Published in 2020
368 pages
Laleh Khalili is an Iranian American and Professor of International Politics at Queen Mary University of London. She was formerly a Professor of Middle Eastern Politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. She graduated from University of Texas, and received her PhD from Columbia University. Her primary research areas are logistics and trade, infrastructure, policing and incarceration, gender, nationalism, political and social movements, refugees, and diasporas in the Middle East.
What is this book about?
A wide-ranging account of shipping and capitalism in the Middle East
On the map of global trade, China is now the factory of the world. A parade of ships full of raw commodities -iron ore, coal, oil- arrive in its ports, and fleets of container ships leave with manufactured goods in all directions. The oil that fuels China’s manufacturing comes primarily from the Arabian Peninsula. Much of the material shipped from China are transported through the ports of Arabian Peninsula, Dubai’s Jabal Ali port foremost among them. China’s ‘maritime silk road’ flanks the Peninsula on all sides.
Sinews of War and Trade is the story of what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructures has meant not only for the Arabian Peninsula itself, but for the region and the world beyond. The book is the account of how maritime transportation is not simply an enabling adjunct of trade, but central to the very fabric of global capitalism. The ports that serve maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport create racialised hierarchies of labour, engineer the lived environment, aid the accumulation of capital regionally and globally, and carry forward colonial regimes of profit, law and administration.
