"All at Sea: Surveying the watery expanses of the world economy "

From The Baffler:

Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula by Laleh Khalili. Verso Books, 352 pages.

The International Labor Organization estimates that in spring 2020, the coronavirus drove a 14 percent decline in worldwide working hours relative to spring 2019, equivalent to some 400 million lost jobs. Yet as economists rushed to measure these staggering unemployment numbers, an inverse calamity unfolded out of view: a rash of workers forced to labor against their will. The International Transport Workers’ Federation claims that, in the midst of the pandemic, the shipping industry coerced at least 200,000 merchant seamen into contract extensions, denied them safe passage home to their families, or required them to forego medical care in port. Still ongoing, this de facto mass conscription resembles a large-scale restoration of the historic press gangs seen during the worst seasons of labor recruitment by the British Royal Navy, and later by the crimps and landsharks of San Francisco’s so-called Barbary Coast. As customs enforcement agencies tightened borders and shipping concerns endeavored to ward off a dreaded cycle of “deglobalization” this spring, each revealed a characteristic indifference to the marine workers who stoke the dynamo of world commerce.

If this neglect feels like an old story, that is because the seagoing edges of capital and colonialism, often sailing in cahoots, entail five hundred years of contempt for marine workers. We can trace these exploitative labor histories back to the sixteenth century, when chattel slavery, facilitated by marine transport, laid the groundwork for the expansion of European empires. Closer to our era, in the nineteenth century, the Egyptian public works department used “Corvée”—that is, unfree—labor to build the Suez Canal. In the early twentieth century, as soon as organized labor made gains for sailors, the flag of convenience began to fly: a legal instrument freed shipowners to open registries in Liberia or Panama, allowing them to circumvent national labor laws protecting seamen. Since the 1960s, the relentless marches of automation and containerization—the use of those now-ubiquitous boxes that streamline movement of goods from ship to shore—have again undermined dockworkers who had only just managed to decasualize.

In recent decades, as remote, securitized transshipment facilities like Dubai’s Jabal Ali have overtaken older, “break bulk” urban seaports—where goods flowed right out of the holds and off the docks into the metropolis—public scrutiny on maritime commerce has only diminished. Now out of view, container and tanker ports continue to be what Allan Sekula once dubbed globalization’s “forgotten space.” The political theorist Laleh Khalili credits this imperviousness partly to the sailor’s own fall from grace as a raconteur, hampered by the age of the container ship. “If there are no yarns to be spun,” she writes in her new book Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula, “There is also scant possibility of telling stories over the deafening sound of the electric grinders or power hoses.”

Sinews offers one of the most outstanding recent investigations into the hard-to-narrate infrastructure of modern ports and their place in the patterns of global conflict and commerce. Much of her book concerns the post-World War II development of tanker, bulk, and container shipping along the coastlines of the Arab Peninsula, and the fantasy futures authored by the speculators, emirates, empires, and mercenary logistics companies that profited from it. Khalili’s deft and forensic investigation brings into focus how the region was shaped and in turn shaped the global energy economy in the age of oil. Moreover, she draws a bright line between regional military and trade networks, revealing the human cost of ordinary logistics. As she notes late in the book, “Quartermasters of capital are so often indistinguishable from the masters of trade.”....

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