This paper offers a critical rereading of Omani work history, one which foregrounds labour, flipping the perspective from the view of industry and capital to the human experience. Because the oil industry is capital rather than labour intensive, the story of work remains at the margins. What unfolds here is the reverse. I begin at the margins, and centre on “living and working.” This exercise reveals the lineages of practice and discourse that have shaped the labour market environment that Omani millennials face today. It provides a crucial backdrop to the labour market segmentations running across economic sectors in the country and Gulf region, and provides a retelling of the story of economic development. Moreover, a historical, labour-centred perspective uncovers how the discourses around the Omani labour market today became accepted and embedded in development plans and polices (written initially by outsiders), and accepted into the developmental consciousness in policy making and private sector business practice. I separate these lineages into three overlapping categories, where each mutually constitute and inform the other. These are the lineages of differentiation and resistance, lineages of preparation and motivation, and lineages of liberalisation and nationalisation. Through process tracing, this mode of analysis corresponds with feminist inquiry’s emphasis on understanding how difference operates in historically contingent situations to shape not only the social but also the economic. Indeed, through a critical and feminist international political economy of labour it becomes apparent how capitalist modes of development and contemporary industry operates across the global economy and “fragments the labour process across space and continually reconfigures the geography of production” (Bair 2010: 205). Practices of recruiting and framing labour alongside the experiences of working have profoundly shaped the growth and organisation of wage labour in Oman and the Gulf.