It is the airports of Arabia that figure most prominently in global networks today with Emirates, Etihad and Qatar Airways jockeying for passengers headed between Asia and the Western Hemisphere. Yet one hundred years ago the region’s seaports played a similar role for passengers heading between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. Aden in particular was a global entrepôt par-excellence, but Bahrain, Jedda and Muscat were also important nodes of Indian Ocean trade. Scholarship on space and capitalism has powerfully outlined how capitalist forms of production and circulation have produced certain types of urban spaces. The fixed capital invested in steamship ports around the Arabian coastline are powerful evidence of how European capital shaped the physical space of Arab cities. Roads were built, buildings were erected, and land was reclaimed from the sea in order to mirror port-cities in Europe. The trading networks in which these cities operated were reordered to cater to colonial capitalists. Yet while these steamship docks connected the Arabian coastline to Europe, it was dhow bandars which allowed capital and commodity flows to reach the ordinary consumer around the Indian Ocean. The modern industrial spaces of the steamship port were dependent upon the informal and pre-industrial spaces of the bandar. The dhows, and the bandars where they anchored were nonetheless also capitalist spaces which were essential for the distribution of mass-produced commodities to dispersed populations around the ocean. Bandars were spaces that catered to the lean, flexible and diversified operations of diasporic capitalists. Consequently, this paper argues that 19th century capitalism produced two distinct but complementary nodes of capital flows along the Arabian coastline: ports and bandars. Steamship ports were capital-intensive, European-designed spaces built to create and exploit economies of scale. But these ports were intimately linked to dhow bandars which were labor-intensive, unplanned spaces which provided the flexibility and informality vital to reaching diverse and dispersed producers and consumers. Drawing on state archives in Britain and India, British shipping company records and merchant correspondence from the Gulf, this paper details the shape and function of these two spaces and how they developed in tandem.