Mobility is one of the major characteristics that permeates our sense of historical and particularly premodern life around the Indian Ocean. Amidst the fluidity of life around and on the water, there also existed barriers, narrow passages, and a range of depths that required navigation. Society too reflected these fluidities and frictions. This paper looks at how oceanic mobility transformed in the early twentieth century, and how this transformation played out on the organization of space in port towns. Here I understand mobility not only as physical movement from one place to another, but also the social navigation of relationships. The early twentieth century is an apt time for studying mobilities in this region given that it is a moment where the forces of global capitalism met with colonial power and state formation. It was thus a time of vastly increased movement, but also increased regulation. Using a variety of archival sources from British court records to private papers, this paper illuminates how everyday people navigated these new waters. It argues that namely that new forms of patronage developed as a way of harnessing and organizing the vastly increased numbers of people circulating the Gulf and Indian Ocean in the twentieth century, and will show how patronage networks clustered people into new types of communities and spaces that had not existed in the previous century.