In this roundtable, I would like to highlight the geographic, material, and environmental implications of the oceanic turn for Arabian Peninsula studies. Thinking through water allows us to resituate the Arabian Peninsula’s historic position at the center of worldwide commercial networks. It also provides a lens for understanding Yemen as a key node at the center of global crossroads, rather than an overlooked backwater, as it may be cast today. It’s quite interesting that recent events in the Red Sea have reasserted Yemen’s strategic place within world shipping lanes once again! In regard to the material implications, scholars of the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean spend a great deal of time lamenting our lack of substantive local (non-European) sources, particularly in regard to the maritime trade. Material objects constitute a body of sources that is useful for oceanic history and relevant because these objects constituted the very fodder of the maritime trade. Indeed, text tends to be centered without question, especially when it comes to documenting practices of material exchange, even while we acknowledge the major shortcomings, biases, and selectivity of our written sources. Scholars should be more open to working with the material and visual record as salient entry points to understanding Indian Ocean history. At the same time, we must do so with a certain amount of agility. Objects and images require sophisticated strategies of reading and analysis; they are no more transparent than the textual record. So, the oceanic turn can, and should open up this important body of ‘sources’ for study. And lastly, in recent years, the oceanic turn has been bolstered by the decisive eco-critical turn in the humanities and social sciences, spurred on by the terrifying specter of environmental devastation that we are reeling toward. This eco-critical turn, which considers oceans as spaces rather than surfaces provides a lens to question the land-oriented biases that dominate so much of scholarly work. Indeed, many of us who work on oceans cast them as maritime channels, drawn along the surface of the water. Eco-critical awareness draws us into the water itself as a deep space with its own history, agency, and actors.

My approach to the oceanic histories of the Gulf (and to a lesser extent, the Arabian Peninsula) begins from a very basic question: where does the history of the Gulf play out? For nearly a decade now, I have tried to make the case that we are just as likely to find the history of the Gulf in places like Bombay, Aden, and Zanzibar as we are the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, where it has long been located. By reading and writing the history of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula from the standpoint of the Indian Ocean, we can begin to see new connections and circulations, uncover new processes, ask new questions of the field, and establish new avenues of historical inquiry. The promise of an Indian Ocean history lies in the space it gives the historian to think about world history from the vantage point of those who were long thought to be mere recipients of processes that originated elsewhere – namely, Europe. By writing world history from the Indian Ocean, the historian can anchor that history in an arena teeming with long-standing connections, institutions, and ideas; they can write that history “from the other boat.” By envisaging a Gulf history that is strewn across the littorals of India, South Arabia, and East Africa, I am making the claim that these communities were always shaped and reshaped by contact with groups from other parts of the Indian Ocean world, and that were able to incorporate other people’s languages, artifacts, practices, and signifiers into their cultural repertoires. Doing this requires that we first decouple society from the nation, and even more so from the state – and upon doing that, see how it spreads itself thinly across the vast expanses of the Western Indian Ocean without losing its internal density. It then requires that we think of Gulf society as part of an open system rather than closed one – a world in which merchants, mariners, nakhodas, scholars, and statesmen share dense business, social, political, and blood ties with individuals and groups in Persia, India, South Arabia, and East Africa, and in which distant markets for timber in Calicut, dates in Karachi and Aden, and mangrove poles in Zanzibar shape activity in places like Basra, Bahrain, and Kuwait.

In my first book, I tried to articulate how the Ottoman Hijaz, Yemen, and the wider Red Sea were, perhaps, not as solidly located in either the Middle East or the Ottoman Empire as most might assume. I wanted to demonstrate how many of the ideological, legal, infrastructural, and environmental challenges facing Ottoman governance were conditioned by the gravitational pull of the British-dominated Indian Ocean. I tried to imagine how these spaces were often more Indian Ocean than Ottoman or Arab. My interest in the Indian Ocean hajj was initially framed by British colonial archival materials and Indian Ocean secondary writings related to questions of cholera, quarantine, and steamship mobility. However, I ultimately came to believe that the very colonial sources that allow us to connect the disparate geographies of the Indian Ocean needed to be challenged, tested, and revised based on sources from Middle Eastern archives and localities. Thus, I tried to speak back to this colonial literature with new answers from Ottoman Turkish and Arabic source bases. In a similar way, my next project also grew as an offshoot from my work on cholera and water infrastructures attached to the Indian Ocean hajj. Here, I trace how the steamship industrialization of the peninsula’s port cities gave rise to an archipelago of desalination plants. This ring of facilities stretching from Suez, Jeddah, and Aden to Muscat and Kuwait first appeared alongside British coaling stations as part of the industrializing spine of Ocean Arabia. However, these early desalination facilities eventually acted as critical infrastructural bridgeheads for the construction of Arabia’s oil industry. I argue that man-made, fossil-fueled water, born out of oceanic empire, served as a midwife for the development of a carbon-water nexus that now underpins the petro-states of the Gulf. By tracing the origins of desalination back to the pre-oil era, what emerges is a shared system of environmental management evolving in the Red Sea and the Gulf, eventually uniting both the peninsula’s littoral spaces and Saudi Arabia’s vast interior. Thus, while this project now takes me to a dizzying array of national archives and libraries from Riyadh to Doha, I don’t think that I would have been able to assemble either the temporal scale or the geographical scope of this project without first combining Istanbul’s view on the Red Sea with London’s Indian Ocean vision of the Gulf.

