Unruly Labor: A History of Oil in the Arabian Sea

Abstract (English)

Unruly Labor is an anthropological history of the oil industry in the Arabian Sea, and it centers the workers who built and maintained the industry. Looking at the 1930s through 1960s, each chapter of the book begins with strikes by both mobile and local workers and considers what factors impacted worker solidarities. Unruly Labor also examines how oil companies and governments responded to these strikes. This examination demonstrates how oil became increasingly connected to national security and how this connection between oil and national security negatively impacted workers’ ability to unionize and go on strike.
Scholars have attributed restrictions on worker organizing in the Arabian Peninsula to the continuation of pre-oil social relations, and scholars have also argued that oil wealth negatively impacts the development of democratic institutions. Recent scholarship has called into question assumptions about the “timeless and traditional” Gulf and critiqued the idea of the “resource curse.” More recently, scholars have discussed how the materiality of oil impacted political organizing. Unruly Labor recenters the relationships among workers, oil companies, and local and imperial governments in these conversations. It investigates the evacuation of politics from the oilfields and the formation of racialized labor hierarchies. It does so by analyzing the relationships among oil companies, workers, and local and imperial governments. Unruly Labor describes how workers shaped corporate management practices and governance as they went on strike and made economic and political demands. In turn, this book explores how the contours of worker actions were also shaped by oil company practices, including segregating workers based on their nationality. By situating oil production and labor movements in the contexts of both imperialism and decolonialization in the mid-twentieth century, we see the changing ways workers formed solidarities and the impact of social movements—including nationalism and anti-imperial struggles—on worker solidarities. Unruly Labor documents how new understandings of citizenship and rights worked in conjunction with discourses that connected oil to national security to limit the political possibilities of oil workers’ strikes.