In early 2011 just as the ‘Arab spring’ reached the shores of the Kingdom of Bahrain, the Bahraini state brutally came down on the protesters lining the streets via security forces. Interestingly, over 35% of these security forces were composed of ethnic Balochs from the coastal region of Makran located in the Pakistani province of Balochistan. This paper looks to situate the current Balochs in the Bahraini security forces in a longer historical tradition of Makrani Baloch serving as mercenaries in the Indian Ocean; a role that came to be solidified with the rise of Omani Empire in the Indian Ocean. Particularly since the Makrani Coastal town of Gawadar was awarded to Said bin Sultan Al Bu Saidi in the early 19th century, Baloch mercenaries emerge as an increasingly important component of the Omani Empire; essential not only for curbing intertribal skirmishes in the Gulf but also for establishing control over parts of East Africa. On the basis of multi-sited ethnographic and archival field research in Zanzibar, Dar-es Salaam, Manama, Muscat, Gawadar and Karachi, the paper contributes to scholarship on the Indian Ocean by bringing to the forefront the largely ignored role of Baloch Mercenaries circulating between the circuits enabled by the Omani Empire. With the help of oral histories, genealogical charts, biographical and travel narratives, and state records, I ask: how was sovereignty inscribed on to the bodies of the mercenaries and how in turn were they inscribing the Sovereign’s claims? This I believe will help us in understanding the logics of sovereignty and systems of governance through which a non-territorial thalassocracy asserted itself in a region that extended from South Asia to East Africa. This unique configuration of sovereignty imposed both on and through the Balochs, challenges the assumed universality of the territorially based understanding of ‘Sovereignty’ emerging from the Colonial logic. The paper exhibits how particular forms of social relationships can serve as a foundation for constituting a state’s logic of sovereignty. It is this legacy of sovereignty constructed upon a particular social relationship that comes to be reflected in the use of Baloch security personal to crush the recent uprisings in Bahrain.