In intellectual histories, the Arabian Peninsula has often been viewed through narrow, landlocked perspectives, focusing on localities and emphasizing sectarianism within the confines of the nation-state. However, my extensive exploration of Arabian manuscript collections for my dissertation research has shattered these misconceptions, revealing the richness and complexity of transregional and transoceanic intellectual traditions that flourished across the region. These traditions are deeply linked to the vast expanse of the oceanic world surrounding "the Peninsula," fundamentally influencing its historical identity and intellectual trajectory. My research traces the genesis and Early Modern history of occult-scientific knowledge production and practices in Oman, positioned at the crossroads of the Gulf, South Arabia, South Asia, and East Africa. My research led me to intellectual networks linking Basra to West and East Africa; a scholar under the patronage of Hormuz producing alchemical works in the Hijaz; a Bahraini scholar engaging with Yemeni occultist works in Shiraz; Yemeni occultist texts copied and commented on by Omanis on the frontiers of Madagascar and the Cognos; Enslaved individuals from East Africa sharing occult knowledge with an Omani jurist in Zanzibar; Yemeni and Omani scholars learning occult recipes from South Asians; East Africans commenting on Omani occult work; African diasporic occult practices in Oman and Hadhramaut––to name a few. These historical expressions and experiences speak volumes about the necessity of situating Arabia within its oceanic context to comprehend its intellectual history. My intervention in the historiography aims to rectify the oversight that has marginalized Arabia in the history of science. By positioning the Arabian Peninsula as a pivotal hub for Early Modern scientific production, I highlight how occult-scientific scholarship, with its oceanic connections, thrived and disseminated across courts, scholarly circles, and everyday practices. This analysis emphasizes the indispensable role played by Arabia within the broader Indian Ocean world, where natural and occult sciences shaped and reflected intellectual, political, environmental, and social life.

The economic reliance on long-distance trade or pearling to coastal communities is, by now, well-established. And yet, there is much more that we can explore as historians about what this oceanic inflection meant in material, intellectual, and environmental terms. First, we can “think” the oceanic environment in terms of the history of science and intellectual history, recuperating the sciences of navigation and sciences of the sea (‘ilm al-bahr) in the early twentieth century. Beyond noting the economic importance of trades like pearling, we might further explore the regimes of intellectual work and knowledge making that accompanied the industry. For instance, how did ship captain’s own mental maps and practical navigational manuals and notebooks compare or run-up against colonial and high imperial mapping projects of the seabed between 1900-1907, during the compilation of Lorimer’s Gazetteer? How do we compare a ship captain like Rashed bin ’Ali (b. Bahrain, 1874)’s Majari al-hidaya (1922) to other colonial maps that attempted to plot the seafloor across the northern Indian Ocean at this time? These documents do not date from the medieval period of famed Arab navigation across the Indian Ocean, nor from the so-called “Golden Age” of Islamic Science, and yet, they continued to generate their own modes of expertise, documentation, and knowledge. So, this is a move to configure the oceanic not just in terms of economics and trade, but to return intellectual histories also to the study of commodities. Within this subset, we can cross-fertilize more broadly and ambitiously with the history of science and environmental history. The pearl trade, for instance, moved oysters, parasites, and marine specimens between the Persian Gulf and Ceylon. In addition to the human migration of thousands of khaliji divers to Ceylon, how do we account for other movements, such as those of the non-human and environmental material across place? For me the “oceanic” is an invitation not just to think across space (“trans-nationally”), which is a story that we now know quite well – the oceanic framing of the Arabian Peninsula now firmly tells its histories alongside histories of east Africa and western India – but also to apply new methods that borrow not only from the history of trade and commodities, but also from the history of science and environmental history.

Despite Engseng Ho’s seminal 2006 Graves of Tarim, ethnographic scholarship on the Indian Ocean – and Oceanic Arabic in particular – has lagged historical research. To be sure, anthropologists working on migrant labor in the Arabian Peninsula had long focused attention on the significance of movement and mobility, as had those scholars who noted the significance of fishing or linguistic variation. Nevertheless, the fact of mobility as well as its long history have become central to the work of anthropologists in the region too. And, liberated from the limits of an Ottomanist orientation, anthropologists working in the Indian Ocean littoral of the Arabian Peninsula as well as on its islands, have addressed some fascinating analytic themes and questions. Anthropologists have been exploring, for example, the manifestations of historic oceanic crossings and displacements as well as the melding, disjunctures, and hierarchies of those relationships forged in crossing, not to mention those processes that have emerged in the wake of national territorial formations and economic transformations from the mid-twentieth century. Indeed, it now almost seems impossible to ignore the ocean or to project a world of bounded nation-states, even when these territories exert such power defining and regulating the lives of those who reside within them. For me, working seemingly far the coast of Oman and its "outward" orientation, the significance of Zanzibar, never mind South Asia and Iran, were impossible to ignore, shaping not only recollections, but present relationships and anxieties about the future. The question for many anthropologists has become how do those who enter or reside within these spaces navigate the multiple pulls, including emotional, across the seas and within the newly formed nation-territorial boundaries, or how are socio-economic-political hierarchies within these spaces reformulated, even transgressed. How has oil economic power reconfigured, or reinforced, relationships across oceans? Finally, how has the ocean itself, and the world “offshore,” been understood, experienced and reconfigured? We might consider how a world that was "always" mobile come be examined as one of “difference” in the first place? Perhaps it is not about mobility per se, as it is about its conditions and its management. As we attend to these long -- layered -- histories and their reach, I can’t help wondering -- worrying -- too whether we might not seem to be overdetermining their presence.