On the world trade map, China appears as the factory of the contemporary world, while the Arabian Peninsula, its large ports and the ship fleets around it, are a major hub for world trade and containers that transport raw materials and goods around the world.
In her recently published book, “The Strings of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula,” the American author (of Iranian descent) says to Khalili’s family that the oil that feeds Chinese industries comes mainly from the Arabian Peninsula, as much of the shipped material is transported from China is through the ports of the Arabian Peninsula, and the Chinese "Silk Road" surrounds the Arabian Peninsula from all sides, sea and land.
The author argues that the Arabian Peninsula is the heart of the movement of goods and goods that shape and enable contemporary capitalism, making it inevitably an area of urgent strategic importance and a military and diplomatic conflict.
The Academy at Queen Mary University of Britain explains how the creation of new ports, freight structures and platforms changed the Arabian Peninsula itself, and how it reshaped the region and the modern world.
The book, published by Verso Publishing, deals with the issue of maritime transport, not only as a means of trade but also as a fabric and nerve for global capitalism as well.
The book explains how to configure the ports that serve marine trade and logistical services, and the transportation of oil derivatives, which in turn created the employment system, and how the ports reshaped and engineering the environment, and helped to accumulate capital regionally and globally, and also formed the faces of colonial countries that formed profit, law and management systems.
Contemporary trade
The author says that 90% of global goods travel by ship, and crude oil transported in tanks accounts for approximately 30% of all marine cargo, but these large proportions and numbers should not be read in isolation from the cultural and social transformations that they brought about in contemporary lifestyles, as well as the transformations The massive formation of seas, beaches and coastal cities.
The book considers that the beaches of the Arabian Peninsula were reconfigured based on the large oil discoveries, which created new coastal ports and communities, large cities, oil stations, docks, and ship docks on the waters of the Arabian Gulf in the east, and coral reef beaches in the Red Sea in the west.
Thus, the ports from which the cargo ships and the huge crude oil tankers depart overwhelmed the culture of pearling, fish, and sailboats that were particularly popular in the Arabian Peninsula, and the new nature of coastal cities and oil ports in the Arabian Peninsula reflected the way the contemporary capitalism works, especially "engineering the living environment" "Transforming the" natural "traits of the world into a legal structure of an organized nature, creating new spaces and infrastructures aimed at capital circulation, creating imaginary goods, speculative patterns, and hierarchies of work.
The story does not stop at ships, ports and oil, but rather deals with tales of residents and immigrants, and the emerging systems of administration and law, and the author explains how the military armies met with capital and workers on the peninsula, far from what the writer calls "ancient clichés about rentier economies and the security perspective of the Persian Gulf".
Salt cities
The author quotes the famous novelist Abd al-Rahman Munif described by cargo ships that carried drilling tools and oil exploration equipment to Saudi Arabia, and how a remote coastal area of a port was built behind barbed wire where a ship is anchored on the Gulf coast, while foreigners arrive for continuous work tirelessly.
Laleh quoted Munif as describing the local residents' suspicion of the constant movement of foreigners and ships on the coast of Qatif in eastern Arabia, and how new and unfamiliar things came with these ships that no one had imagined.
Munif became famous for his quintet, "Salt Cities", which deals with pictures of life in the Arabian Peninsula, with the beginning of the discovery of oil and the rapid transformations that changed its cities and villages, including the refusal of the population to explore for oil and the use of power for violence, the transformation of the desert into an oil field, the struggles of the ruling family, and monitoring the conditions of people Changing habits, places, forms of belonging and identity.
Munif said that he meant "cities of salt" those cities that arose in a moment of time exceptionally abnormal, meaning that "they did not appear as a result of a long historical accumulation that led to its establishment, growth and expansion, but rather it is a kind of explosions as a result of emergency wealth; this wealth (Oil) led to the creation of enlarged cities that became like balloons that could explode, ending, as soon as something sharp touched them. "
Munif wrote 11 novels, among them: five "cities of salt" and three "Land of the Black", and his novels - which mix historical documentation with literary fiction - were translated into many foreign languages, and were considered a literary and historical reference documenting the era of the emergence of oil and the transformations of the cities of the Arabian Peninsula.
Ports and the world
The author says that she seeks in the book to better understand the connection of the Arab Gulf region and the peninsula and its wealth with other Arab countries in the Middle East, as well as in South Asia and East Africa and European and American capitals and cities.
The book is based on many archives and national archives of America and Britain, records of the British India Office, British and Oman archives in the archives of Georgetown University, in addition to a large collection of old newspapers and commercial documents, and even literary and poetic writings.
In her dialogue with the "dialectic" platform on the occasion of publishing the book, Lalla said that her motivation for writing was that she was affected by the harsh experience that she lived when her parents were political prisoners in Iran, and heard many stories of torture, violence, and cruel treatment, which prompted her to follow the stories of dockers, ports, and sailors workers and their continuous struggle Throughout the twentieth century to secure business and political rights gains.
The author connects her new book with previous authors, also dealing with the issue of capitalism and conflict; In her book, "The Time of Shadows," issued in 2012, she addressed the stories of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the American war on terror, and she traced the stories of prisons, detention centers, and the emergence of the rebellion against the "liberal" authorities that are fighting asymmetric wars with the rebel movements.