal definitions of nationality gained increasing prominence, British banks increasingly viewed merchants with connections to the Indian subcontinent as transient interlopers capable of abandoning their commitments, and enacted discriminatory policies that systematically excluded them from access to credit. While these merchants sought to participate in new credit networks, repeated rejections forced them to turn to more expensive and less reliable lending systems that existed uneasily alongside the new British banks. These varied expectations, assumptions, biases helped fuel a new class of merchants who benefitted not just from powerful political contacts, but from their ability to make claims to indigeneity and promise that seemed convincing to British financial institutions. The expectations of British bankers regarding who would - and would not - benefit from a regional oil boom thus helped create their own reality, and turned international capital into an enforcement mechanism for narrow and exclusivist conceptualizations of citizenship and belonging. The paper draws on research conducted in English and Arabic across archives in the United Kingdom, India, and Kuwait, and emphasizes memoirs and fine-grained bank records – particularly loan applications – to highlight the importance of quotidian interactions and non-elite actors in shaping broader conceptions of indigeneity, loyalty, and self.