This paper traces how new geographies of credit in the Persian Gulf shaped – and were shaped by – new banking infrastructures, reconfigured political networks, and shifting conceptions of indigeneity. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, merchants with links to the Indian subcontinent – particularly Bombay – created a sprawling network of trade and credit within the British imperial system. But starting in the 1940s, as national differences sharpened and British banks aggressively fought to profit from an expected oil boom, the web of trust and credit that had once provided a financial scaffold for imperial rule across the Indian Ocean world was destroyed by many of the very institutions that created it. Lower capital transfer costs, enabled by global credit networks and air transport, increasingly made money more like money – an abstract representation of value – releasing capital from the regional commodity markets and monsoon winds that had linked the Gulf to the Indian Ocean. Intent on expanding their profits from currency exchange and import credits, banks actively encouraged stronger links to Western Europe and the British Empire with themselves as middlemen, reorienting the economic hinterlands of Gulf cities. As new conceptions and legal definitions of nationality gained increasing prominence, British banks increasingly viewed merchants with connections to the Indian subcontinent as transient interlopers capable of abandoning their commitments, and enacted discriminatory policies that systematically excluded them from access to credit. While these merchants sought to participate in new credit networks, repeated rejections forced them to turn to more expensive and less reliable lending systems that existed uneasily alongside the new British banks. These varied expectations, assumptions, biases helped fuel a new class of merchants who benefitted not just from powerful political contacts, but from their ability to make claims to indigeneity and promise that seemed convincing to British financial institutions. The expectations of British bankers regarding who would - and would not - benefit from a regional oil boom thus helped create their own reality, and turned international capital into an enforcement mechanism for narrow and exclusivist conceptualizations of citizenship and belonging. The paper draws on research conducted in English and Arabic across archives in the United Kingdom, India, and Kuwait, and emphasizes memoirs and fine-grained bank records – particularly loan applications – to highlight the importance of quotidian interactions and non-elite actors in shaping broader conceptions of indigeneity, loyalty, and self.

This paper will examine the urban interventions of the Iraqi government with a particular focus on Kirkuk from the time of the Ba‘th-led coup in 1968 to the first Gulf War. I find that, during this era, the Ba‘th Party government sought to transform the parts of Kirkuk that conformed the least to its political and ideological aims, using ethnicity—or, in Arabic, qawmiyya—as an indication of one’s loyalty to the state. Consequently, these major infrastructural projects were acts of ethnic cleansing. Soon after taking control of Iraq in 1968, the Ba‘th Party issued decrees gradually bringing many plots of land in Kirkuk under its control that were widely known to be in predominantly non-Arab neighborhoods. The Kurdish and Turkmen inhabitants of those properties were meagerly compensated, then expelled and prevented from purchasing any other property within the province. While this tactic of demographic manipulation in Ba‘th-era Iraq is well known, a less well-known strategy of displacement and coercion was the use of urban development schemes. For instance, the Iraqi government commissioned the building of a large highway interchange through the middle of a dense, overwhelmingly Kurdish residential neighborhood that was recognized as a center of resistance to Saddam Hussein, a project that certainly led to the demolition of many houses. Another focus of these development projects was Kirkuk’s citadel—the city’s ancient core, still continuously inhabited, and known as a stronghold of the remnants of its Ottoman-era Turkish-speaking culture. The citadel’s last remaining inhabitants were forced out on the pretense of preservation of its ruins, though their homes were razed in the process. The schemes conceived and carried out in Kirkuk in the Ba‘th era stand in stark contrast to urban development projects in earlier eras in Iraq, which sought to benefit, or manage, certain citizens on the basis of class rather than through the concept of differing qawmiyyas. For its primary material, this paper relies on comparisons of historical maps of Kirkuk; archival material found in the Doxiadis Archives in Athens, Greece; and items from local publications, including a bilingual periodical issued by an Iraqi Turkmen organization and a compilation of facsimiles of Ba‘th-era decrees printed in Kirkuk.

This presentation illustrates how a series of Iraqi governments-- from the Hashemites to the Ba'th Party--used urban planning and housing policies to manage politically sensitive populations in Baghdad during the ‘oil boom’ years of 1950-1979. Two housing policies in particular—one targeting rural migrants, the other targeting a growing cadre of public sector workers—are key for understanding the political motivations that transformed Baghdad’s urban landscape during these three pivotal decades. In the first instance, housing settlements were geographically situated and designed by the state to manage, control, and monitor a poor population viewed as politically troublesome and socially destabilizing. The legacy of this policy is today's Sadr City, home to one quarter of Baghdad's population, though the district is geographically marginalized and designed to be cut off from the city center. In the second case, the state turned housing into a new standard benefit to reward the growing ranks of public sector employees who made up the staffs of new government ministries, professional associations, and the officer corps. Strikingly, new neighborhoods were built for each major professional union, creating vocational silos of middle-class Baghdadis in the middle of the capital. The result of these two different housing strategies for managing potential political allies and troublemakers was a new urban landscape in which largely homogenous communities were structurally separated into ‘good’ districts and ‘dangerous’ districts differentiated by vocation, income, and background. Baghdad’s newly-built neighborhoods for rural migrants and public sector employees contained markers of political belonging or exclusion, politicizing housing and making it a new point of negotiation between state and society. This paper draws on the archives of urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis; French, British, and American diplomatic archives; Iraqi maps; and unpublished demographic studies of Baghdad from the 1960s and 1970s.

The rapid oil-fueled integration of the Trucial States/United Arab Emirates into the global capitalism in the mid-twentieth century resulted in the formation of new property regimes in the region. This paper considers two overlapping and competing nations of property and indigeneity in the northern UAE, especially Ras al-Khaimah. Prior to the emergence of the state in the mid-20th century, land and property in the UAE and Oman were governed by usufruct, Islamic inheritance laws, and communal identities based on location and extended kinship networks. The distribution of property was in turn linked to seasonal migrations between different ecological zones to ensure a constant supply of resources throughout the year. These patterns gave rise to what was called the dirah, literally the place where one (or one's kinship group) circulates. In this system, land was most often transferred through marriage and inheritance, and in some cases by purchase. When the seven Trucial States formed the United Arab Emirates in 1971, each emirate developed its own laws concerning the ownership of land and property. In some cases, as in oil-rich Abu Dhabi and much of Dubai, the state purchased all land from its owners in the decade after independence. However, this did not happen in Ras al-Khaimah, where three competing forms of ownership coexist: private, collective, and state. Each of these is linked to ideas of indigeneity. Only UAE citizens can privately own land, a reaction to 1960s and 1970s purchases of land by expatriate Arabs that UAE citizens criticized as exploitative and anti-development in late 1970s protests. Categories of "indigenous" and "foreign" developed in part in response to these purchases, resulting in a 1982 law that banned land sales to non-citizens. While land ownership was one means of asserting citizens' control over a key resource, more local notions of indigeneity are regularly invoked to contest the Ras al-Khaimah government's ownership of public lands. Many UAE citizens in the emirate claim collective ownership of land based on longstanding connections dating back to the dirah of the pre-state period. These claims result in extended contestations between the state and citizens (both individuals and extended groups) for control of development, including housing, roads, and industrial projects. In short, land is a key means by which UAE citizens assert their indigeneity against the state and foreigners alike.