csillagkohó’s Reviews > Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula > Status Update

Het gebruik van "flags of convenience" (onder de vlag van een land varen - bv Panama, Liberia, Honduras - waarbij het schip een klein bedrag betaalt & in ruil daarvoor met geen enkele arbeidsregulatie rekening moet houden) is geboomd in het neoliberale tijdperk. Zelfs de landen in kwestie verdienen er niet persé aan; het Liberiaans register wordt uitgebaat door een Amerikaans bedrijf dat merendeel vd winst opstrijkt.

"In 2004, Nepalese logistics workers were imported by Jordanian recruiters under contract with KBR (a subsidiary of Halliburton and a provider of logistical support to the US military) to haul cargo for the US military in Iraq. The Nepalese had been told that they were going to Kuwait to work (...) Their convoy, carrying goods from Kuwait to US bases deep in Iraq, was ambushed and several of the workers killed."

Zo bv de wederzijds handige deal tussen Ibn Saud, oliebedrijf Aramco en de VN-missie voor Palestina die wou vermijden dat de uitgedreven Palestijnen na de Naqba zouden terugkeren. Tussen 1948 en 1950 steeg aandeel Palestijnse arbeiders bij Aramco van quasi 0% naar 17%. Na de Saudi's zelf waren ze de grootste groep bij bouw haven Dammam. Nochtans overleefden velen de migratie over zee of via de woestijn niet. (2/2)

Uitvinding van de categorie "migrant": "Historically, the category of 'native' workers on the Peninsula had included communities considered part of the life of the cities: Indians in Bahrain; Iranians in Kuwait; Baluchis in the Trucial Emirates; Somalis in Aden. These communities only became 'migrants' after such categories were invented by modern states to classify and control workers." (1/2)

"Port and terminal-operation managerial expertise still travels from Europe, where regulations are tighter, pay comparatively lower, and unions more fractious. ... As Dubai Ports World invests in terminals in Rotterdam and London and elsewhere in Europe and North America, it also provides a conduit amenable to the movement of technical and managerial experts from shipping hubs in the global North to the Middle East."

"Again and again, oil companies acted as indistinguishable agents of their home states. Maritime boundaries between states were decided in conversations between competing oil officials in the US or UK rather than between the rulers of those states. For example, to decide the seabed frontiers between Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, British and US diplomats mobilised officials of BAPCO and Aramco to speak to one another."

"International arbitration protected the property of investors, made the contract sacrosanct, and guaranteed secrecy to corporate litigants (...) Justice Stephen Schwebel declared triumphantly that international investment law and its tribunals 'dethroned the State from its status as the sole object of international law' at exactly the moment former colonies were becoming sovereign states. This was no coincidence."

"Dubai may be ridiculed as a kind of mirage in the desert and an embodiment of hubris, but neither its headlong rush to capitalisation nor its mercantile history nor even its ignominious story of exploitation of migrant workers and hierarchies of expertise and management are too dissimilar from Singapore or Hong Kong."

"Notwithstanding the Orientalist fantasy of a visionary shaikh calling infrastructures into being, there is something extravagantly modernist about making the largest artificial harbour in the world –as in Jabal Ali– without regard to the geological and geopolitical unsuitability of the site. It is wildly optimistic to ignore natural topographies in trying to make harbours conform to the demands of ever larger ships"

☎️ "Historian Douglas Farnie goes so far as to argue that in India, communication by cable was more pivotal to the maintenace of British economic and political power than railways or steamships because it centralised the state's ability to collect strategic intelligence and expanded its capacity to project state power."