Mobility is one of the major characteristics that permeates our sense of historical and particularly premodern life around the Indian Ocean. Amidst the fluidity of life around and on the water, there also existed barriers, narrow passages, and a range of depths that required navigation. Society too reflected these fluidities and frictions. This paper looks at how oceanic mobility transformed in the early twentieth century, and how this transformation played out on the organization of space in port towns. Here I understand mobility not only as physical movement from one place to another, but also the social navigation of relationships. The early twentieth century is an apt time for studying mobilities in this region given that it is a moment where the forces of global capitalism met with colonial power and state formation. It was thus a time of vastly increased movement, but also increased regulation. Using a variety of archival sources from British court records to private papers, this paper illuminates how everyday people navigated these new waters. It argues that namely that new forms of patronage developed as a way of harnessing and organizing the vastly increased numbers of people circulating the Gulf and Indian Ocean in the twentieth century, and will show how patronage networks clustered people into new types of communities and spaces that had not existed in the previous century.

When did Oman become an “Empire” from a “Sultanate” or an “Imamate”? What are the central attributes of an “Omani Empire”? Can we speak of an “Omani Imperialism”? Through unpacking the notion of an often called a ‘maritime’ or a ‘commercial’ ‘Omani Empire’—stretched from the Persian Gulf to Coastal Balochistan, Southern Arabia, and along East Africa—this paper investigates: When and how did the imperial framing of the al-Busaidi polity develop? How do we assess this discursive construction of temporality? What are its historiographical foundations, patterns, and expressions? Moreover, what are the political, social, and cultural consequences of the imperial frame and how does it define transoceanic mobilites and legacies in the Western Indian Ocean? Ultimately, what is the symbolic power of the Empire as terminology and idea? What does it signify for the sociocultural diversity and historical experiences of mobility across ‘Oman as an Empire’? By historicizing the notion of an ‘Omani Empire’ in European colonial and Arab writings from the 19th to the 20th centuries, this paper demonstrates the implications of the imperial conceptualization of transoceanic mobility in historical narratives and the legacy of this imperial frame to assess what does it render visible and invisible in the present Omani nation-building narrative.

This paper analyzes economic, political, and cultural legacies of Qusman traders in the port cities of the Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean. The Qusman (people of al-Qasim, a subregion of Najd) were well known as merchants. This paper traces their commercial activities in the Gulf and Indian ports. While some of them were laborers at the ports and pearl fields, others exported horses and dates from Najd, and pearls from the Gulf to India, and imported rice from India and sugar from Mauritius. They also trafficked slaves and weapons. Qusman traders were also influential politically, socially, and culturally both in these trading centers and back home. This paper discusses how this trade integrated Najd into the global economic system, enabling the two towns of al-Qasim, Buraydah and ‘Unayzah, to become the wealthiest towns in Najd in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Culturally, this paper explains how the two rival towns were cosmopolitan centers surrounded by a desert. Politically, this paper reveals the crucial roles Qusman traders played during the creation period of Saudi Arabia, whether by sending sums to Ibn Saud or by working later as diplomats and representatives for the newly founded state.

This paper examines the role of migration in the making of the United Arab Emirates and of the Emirati national identity. Unlike other research that focuses on foreign workers primarily from South Asia, this paper takes a more global approach and shifts across multiple scales. Here the focus is on the UAE citizens, many of whom were born outside of the borders of the UAE state or trace their ancestry elsewhere. Using oral histories and field research, primarily in the northern regions of the UAE, the presentation traces changing migration patterns over the latter half of the twentieth century. Many long-term residents and citizens of the UAE arrived in the mid-1950s and early 1960s, before the discovery of oil attracted large-scale labor migration. This wave of migrants came from around the western rim of the Indian Ocean and the Gulf, from places as diverse as Socotra, Somalia, India, and Iran. At the same time, they were joined by a newer wave of modernizing Arab migrants, many involved in the nascent education and administrative sectors, whose pan-Arabist ideologies were crucial to the early identification of the UAE state with Arab nationality. This resulted in the privileging of Arab identity over the population’s more cosmopolitan Indian Ocean roots. The presentation also traces a more local type of migration, the movement of Emirati citizens from tight-knit neighborhood quarters in coastal port towns to state-sponsored housing in inland suburbs. This process, which took place beginning in the 1970s and accelerated dramatically in the 2000s, as the Emirates became a key regional node in the global economy. Migration to the suburbs had the effect not only of more strictly segregating UAE citizens from non-citizens, but also of locating citizen housing in the desert. For younger UAE citizens, this reinforced the official state privileging of Arab Bedouin heritage over seafaring, maritime narratives. Taken together, these patterns show how local, regional, and international patterns of migration have been a critical part of the UAE’s formation as both a nation and a state.