This paper examines the remarkable itineraries of the al-Busaidi rulers of Muscat and Zanzibar during the nineteenth century to trace the correlation of mobility to state power. Narratives of travel and idioms of mobility underscored the tentative nature of central authority in an era of encroaching British suzerainty and posed challenges to state formation. Al-Busaidi sultans moved naturally within Indian Ocean circuits between Muscat and Zanzibar, the poles of their realm, and to centers of power both sacred (Mecca) and secular (Bombay). During the first half of the century mobility created state power and unified an empire. Sa'id bin Sultan al-Busaidi (r. 1804-1856) policed the Gulf and sailed to East Africa several times before moving his capital to Zanzibar in the 1830s. In attempting to establish his rule along East Africa's Swahili coast and maintain control in his Arabian possessions, he developed a form of mobile governance, shuttling between the distant nodes of his dominions. These peregrinations were not political theatre, but a literal enacting of the state. The empire did not survive his death. In the second half of the century, the movements of sultans and sultans-to-be exposed them to British power and left them vulnerable to British intervention. In the newly bifurcated domain, Sa’id’s sons’ contests for power constrained rulers’ mobility and constricted their territorial claims while perversely propelling competing aspirants into a thriving Indian Ocean arena. As exiles in Bombay, future al-Busaidi sultans lived in close proximity to British imperial power and Indian industrialization. When they eventually took power, these former “exiles in empire” modernized statecraft to varying degrees, but suffered humiliations under British demands to end the slave trade. Ironically, such concessions won mobility even as they circumscribed state power, and Barghash, who ruled Zanzibar from 1870-1888, was able to visit London and Mecca before dying near Muscat. The paper situates claims to power and the ability to rule in Muscat and Zanzibar within a larger Indian Ocean context. The paper argues that during the nineteenth century, deracinated rulers became protégés of empire, and found state political cultures increasingly rooted. Indeed, hardening lines of territoriality in the Indian Ocean contested older notions of mobility as power, ultimately limiting al-Busaidi authority. The methodology of the paper is documentary analysis of Arabic and English archival material from the India Office Records in the British Library (London); the Maharashtra State Archives (Mumbai); and the Zanzibar National Archives (Zanzibar)

In 2008, during the month of Ramadan, Kuwait Television aired a new series called ?h Y? M?l (literally, Oh, Wealth/Money). The story highlighted the adventures of Humoud, the son of a poor Kuwaiti sailor, who joins a dhow sailing to Zanzibar in order to earn his family a meager income. While the themes of poverty and hardship were common to Kuwaiti soap operas, this time they were explored in a relatively novel setting, the Indian Ocean. The cast of characters, which included sailors, nakhodas (dhow captains), merchants and murderers, moved frequently between Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Yemen and East Africa and the bodies of water in between. Set against this backdrop of fluid spatial mobility was a plotline that highlighted a mobility of a different, yet inextricably linked kind: socio-economic mobility. In ?h Y? M?l, as well as other shows like it, the sea was a body of endless potential from which merchants, sea captains and mariners alike could draw to remake their lives and reinvent themselves. Drawing on the life accounts of several different merchants, as well as 19th century histories from the region, I explore how Gulf merchants’ movements around the Indian Ocean afforded them unique opportunities for social, economic and political mobility at home. While the Gulf may have been relatively barren region, those who were able carve a place from which they could draw on the resources of the broader Indian Ocean and channel them back to the home ports were in a position to exercise considerable degrees of political and economic influence. Merchants were able to build substantial bodies of debtors and clients whom they could mobilize in support of a range of political ambitions. At other times, they even established proto-states from which they mounted significant political challenges to rulers in different Gulf ports. In mapping out a political world in flux, this paper thus makes three broad points. First, it demonstrates that mobility was a key component of political life in the pre-oil Gulf. Second, it asserts that any political map of the Gulf in the 19th century would have to be constantly shifting to reflect this mobility. And finally, it argues that the world of the Indian Ocean was inextricably linked to economic and political life in the Gulf – that the history of the former can, and must, be written into that of the latter.

In the context of the Middle East, oil is usually discussed in geo-strategic terms. It is presented as a disembodied source of revenue, a “curse”, a security concern, or simply as rent. This paper joins a growing body of scholarship that is critically reexamining the social and cultural dimensions of extractive industries. It asks how can we recover the social life of oil and dislodge it from the straightforward narrative of modernization that results in the modern Gulf State. In 1956, a rebellion lead by the oil workers of the Bahrain Petroleum Company struck at the center of one of the world’s most productive hydrocarbon infrastructures. For the workers, the nationalization of the oil industry would have been an obvious and yet impossible demand, for there was no “nation” to resort to. This study is concerned with the struggle to imagine one. Using local records of the rebellion in Arabic, along with the British colonial archives, I argue that the racial climate that initially framed labour relations in the oil industry contributed to the formation of a new political subjectivity in Bahrain. Common people, mostly industrial workers, became subject to a profusion of demographic categories: “local”, “foreign”, “Arab”, “Nejdi, and “Iranian”. These categories far from being innocent taxonomical delineations are endowed with meaning when they define channels of social mobility, class aspirations, and become markers of privilege and exploitation in a context where there is no recourse to the inclusive tenets of a “nation” for redemption. Nowhere does this new political subjectivity become more evident than a popular rebellion catalyzed by the Suez crisis in 1956. When sectarian divisions broke out into violence, they also activated a national imaginary that attempted to refashion this violent rupture of social relations into a consensus on the future of the state. Although the ideological raw material for the rebellion was supplied by Arab Nationalism, the national movement’s legitimacy rested on the idea of sectarian representation in government. This constituted a failure to break with the fundamental categories that had precipitated the crisis itself. Thus, the rebellion’s historical significance is derived not from the fact that it “almost succeeded”, but because it is the historical and ideological precedent that framed the national project itself in sectarian terms. This constituted a deep and continuing crisis for future attempts to create a “national consensus” that could begin to transcend sectarianism, perhaps rendering the nation itself as unimaginable.

In the following paper I address how the ‘demographic imbalance’ of the UAE has led to the emergence of parallel social contracts between the state and its citizens and the state and its non-citizens. I then examine how its naturalization policy has been used as a key mechanism for enforcing those parallel contracts by policing the demarcation between nationals and expatriates. I consider how the securitization of naturalization policy has also given the state the ability to create a ‘gray zone’ or a liminal population between these two seemingly mutually exclusive categories of nationals vs expatriates. Specifically, I discuss how it has externalized the costs of citizenship to an “offshore” site by naturalizing the paperless (bidoon) with a foreign passport, effectively placing that individual in the category of ‘expatriate’ (and hence in the secondary social contract) while the individual himself never actually moves. The individual is told that this is a temporary measure and that at some unidentified point in time, contingent upon good behavior, he/she may be brought into the pool of citizens. The person’s legal status is thus not a stagnant state of a citizen or a non-citizen; but rather part of a population that gives the state flexibility in the allocation of welfare resources by forming a cushion for absorbing economic shocks or pressures. What emerges is the regulation of Emirati citizenship not as a series of rights and responsibilities (or as the “right to have rights” (Somers 2008)), but as the “privilege to have privileges” where one’s precarious membership is defined by conforming to a particular kind of conduct; that conduct is at once cultural, moral, and political (or rather, more accurately, ‘apolitical’)—with “allegiance” playing a central role.