Drawing on corporate records, imperial archives, newspapers, periodicals, memoirs, and oral history interviews in English and Arabic, this paper traces the genealogy of Kuwait’s first comprehensive labor law, which was implemented in 1959. The law came into being after a wave of strikes that rocked Kuwait from 1948 to 1956. Workers called on the Kuwaiti government to protect their rights and bring an end to blatant racial segregation in the oil industry. Shaken by the protests and by the looming threat of nationalization, oil companies and imperial officials abandoned their fight against Kuwaiti government oversight, and grudgingly resigned themselves to working within it. But even as officials changed tactics, they sought to build a state that would police worker dissent as much as protect worker rights. Their efforts received support from a cadre of British and Egyptian “labor experts,” who were convinced that Anglo-American oil firms represented the cutting edge of modern industrial relations. Untroubled by the industry’s pervasive racial segregation, they crafted a labor code explicitly based on corporate practices, going so far as to use the Kuwait Oil Company “Employee Handbook” as the basis of the legislation. Their belief in their modern expertise overrode Anglo-Egyptian geopolitical tensions, while their legislation retroactively legalized the discriminatory practices that had generated worker protests in the first place. In other words, the “modern” expertise of corporate and imperial officials, rather than engrained cultural conservatism, shaped the repressive labor legislation of the Persian Gulf. In tracing the genealogy of Kuwaiti labor law, this paper argues that “modern” labor legislation perpetuated corporate practice by replacing a tiered hierarchy based on race with one based on nationality. This legal apparatus would have significant regional effects, as Kuwaiti legislation became the basis of Gulf labor law. Either through persuasion, as in Kuwait and Qatar, or by force of arms, as in Bahrain, imperial officials transplanted this labor legislation throughout the Gulf, forging a labor regime that divided citizen and noncitizen workers. It was this legislation, rather than supposedly traditional or conservative identity politics, that came to exclude noncitizens from the protections of labor law. Gulf states thus baked an array of corporate strategies—including segregation, divide-and-rule, and deportation as a mechanism of labor discipline—into their legal systems on the eve of independence, in the process providing them with a seemingly modern veneer of legitimacy.